So things are still going really well. As discussed in previous posts, I did the interview with Bruce Coville on Monday evening. In order to finish the story, I need to get a total of 6 sources, so Coville gave me the contact info for a bunch of people I could speak with. I've spoken with a few of them over the past couple of days, so I'm up to four sources. I'm hoping to contact two more either tomorrow or Saturday, so that I can write the article on Sunday, and essentially I wouldn't have to do anything for news writing in the final week. I am slightly concerned because I've made efforts to contact my other sources and they haven't returned my messages yet, but it's only been a couple of days, and in a pinch I could probably find some other people to talk to, or call/email Bruce himself and ask him to recommend some other sources. Anyway, I'm in good shape. Six days away from my deadline, and I'm much further along than I thought I would be.
But the real surprise of this week is in regards to my graphics class. First of all, I thought the project I turned in last week sucked, because it took me almost all day on Friday to come up with a decent idea, and then once I had the idea I had to rush through the actual design. So I was feeling pretty pessimistic about it. But then something odd started happening-- some classmates started telling me how much they liked my design, and some others made positive comments about it on the blog where all the students in the class post their projects and discuss them. Apparently, my professor also liked the design. Got it back on Wednesday, and I got an A on it. In a turn of events I would have literally never expected, I'm pulling straight A's in graphic design. And the news gets better:
Our project this week is to design a layout for a feature article for a magazine. They told us how time-consuming this would be, and said that it would be the most difficult project we were assigned in the class. So I actually started on it early (something I didn't do with any of my other projects), and it went really well right off the bat. It certainly is the most complex and time-consuming project we've done so far, but somehow it's also the easiest (in my opinion). I think it's because the other assignments all called for us to create something completely new. There weren't many rules or restrictions, you could more or less do what you wanted, and since I'd never done this kind of stuff before, I had no idea where to start. This project is different because everybody knows what a magazine article is supposed to look like. You're just supposed to make one that looks really good. And so far I think I'm doing that. I'm pretty close to being done with the project already, so tomorrow shouldn't be too stressful, and I think it's going to come out great. I'll probably post it up here tomorrow night so you can all take a look at it.
Oh, one other thing. For this magazine project, we don't have to write the article. We were supposed to pick an article out of an existing magazine, and then just redesign that article (we're also supposed to make up a new title, use different pictures, basically change everything except the subject of the story and the text itself). Since I have recently become a huge fan of Esquire, I chose an article from their August issue (the one with Stephen Colbert on the cover. And, no, that was not a misprint when I said the August issue. The August issue was on shelves around the second week of July. There are things I will never understand about the magazine industry). Anyway, the article is about the guy who killed five people and wounded 16 others in a shooting spree at Northern Illinois University back in February. The article is fantastic, exactly the kind of journalism I could see myself doing someday. It's very long, but well worth your time. Click here to read it.
Okay, that's all for now. I'll probably be back tomorrow night or over the weekend.
-Nick
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Cigarette Tax Article, more
A few days ago I promised to post the cigarette tax article on the blog once I got it back from my professor. Well, I got it back in class today, and the news was good-- I got an A on it, keeping my string of A's in this class intact.
In other good news, my professor told me today that he thinks I would be able to sell the Coville article to a publication of some kind "in a second," since Coville is a pretty big deal in the world of children's literature (he also said he was impressed I landed this interview). Once I have actually written the story (it's due Wednesday the 6th, but I'm going to finish it early if I can, make that last week of classes as easy as possible) I might shop it around and see if anyone is interested. After all, publishing is the name of the game.
Had some free time today after class, so I got started on the magazine layout project for my graphics class. It's definitely going to be time-consuming, but I don't think it will be as bad as I originally feared, and I've already got a good head start on it.
I realized that I have not yet answered an unanswerable question this week, so I'll try to get on that at some point. Tonight I'm going to take it easy. I mean, I have enough to do that I'm probably going to be working on something productive all night, but since I don't have any looming deadlines and I'm not under much pressure at the moment I'll just work at a leisurely pace, maybe watch a movie at the same time. Anyway, without further ado, here comes the cigarette tax article. It has no title or headline, because it turns out that newspaper writers do not write their own headlines. I believe that's part of the copy editor's job. So yeah, I guess you can feel free to make up your own headline if it makes you feel better:
June 3 was not a good day for Kathie Hartnagle, 58, who has owned and operated Mallard Tobacconist in Armory Square since 1991.
“I sold one pack of cigarettes all day,” she said.
That was the day New York’s new cigarette tax went into effect, raising the cost of a pack of cigarettes by $1.25. The state taxes on cigarettes in New York now total $2.75, the highest in the nation. The tax increase is expected to generate $265 million in revenue for the state this year. The tax is also meant to deter people from smoking, and to encourage current smokers to quit.
The tax revenue will be used to battle health care costs, which are skyrocketing as a result of tobacco-related illnesses. According to a report from the New York State Tobacco Control Program, smoking kills 25,500 New Yorkers each year and accounts for $8 billion in medical expenses.
The state government has attempted to deter smoking with legislation in the past. In 2003, the Clean Indoor Air Act banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places. In 2002, cigarette taxes went up from $1.11 per pack to $1.50, and taxes on other tobacco products increased to 37% of the wholesale price. That was one of the worst hits for Hartnagle. Cigars and pipe tobacco account for the largest portion of her sales.
“Fortunately, I can pay all my bills. It’s a struggle, but I do it,” she said.
The tax increase presents new challenges for her, and many New Yorkers have different feelings on the issue.
Seve Robinson, 20, is a nonsmoker who works at Journeys and JB Robinson in Shoppingtown Mall. He supports the idea of using the tax as a deterrent.
“If it gets people to quit, I think it’s A-OK,” he said.
Robinson has “a lot of relatives” who smoke, including two aunts.
“They have babies in the house,” he said. “So hopefully the higher taxes will give them a reason to quit.”
Lindsay Nichols, a retail sales associate for Time Warner in Syracuse, started smoking at 16. Now 22, she smokes one or two packs a day.
Nichols called the tax “horrible” because of the added cost to smokers, but admitted that it might help people quit.
Nichols can already see the effects of smoking on her health. She now breathes heavily while working out and feels different when she gets up in the morning. Despite that, she has no plans to quit. To save money, she now buys her cigarettes at the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop in Nedrow. Smoke shops on Native American reservations do not charge state taxes.
“Going and buying a pack a day at the store would cost a fortune,” Nichols said.
Smokers who take their business to the reservations are a major concern for legislators. The issue is particularly significant in Central New York because of the nearby Onondaga and Oneida reservations.
Assemblyman Bill Magee, D-Nelson, opposed the new tax because he feared “it would send people to the Indian operations and the Internet.”
Magee said that, as the law is written, the reservations can only sell tax-free cigarettes to Native Americans; everyone else is supposed to pay the taxes. This law has never been enforced, however.
Magee is critical of Governor Paterson and his predecessors, Governors Pataki and Spitzer, for their failure to enforce the law. He speculated that the government may fear resistance or even violence from Native Americans if the state attempted to enforce the law. Representatives from the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop did not comment on this story, and failed to return several messages.
Magee believes many smokers will start buying their cigarettes online or at the reservations, or find other ways to avoid the tax. He thinks the new tax will generate much less revenue than the state expects. He also worries about the effects it will have on local businesses and the economy.
“It definitely would take more customers away from the taxpaying businesses,” he said.
Assemblywoman Joan Christensen, D-Syracuse, also has concerns about the tax, although she supports it.
“I have mixed feelings about a lot of taxes,” Christensen said, and later added, “I vote no on every single tax I can.”
Still, she believes the higher cigarette tax will change things for the better, if it helps to fund health care and deters people from smoking.
“Change is difficult, even good change,” she said.
Like Magee, Christensen worries about local businesses who may be negatively affected by the tax. “My heart goes out to those who rely on only one source of income,” she said.
Her advice to business owners is simple: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify.”
Smoking is a serious problem in New York, but it is even worse in some other states. According to health reports, the prevalence of smoking in New York is below the national average, and state smoking rates reached their lowest levels ever in 2006, having dropped about 24% since 1989. Yet the legislature still found it necessary to raise New York’s cigarette taxes to the highest in the country.
Assemblyman Al Stirpe, D-North Syracuse, says federal health care policy is to blame.
“As a nation, the biggest failure we have is a failure to address health care,” he said. “We’ve needed leadership at the national level, and we just haven’t gotten any.”
Stirpe expressed hope that the new administration, regardless of who wins the White House, will take a more “progressive” stance on health care. In the meantime, he strongly supports the cigarette tax and believes it is a good way to fund health care costs.
He called the tax “a great deterrent” and “a win-win,” saying it would raise money for the state and inspire people to quit smoking.
“The bottom line is it’s great for health policy,” he said.
Despite his passionate feelings about “the devastating effects of smoking cigarettes,” Stirpe said he would not be in favor of a movement to outlaw tobacco altogether.
“We normally support anything that provides choice,” he said, and other legislators echoed his sentiments.
“We have a right to our bad habits,” Assemblywoman Christensen said.
“It’s their choice,” said Assemblyman Magee.
Some smokers, like Kathie Hartnagle, look back on the past two decades of tax hikes and smoking bans, and find such statements difficult to believe.
“We’re getting to be too much of a Big Brother country,” Hartnagle said. “We can’t do anything. It’s ridiculous.”
In other good news, my professor told me today that he thinks I would be able to sell the Coville article to a publication of some kind "in a second," since Coville is a pretty big deal in the world of children's literature (he also said he was impressed I landed this interview). Once I have actually written the story (it's due Wednesday the 6th, but I'm going to finish it early if I can, make that last week of classes as easy as possible) I might shop it around and see if anyone is interested. After all, publishing is the name of the game.
Had some free time today after class, so I got started on the magazine layout project for my graphics class. It's definitely going to be time-consuming, but I don't think it will be as bad as I originally feared, and I've already got a good head start on it.
I realized that I have not yet answered an unanswerable question this week, so I'll try to get on that at some point. Tonight I'm going to take it easy. I mean, I have enough to do that I'm probably going to be working on something productive all night, but since I don't have any looming deadlines and I'm not under much pressure at the moment I'll just work at a leisurely pace, maybe watch a movie at the same time. Anyway, without further ado, here comes the cigarette tax article. It has no title or headline, because it turns out that newspaper writers do not write their own headlines. I believe that's part of the copy editor's job. So yeah, I guess you can feel free to make up your own headline if it makes you feel better:
June 3 was not a good day for Kathie Hartnagle, 58, who has owned and operated Mallard Tobacconist in Armory Square since 1991.
“I sold one pack of cigarettes all day,” she said.
That was the day New York’s new cigarette tax went into effect, raising the cost of a pack of cigarettes by $1.25. The state taxes on cigarettes in New York now total $2.75, the highest in the nation. The tax increase is expected to generate $265 million in revenue for the state this year. The tax is also meant to deter people from smoking, and to encourage current smokers to quit.
The tax revenue will be used to battle health care costs, which are skyrocketing as a result of tobacco-related illnesses. According to a report from the New York State Tobacco Control Program, smoking kills 25,500 New Yorkers each year and accounts for $8 billion in medical expenses.
The state government has attempted to deter smoking with legislation in the past. In 2003, the Clean Indoor Air Act banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places. In 2002, cigarette taxes went up from $1.11 per pack to $1.50, and taxes on other tobacco products increased to 37% of the wholesale price. That was one of the worst hits for Hartnagle. Cigars and pipe tobacco account for the largest portion of her sales.
“Fortunately, I can pay all my bills. It’s a struggle, but I do it,” she said.
The tax increase presents new challenges for her, and many New Yorkers have different feelings on the issue.
Seve Robinson, 20, is a nonsmoker who works at Journeys and JB Robinson in Shoppingtown Mall. He supports the idea of using the tax as a deterrent.
“If it gets people to quit, I think it’s A-OK,” he said.
Robinson has “a lot of relatives” who smoke, including two aunts.
“They have babies in the house,” he said. “So hopefully the higher taxes will give them a reason to quit.”
Lindsay Nichols, a retail sales associate for Time Warner in Syracuse, started smoking at 16. Now 22, she smokes one or two packs a day.
Nichols called the tax “horrible” because of the added cost to smokers, but admitted that it might help people quit.
Nichols can already see the effects of smoking on her health. She now breathes heavily while working out and feels different when she gets up in the morning. Despite that, she has no plans to quit. To save money, she now buys her cigarettes at the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop in Nedrow. Smoke shops on Native American reservations do not charge state taxes.
“Going and buying a pack a day at the store would cost a fortune,” Nichols said.
Smokers who take their business to the reservations are a major concern for legislators. The issue is particularly significant in Central New York because of the nearby Onondaga and Oneida reservations.
Assemblyman Bill Magee, D-Nelson, opposed the new tax because he feared “it would send people to the Indian operations and the Internet.”
Magee said that, as the law is written, the reservations can only sell tax-free cigarettes to Native Americans; everyone else is supposed to pay the taxes. This law has never been enforced, however.
Magee is critical of Governor Paterson and his predecessors, Governors Pataki and Spitzer, for their failure to enforce the law. He speculated that the government may fear resistance or even violence from Native Americans if the state attempted to enforce the law. Representatives from the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop did not comment on this story, and failed to return several messages.
Magee believes many smokers will start buying their cigarettes online or at the reservations, or find other ways to avoid the tax. He thinks the new tax will generate much less revenue than the state expects. He also worries about the effects it will have on local businesses and the economy.
“It definitely would take more customers away from the taxpaying businesses,” he said.
Assemblywoman Joan Christensen, D-Syracuse, also has concerns about the tax, although she supports it.
“I have mixed feelings about a lot of taxes,” Christensen said, and later added, “I vote no on every single tax I can.”
Still, she believes the higher cigarette tax will change things for the better, if it helps to fund health care and deters people from smoking.
“Change is difficult, even good change,” she said.
Like Magee, Christensen worries about local businesses who may be negatively affected by the tax. “My heart goes out to those who rely on only one source of income,” she said.
Her advice to business owners is simple: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify.”
Smoking is a serious problem in New York, but it is even worse in some other states. According to health reports, the prevalence of smoking in New York is below the national average, and state smoking rates reached their lowest levels ever in 2006, having dropped about 24% since 1989. Yet the legislature still found it necessary to raise New York’s cigarette taxes to the highest in the country.
Assemblyman Al Stirpe, D-North Syracuse, says federal health care policy is to blame.
“As a nation, the biggest failure we have is a failure to address health care,” he said. “We’ve needed leadership at the national level, and we just haven’t gotten any.”
Stirpe expressed hope that the new administration, regardless of who wins the White House, will take a more “progressive” stance on health care. In the meantime, he strongly supports the cigarette tax and believes it is a good way to fund health care costs.
He called the tax “a great deterrent” and “a win-win,” saying it would raise money for the state and inspire people to quit smoking.
“The bottom line is it’s great for health policy,” he said.
Despite his passionate feelings about “the devastating effects of smoking cigarettes,” Stirpe said he would not be in favor of a movement to outlaw tobacco altogether.
“We normally support anything that provides choice,” he said, and other legislators echoed his sentiments.
“We have a right to our bad habits,” Assemblywoman Christensen said.
“It’s their choice,” said Assemblyman Magee.
Some smokers, like Kathie Hartnagle, look back on the past two decades of tax hikes and smoking bans, and find such statements difficult to believe.
“We’re getting to be too much of a Big Brother country,” Hartnagle said. “We can’t do anything. It’s ridiculous.”
Monday, July 28, 2008
The interview, reporting fake news
So the Bruce Coville interview went pretty well. We actually talked for close to two hours, and it was a very good interview and a lot of fun. The only rough spot came after we finished the interview, when he asked me how long the story was going to be, and I told him 1,000 words. He didn't say much about it, but he sort of made a face that said, "Why the hell did I just spend two hours being interviewed by you when you're not going to be able to use 95% of what I said?" Which is a perfectly fair question, and I did feel a little bad about taking up so much of his time. Personally, I wish the length of the assignment were much longer.
The only other thing that might pose a problem is that Coville seemed reluctant to just give out phone numbers of people he knows so that I can contact them. One of the requirements for the story is I need to talk to a minimum of 5 people in addition to the interview subject. Which is completely excessive and ridiculous considering the brevity of the assignment, but hey, they're not my rules. He did give me the names and contact info for five or six people, but he only gave me phone numbers for a couple and email addresses for the rest. So I'll just have to hope that these people will respond to my emails and be willing to talk to me. If not, I guess I'll just have to get back in touch with Coville and ask him to give me names of other people who might be more open to a reporter asking them some questions.
In class today, we did this exercise where they staged a breaking news story for us to cover and sent us out into the field, then we had to come back to the labs in the afternoon and write a story about it by 5. The exercise was a pain in the ass, but it was also really cool. I couldn't believe how elaborate it was. They had actual officials from the fire department, the police department, the university, and the FBI on hand to talk to us. A van was set on fire. At one point a helicopter became involved. I was impressed. Granted, all of this was not done solely for the benefit of my class. All the law enforcement and safety officials involved use this as a training exercise/drill, and I imagine they would do this or something similar even if 80 or so aspiring journalists weren't covering it for an assignment. But, they still did us a huge favor by staging a press conference as if the crime had actually taken place, and interacted with us and answered our questions. It was very cool.
But, like I said, writing the story was a pain in the ass. It also didn't help that I seem to be growing increasingly more fatigued lately (getting 4-5 hours of sleep a night seems to be catching up to me), and I was having trouble concentrating because all I could think about was the interview with Coville I was going to right after class. Not to mention, after talking to state legislators and covering a real news story for the cigarette tax article I wrote last week, it was a lot harder to get excited about covering fake news. So, I will go ahead and admit that I sort of mailed this story in. It still read pretty well, and I won't be surprised if I get a good grade on it, but I won't be surprised if I get a bad grade on it, either. And I'm okay with that. Because, honestly, this class is almost over and I've been doing so well that I feel like I'm practically assured of an A. Especially if I did well on the cigarette tax story, which I will get back in class tomorrow. If it turns out I got a mediocre grade on that one, then I'll sort of feel like an idiot and will probably regret not working harder on today's story, but I guess I decided that was a risk I was willing to take.
All right, that's all the time I have for tonight. I still need to read today's news (we have near-daily current events quizzes in class), then I want to try to figure out what I'm going to do for my magazine layout project in graphics this week, and I might listen to some of the Coville interview, just to get a feel for the sound quality and to start making notes. So it will be a long night, and in all likelihood, an even longer day tomorrow. But it's almost over now, I keep telling myself. It's almost over, it's almost over, it's almost over, I don't need to sleep, it's almost over. (Note: it's really not that bad. I'm being melodramatic/facetious. I mean, I do have a lot of work to do, and I am tired, and I am stressed, but it's not all that bad. I'm really enjoying the work... except for graphics... and I think I may have finally found my calling. So yeah, things are all right. And, once again, it's almost over).
-Nick
The only other thing that might pose a problem is that Coville seemed reluctant to just give out phone numbers of people he knows so that I can contact them. One of the requirements for the story is I need to talk to a minimum of 5 people in addition to the interview subject. Which is completely excessive and ridiculous considering the brevity of the assignment, but hey, they're not my rules. He did give me the names and contact info for five or six people, but he only gave me phone numbers for a couple and email addresses for the rest. So I'll just have to hope that these people will respond to my emails and be willing to talk to me. If not, I guess I'll just have to get back in touch with Coville and ask him to give me names of other people who might be more open to a reporter asking them some questions.
In class today, we did this exercise where they staged a breaking news story for us to cover and sent us out into the field, then we had to come back to the labs in the afternoon and write a story about it by 5. The exercise was a pain in the ass, but it was also really cool. I couldn't believe how elaborate it was. They had actual officials from the fire department, the police department, the university, and the FBI on hand to talk to us. A van was set on fire. At one point a helicopter became involved. I was impressed. Granted, all of this was not done solely for the benefit of my class. All the law enforcement and safety officials involved use this as a training exercise/drill, and I imagine they would do this or something similar even if 80 or so aspiring journalists weren't covering it for an assignment. But, they still did us a huge favor by staging a press conference as if the crime had actually taken place, and interacted with us and answered our questions. It was very cool.
But, like I said, writing the story was a pain in the ass. It also didn't help that I seem to be growing increasingly more fatigued lately (getting 4-5 hours of sleep a night seems to be catching up to me), and I was having trouble concentrating because all I could think about was the interview with Coville I was going to right after class. Not to mention, after talking to state legislators and covering a real news story for the cigarette tax article I wrote last week, it was a lot harder to get excited about covering fake news. So, I will go ahead and admit that I sort of mailed this story in. It still read pretty well, and I won't be surprised if I get a good grade on it, but I won't be surprised if I get a bad grade on it, either. And I'm okay with that. Because, honestly, this class is almost over and I've been doing so well that I feel like I'm practically assured of an A. Especially if I did well on the cigarette tax story, which I will get back in class tomorrow. If it turns out I got a mediocre grade on that one, then I'll sort of feel like an idiot and will probably regret not working harder on today's story, but I guess I decided that was a risk I was willing to take.
All right, that's all the time I have for tonight. I still need to read today's news (we have near-daily current events quizzes in class), then I want to try to figure out what I'm going to do for my magazine layout project in graphics this week, and I might listen to some of the Coville interview, just to get a feel for the sound quality and to start making notes. So it will be a long night, and in all likelihood, an even longer day tomorrow. But it's almost over now, I keep telling myself. It's almost over, it's almost over, it's almost over, I don't need to sleep, it's almost over. (Note: it's really not that bad. I'm being melodramatic/facetious. I mean, I do have a lot of work to do, and I am tired, and I am stressed, but it's not all that bad. I'm really enjoying the work... except for graphics... and I think I may have finally found my calling. So yeah, things are all right. And, once again, it's almost over).
-Nick
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The interview is on!
It's official--- the Bruce Coville interview is a go. I'm actually doing the interview tomorrow right after I get out of class. That's a little sooner than I would have preferred, since I'd like some more time to research and prepare questions, but I just went ahead and did all that today, and I actually think I have more questions written out than we'll possibly be able to cover in the amount of time we'll have. So hopefully it'll be a very good interview. I'll try to write something tomorrow night to let you know how it went.
-Nick
-Nick
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Microwave is back, some exciting news, more.
Just to update you on the previous post, my landlords got back to me and replaced my microwave. So all is well when it comes to kitchen appliances.
Moving along, I have some pretty cool news. My final assignment for my news writing class, which is due in about a week and a half, is a personality profile piece on someone from the Syracuse-area community. At first, I wasn't sure who I wanted to write about, then a great idea occurred to me. If you've been following the blog, you'll remember that shortly after I arrived in Syracuse, I auditioned for a company that produces audiobooks. The company is owned and run by popular children's author Bruce Coville, who lives in Syracuse and is a personal favorite of mine from when I was a kid. I decided to get in touch with Dan, the guy from the audiobook company who was there when I did my audition, and he gave me Coville's email address.
I sent him an email this afternoon about possibly doing the interview, and he quickly wrote back, saying that he would do it. Unfortunately, there are still some wrinkles to work out, but it looks like it's going to happen. The problem is mainly a scheduling conflict. Coville is flying to the west coast on Wednesday and won't be back for a couple of weeks, so if we do the interview it will have to be Monday or Tuesday. We're currently aiming for Monday evening, after I get done with class, which should work. The only other hurdle is that I need official approval from my professor before I can move ahead, but I sent him an email about it tonight and I would expect him to get back to me tomorrow.
So, fingers crossed, I will probably be sitting down for an interview with Bruce Coville in a couple of days. I'm so excited about this, both because I'm a Coville fan and because this will probably make me look great to my professors, since I doubt very many people find such high-profile subjects for this assignment.
Things continue to go well in both my classes. This week's graphics project was a real bitch, though. We had to design a logo for ourselves and then apply it to a letterhead, a business card, and a business envelope. I had no problem coming up with ideas for a logo, but my professor kept shooting them down while we were in the lab working on the project on Friday. Some of them he just didn't like, while others simply would not work for various reasons (he explained to me that, since a logo should theoretically work on something very small like a business card or something very large like a billboard, it needs to be versatile. Some of my designs looked great on a letterhead, but didn't work very well when you shrunk them down to a much smaller size). So, anyway, it took me most of the day just to come up with a logo that satisfied the professor (and I don't even like it that much), and then I had to rush through the designs and layouts for the letterhead, business card, etc. At the end of the day my professor said he liked what I wound up doing, so I might get a decent grade on it, but it was just a huge pain in the ass. Horrible day. I hate the fact that my summer schedule calls for me to spend all day Friday in a computer lab working on that week's graphics project. I actually dread Fridays right now. That's not a good way to go through life.
And it's going to get a whole lot worse in regards to the graphics class this week. We have a very complex project, designing a magazine layout, due Friday, and we've been informed that there's no way we'll be able to finish it if we only work on it in class. So this week it looks like I'll be spending my days in class, then my evenings working in the computer lab until 8 or 9. It's going to suck out loud, but it will be over soon. Only two more weeks of summer classes, then a short break before the fall semester starts in late August.
I'm not going to write more about Obama's trip to Europe and the huge crowd he drew in Germany earlier this week, at least not right now, but I will get back to these subjects in the future. I'll probably write quite a bit about the presidential election as we get closer to November, as this is the first time I've ever become really interested in politics (hey, I might even vote!). So yeah, stay tuned for politics talk in the future, but not just yet.
Tomorrow will be a pretty full day. I'll still be working on setting up the Coville interview, and then, assuming we're ready to go ahead with the interview on Monday evening, I'll need to do some research and write some questions. I also want to start brainstorming for the magazine layout project, maybe even sketch out some ideas for that. I'm so slow and bad at working with the design software that I need to start as early as possible in order to ensure that I can finish in time and that it won't look like total shit.
Last item for tonight-- there's a new movie in the works called Red Sonja, produced by Robert Rodriguez and starring Rose McGowan. It's a sword and sorcery adventure story based on a Marvel comic (which I believe was originally a spin-off of Conan the Barbarian). Normally, that kind of thing is not my bag, but I do like Rodriguez and McGowan (if only because of the unbelievably awesome Grindhouse). Also, I saw the first promotional posters for the movie today, and I immediately thought, "I don't care if it sucks. I am seeing this movie and buying this poster as soon as possible." Check it out:
All right, that's all I've got for now. Take it easy. I'll keep you updated on what happens with the Coville interview. Wish me luck, as this is going to be a pretty intense and stressful week, but I'm coming into the home stretch of summer "boot camp" now, and just the idea of being done with it is giving me the energy and motivation I need.
-Nick
Moving along, I have some pretty cool news. My final assignment for my news writing class, which is due in about a week and a half, is a personality profile piece on someone from the Syracuse-area community. At first, I wasn't sure who I wanted to write about, then a great idea occurred to me. If you've been following the blog, you'll remember that shortly after I arrived in Syracuse, I auditioned for a company that produces audiobooks. The company is owned and run by popular children's author Bruce Coville, who lives in Syracuse and is a personal favorite of mine from when I was a kid. I decided to get in touch with Dan, the guy from the audiobook company who was there when I did my audition, and he gave me Coville's email address.
I sent him an email this afternoon about possibly doing the interview, and he quickly wrote back, saying that he would do it. Unfortunately, there are still some wrinkles to work out, but it looks like it's going to happen. The problem is mainly a scheduling conflict. Coville is flying to the west coast on Wednesday and won't be back for a couple of weeks, so if we do the interview it will have to be Monday or Tuesday. We're currently aiming for Monday evening, after I get done with class, which should work. The only other hurdle is that I need official approval from my professor before I can move ahead, but I sent him an email about it tonight and I would expect him to get back to me tomorrow.
So, fingers crossed, I will probably be sitting down for an interview with Bruce Coville in a couple of days. I'm so excited about this, both because I'm a Coville fan and because this will probably make me look great to my professors, since I doubt very many people find such high-profile subjects for this assignment.
Things continue to go well in both my classes. This week's graphics project was a real bitch, though. We had to design a logo for ourselves and then apply it to a letterhead, a business card, and a business envelope. I had no problem coming up with ideas for a logo, but my professor kept shooting them down while we were in the lab working on the project on Friday. Some of them he just didn't like, while others simply would not work for various reasons (he explained to me that, since a logo should theoretically work on something very small like a business card or something very large like a billboard, it needs to be versatile. Some of my designs looked great on a letterhead, but didn't work very well when you shrunk them down to a much smaller size). So, anyway, it took me most of the day just to come up with a logo that satisfied the professor (and I don't even like it that much), and then I had to rush through the designs and layouts for the letterhead, business card, etc. At the end of the day my professor said he liked what I wound up doing, so I might get a decent grade on it, but it was just a huge pain in the ass. Horrible day. I hate the fact that my summer schedule calls for me to spend all day Friday in a computer lab working on that week's graphics project. I actually dread Fridays right now. That's not a good way to go through life.
And it's going to get a whole lot worse in regards to the graphics class this week. We have a very complex project, designing a magazine layout, due Friday, and we've been informed that there's no way we'll be able to finish it if we only work on it in class. So this week it looks like I'll be spending my days in class, then my evenings working in the computer lab until 8 or 9. It's going to suck out loud, but it will be over soon. Only two more weeks of summer classes, then a short break before the fall semester starts in late August.
I'm not going to write more about Obama's trip to Europe and the huge crowd he drew in Germany earlier this week, at least not right now, but I will get back to these subjects in the future. I'll probably write quite a bit about the presidential election as we get closer to November, as this is the first time I've ever become really interested in politics (hey, I might even vote!). So yeah, stay tuned for politics talk in the future, but not just yet.
Tomorrow will be a pretty full day. I'll still be working on setting up the Coville interview, and then, assuming we're ready to go ahead with the interview on Monday evening, I'll need to do some research and write some questions. I also want to start brainstorming for the magazine layout project, maybe even sketch out some ideas for that. I'm so slow and bad at working with the design software that I need to start as early as possible in order to ensure that I can finish in time and that it won't look like total shit.
Last item for tonight-- there's a new movie in the works called Red Sonja, produced by Robert Rodriguez and starring Rose McGowan. It's a sword and sorcery adventure story based on a Marvel comic (which I believe was originally a spin-off of Conan the Barbarian). Normally, that kind of thing is not my bag, but I do like Rodriguez and McGowan (if only because of the unbelievably awesome Grindhouse). Also, I saw the first promotional posters for the movie today, and I immediately thought, "I don't care if it sucks. I am seeing this movie and buying this poster as soon as possible." Check it out:
All right, that's all I've got for now. Take it easy. I'll keep you updated on what happens with the Coville interview. Wish me luck, as this is going to be a pretty intense and stressful week, but I'm coming into the home stretch of summer "boot camp" now, and just the idea of being done with it is giving me the energy and motivation I need.
-Nick
Friday, July 25, 2008
I miss my microwave, Germans love Obama
Yesterday, while I was heating up my oatmeal in the morning, my microwave spontaneously stopped working. I've never known of a microwave to go from perfect working conidtion to completely dead like this. Usually when you hear about these things breaking down, people talk about them not heating as effectively as they used to, and eventually they give it up altogether. Not so with my microwave. Perfectly fine Wednesday morning, suddenly broken Thursday morning. I suspect the problem is electrical. You plug it into the wall and it does absolutely nothing. The clock display doesn't even light up. Yes, I did plug it into a different outlet to make sure that wasn't the problem. I also checked where the power cord goes into the back of the unit to see if anything was loose, but no dice.
Now, this microwave came with the apartment, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I won't have to pay to replace it. But it's a bad thing because I have no idea how long it's going to take my landlords to fix this problem. I left them a message yesterday before I went to class, but they didn't call me back. I was halfway hoping that when I got back from campus last night there would just be a working microwave in my apartment, but no such luck. Considering I do not have an oven/stove in my place, the microwave is a fairly vital piece of equipment (I do have a Foreman grill and a hot plate, so it's not like I'm helpless, but it's still inconvenient). So far I've had no complaints at all about my landlord, but we'll see how this episode turns out.
I'm not going to write much about this now, although I'll talk about it again later (maybe when I get back from class tonight and I have more time). But I was watching the morning news and felt compelled to say something about this. If you've been following the news at all this week, you're probably aware that Barack Obama is currently doing a tour of countries overseas, and has been received very well. But in Germany the reaction to Obama was remarkable. 200,000 people showed up to see him give a speech in Berlin. Stop and really think about that for a minute. This is a guy who MIGHT become President of the United States in a few months, speaking to a crowd of Germans. I could obviously point out that even though Obama is known for drawing very large crowds by the standards of political events, 200,000 Americans are not going to go to an Obama speech. But that is not even an accurate comparison. Imagine if Dmitry Medvedev had made a speech in the United States when he was running for president of Russia, or Gordon Brown when he was trying to become England's Prime Minister, and 200,000 people showed up. We are talking about a candidate for an election in a foreign country. Can you even imagine that happening? I can't.
Now I'm trying to figure out what this means, aside from the rather obvious observation that the Germans must really like Barack Obama. I want to understand what this says about America, or about the election, or about Obama himself. I have a feeling the answer is going to be either completely irrelevant or very important.
Now, this microwave came with the apartment, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I won't have to pay to replace it. But it's a bad thing because I have no idea how long it's going to take my landlords to fix this problem. I left them a message yesterday before I went to class, but they didn't call me back. I was halfway hoping that when I got back from campus last night there would just be a working microwave in my apartment, but no such luck. Considering I do not have an oven/stove in my place, the microwave is a fairly vital piece of equipment (I do have a Foreman grill and a hot plate, so it's not like I'm helpless, but it's still inconvenient). So far I've had no complaints at all about my landlord, but we'll see how this episode turns out.
I'm not going to write much about this now, although I'll talk about it again later (maybe when I get back from class tonight and I have more time). But I was watching the morning news and felt compelled to say something about this. If you've been following the news at all this week, you're probably aware that Barack Obama is currently doing a tour of countries overseas, and has been received very well. But in Germany the reaction to Obama was remarkable. 200,000 people showed up to see him give a speech in Berlin. Stop and really think about that for a minute. This is a guy who MIGHT become President of the United States in a few months, speaking to a crowd of Germans. I could obviously point out that even though Obama is known for drawing very large crowds by the standards of political events, 200,000 Americans are not going to go to an Obama speech. But that is not even an accurate comparison. Imagine if Dmitry Medvedev had made a speech in the United States when he was running for president of Russia, or Gordon Brown when he was trying to become England's Prime Minister, and 200,000 people showed up. We are talking about a candidate for an election in a foreign country. Can you even imagine that happening? I can't.
Now I'm trying to figure out what this means, aside from the rather obvious observation that the Germans must really like Barack Obama. I want to understand what this says about America, or about the election, or about Obama himself. I have a feeling the answer is going to be either completely irrelevant or very important.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Story's finished, trying to get a job, burgers.
So I put the finishing touches on the cigarette tax story and printed it out tonight. I'll turn it in tomorrow morning. It turned out fairly well, though it's not as good as I envisioned. Some sources didn't get back to me, and I really had too much information for a 1,000-word story, so I had to make some tough choices about what to include. As usual, holding myself to the maximum length was a struggle. My first draft ran about 1,250 but I knocked it down to 1,075. So, yes, it's still technically overlength, but not enough that it will cause any concerns. And as much as I generally hate revising or cutting things out of my writing, it reads better now than it did the first time around. I cut out some extraneous information, found ways to make sentences shorter and cleaner, etc. Good stuff.
I will post the story here eventually, but not until I get it back from my professor (which will be next Monday, if they grade these in the same amount of time they have graded other assignments). I think it's very unlikely, but I can envision a scenario in which posting the paper on the internet before my professor reads it could cause a problem, so I'll hold off.
The multimedia presentation that I had to do today (see previous post) went smoothly. It's not finished yet; we still have to put the audio and the photos together tomorrow morning and put the finishing touches on it (write captions for the photos, add a title sequence and end credits, etc.) but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Honestly, I think a lot of groups will have better presentations than ours, but I don't really care. When it comes to stuff like this, which I hate doing, my only real goal is to get it done on time while suffering as little bullshit as possible.
This week the grad school was accepting applications for fall semester positions as teaching assistants, research assistants, and office assistants in the administrative offices. I applied to a total of seven of these jobs, and if I manage to get one it'll be a huge boost to my financial situation. All the jobs give you tuition credit (two classes for most of them, three for some) and also pay a pretty decent hourly wage. If I were to get one of these jobs, I would be able to readjust my financial aid package so that I'd be taking out a lot less money in loans, which is a priority for me. I did this loan calculator thing online the other day, and it told me that if I actually borrow all the money I plan on borrowing if I don't find another source of funding, I'm going to need to be making about $86,000 a year when I graduate to be able to make my loan payments and still supply myself with food, shelter, and transportation. Yeah, journalists don't make a lot of money. I might make half that much at an entry level position, if I'm lucky. Of course, considering I will have a master's degree, and I intend to do some networking and carve out an excellent reputation for myself when I'm in school, I might be able to land a job that is significantly better than your average entry level position in journalism, but I still think it's highly doubtful I could be making $86K right out of grad school.
Now for a more enjoyable subject: burgers.
The hamburger, at its most basic level, is a very simple and only marginally satisfying meal. A slab of fried/grilled/flame-broiled beef between two halves of a bun, perhaps topped with a dollop of ketchup or a slice of American cheese. Now, I've got nothing against these simple burgers. I've eaten a ton of them in my days, and they usually taste good and sate my craving for cattle flesh. But such burgers are commonplace, run of the mill, even boring.
A finely crafted burger, on the other hand, is a meal in the truest sense of the word. It was with that in mind that I decided recently to try out a couple burger recipes of my own invention. One day the idea just popped into my head to try making chicken wing burgers-- hamburger meat mixed with wing sauce, among other things, topped with bleu cheese dressing.
So I drove down to the local Wegmans a few days ago and bought what I would need to make these burgers. Since I live alone and you cannot just buy enough beef for one or two burgers, I found myself with a quantity of meat that would be appropriate for about four decent-sized burgers. So I decided to make two chicken wing burgers, and two of another type.
I am a big fan of Chiavetta's sauce. For chicken, for steak, for cereal. Okay, maybe not that last one. But it's a fact that Chiavetta's marinade improves the taste of damn near anything. I decided that Chiavetta's burgers were an experiment I needed to conduct. So I wound up making two wing burgers and two Chiavetta's burgers.
I would term both these experiments successes, although there were some problems. The biggest one was that, since I was in both cases adding liquid to the meat, the burgers didn't hold together as well as you would like them to. They didn't fall apart on the grill or anything, they just weren't very firm. I think I could fix this problem by adding a little bit of flour to the meat before cooking, or a few bread crumbs, a little oatmeal, anything that would absorb some liquid and improve consistency.
Aside from the texture issues, the burgers tasted great. The wing burgers were not as hot/spicy as I expected them to be, especially since I added red pepper flakes and chili powder to the recipe, but I think I could fix this problem the next time around by just using more of those spices. And the flavor was excellent; it just didn't have that bite to it I was going for.
The Chiavetta's burgers, which were more or less an afterthought, were even better. The marinade just added a very distinctive flavor to the meat, and made it really juicy. Even though I'm biased since I made them myself, I would consider these some of the best and juiciest burgers I've ever had.
Obviously, the meat is the most important factor in determing the quality of a hamburger. But there are other important things that must not be overlooked. The presentation and arrangement, all the toppings and extras, are vital as well. I gave my burgers a little more texture and character by mixing green peppers and chopped onions into the meat itself before cooking, and I later topped them with lettuce, tomato, and red onion. I put bleu cheese dressing on the wing burgers, and ketchup on the Chiavetta's.
I feel the bun is often neglected when it comes to the art of burger-making. The bread is not just there to hold the sandwich together (although that is an undeniably important function), it's there because it's part of the meal. Now, I started with cheap, low-quality (but soft and tasty) buns. Wegmans brand, 99 cents for 8 of 'em, can't beat that price. So how did I make these more impressive and exotic? I coated them with margarine and then sprinkled garlic powder onto them, then put them facedown in a hot frying pan to toast them a little bit, turning them into pieces of garlic bread. I cannot claim this idea as my own. Matty's Pizzeria in Batavia serves a submarine sandwich called the Maximus which, in addition to having a badass name for a sandwich, might be the best sub ever created. The first time I tried the Maximus was when I was introduced to the idea of using garlic bread as a sandwich bun, and it's amazing. So yeah, credit the guys from Matty's for that one.
I can't really give you a recipe for these burgers, since cooking them was sort of an improvisational process, and I just threw in as much of every ingredient as seemed appropriate. I would encourage you to do the same thing, use your own discretion, experiment, see how it turns out. Anyway, here's a list of the stuff I put into the two recipes.
Chicken Wing Burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, chicken wing sauce, chili powder, red pepper flakes, garlic powder.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, bleu cheese dressing, toasted garlic bread bun.
Chiavetta's burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, Chiavetta's marinade (so it's not just a clever name), seasoned salt, red pepper flakes.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, ketchup, toasted garlic bread bun.
Okay, that's enough for tonight. Feeling good about this blog entry. Don't forget to come back next time.
-Nick
I will post the story here eventually, but not until I get it back from my professor (which will be next Monday, if they grade these in the same amount of time they have graded other assignments). I think it's very unlikely, but I can envision a scenario in which posting the paper on the internet before my professor reads it could cause a problem, so I'll hold off.
The multimedia presentation that I had to do today (see previous post) went smoothly. It's not finished yet; we still have to put the audio and the photos together tomorrow morning and put the finishing touches on it (write captions for the photos, add a title sequence and end credits, etc.) but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Honestly, I think a lot of groups will have better presentations than ours, but I don't really care. When it comes to stuff like this, which I hate doing, my only real goal is to get it done on time while suffering as little bullshit as possible.
This week the grad school was accepting applications for fall semester positions as teaching assistants, research assistants, and office assistants in the administrative offices. I applied to a total of seven of these jobs, and if I manage to get one it'll be a huge boost to my financial situation. All the jobs give you tuition credit (two classes for most of them, three for some) and also pay a pretty decent hourly wage. If I were to get one of these jobs, I would be able to readjust my financial aid package so that I'd be taking out a lot less money in loans, which is a priority for me. I did this loan calculator thing online the other day, and it told me that if I actually borrow all the money I plan on borrowing if I don't find another source of funding, I'm going to need to be making about $86,000 a year when I graduate to be able to make my loan payments and still supply myself with food, shelter, and transportation. Yeah, journalists don't make a lot of money. I might make half that much at an entry level position, if I'm lucky. Of course, considering I will have a master's degree, and I intend to do some networking and carve out an excellent reputation for myself when I'm in school, I might be able to land a job that is significantly better than your average entry level position in journalism, but I still think it's highly doubtful I could be making $86K right out of grad school.
Now for a more enjoyable subject: burgers.
The hamburger, at its most basic level, is a very simple and only marginally satisfying meal. A slab of fried/grilled/flame-broiled beef between two halves of a bun, perhaps topped with a dollop of ketchup or a slice of American cheese. Now, I've got nothing against these simple burgers. I've eaten a ton of them in my days, and they usually taste good and sate my craving for cattle flesh. But such burgers are commonplace, run of the mill, even boring.
A finely crafted burger, on the other hand, is a meal in the truest sense of the word. It was with that in mind that I decided recently to try out a couple burger recipes of my own invention. One day the idea just popped into my head to try making chicken wing burgers-- hamburger meat mixed with wing sauce, among other things, topped with bleu cheese dressing.
So I drove down to the local Wegmans a few days ago and bought what I would need to make these burgers. Since I live alone and you cannot just buy enough beef for one or two burgers, I found myself with a quantity of meat that would be appropriate for about four decent-sized burgers. So I decided to make two chicken wing burgers, and two of another type.
I am a big fan of Chiavetta's sauce. For chicken, for steak, for cereal. Okay, maybe not that last one. But it's a fact that Chiavetta's marinade improves the taste of damn near anything. I decided that Chiavetta's burgers were an experiment I needed to conduct. So I wound up making two wing burgers and two Chiavetta's burgers.
I would term both these experiments successes, although there were some problems. The biggest one was that, since I was in both cases adding liquid to the meat, the burgers didn't hold together as well as you would like them to. They didn't fall apart on the grill or anything, they just weren't very firm. I think I could fix this problem by adding a little bit of flour to the meat before cooking, or a few bread crumbs, a little oatmeal, anything that would absorb some liquid and improve consistency.
Aside from the texture issues, the burgers tasted great. The wing burgers were not as hot/spicy as I expected them to be, especially since I added red pepper flakes and chili powder to the recipe, but I think I could fix this problem the next time around by just using more of those spices. And the flavor was excellent; it just didn't have that bite to it I was going for.
The Chiavetta's burgers, which were more or less an afterthought, were even better. The marinade just added a very distinctive flavor to the meat, and made it really juicy. Even though I'm biased since I made them myself, I would consider these some of the best and juiciest burgers I've ever had.
Obviously, the meat is the most important factor in determing the quality of a hamburger. But there are other important things that must not be overlooked. The presentation and arrangement, all the toppings and extras, are vital as well. I gave my burgers a little more texture and character by mixing green peppers and chopped onions into the meat itself before cooking, and I later topped them with lettuce, tomato, and red onion. I put bleu cheese dressing on the wing burgers, and ketchup on the Chiavetta's.
I feel the bun is often neglected when it comes to the art of burger-making. The bread is not just there to hold the sandwich together (although that is an undeniably important function), it's there because it's part of the meal. Now, I started with cheap, low-quality (but soft and tasty) buns. Wegmans brand, 99 cents for 8 of 'em, can't beat that price. So how did I make these more impressive and exotic? I coated them with margarine and then sprinkled garlic powder onto them, then put them facedown in a hot frying pan to toast them a little bit, turning them into pieces of garlic bread. I cannot claim this idea as my own. Matty's Pizzeria in Batavia serves a submarine sandwich called the Maximus which, in addition to having a badass name for a sandwich, might be the best sub ever created. The first time I tried the Maximus was when I was introduced to the idea of using garlic bread as a sandwich bun, and it's amazing. So yeah, credit the guys from Matty's for that one.
I can't really give you a recipe for these burgers, since cooking them was sort of an improvisational process, and I just threw in as much of every ingredient as seemed appropriate. I would encourage you to do the same thing, use your own discretion, experiment, see how it turns out. Anyway, here's a list of the stuff I put into the two recipes.
Chicken Wing Burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, chicken wing sauce, chili powder, red pepper flakes, garlic powder.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, bleu cheese dressing, toasted garlic bread bun.
Chiavetta's burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, Chiavetta's marinade (so it's not just a clever name), seasoned salt, red pepper flakes.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, ketchup, toasted garlic bread bun.
Okay, that's enough for tonight. Feeling good about this blog entry. Don't forget to come back next time.
-Nick
Monday, July 21, 2008
Killing Kevin Smith, Answering the Unanswerable, more.
The big cigarette tax story is due Wednesday morning, so tonight I wrote a draft of it. Some sources I really wanted to talk to never got back to me, but I guess that's the kind of thing you have to get used to as a journalist. You make your best effort to contact all the people you think would be useful, then when your deadline is approaching, you do the best with what you have. I think the draft came out fairly well, although I will have to revise it a bit tomorrow night. It's too long, for one thing, and I think it might be a little jumbled in parts. Hopefully I'll be able to trim some stuff that's not really necessary, make it more streamlined and clear, and then I'll be all set.
Tomorrow I have to do this multimedia project where two classmates and I are going to interview a couple people, take some pictures, get audio recordings of the interviews, and then put everything together into a slide show with the audio playing over it. I'm a little concerned about this because I've never done anything like it before, and I don't think any of us are very familiar with the equipment or software we'll be using, but we'll figure it out. I think most people in the class are in the same situation we're in.
So, to explain the bizarre title of this blog post: Last week in the news writing class, we talked about writing obituaries, and we were given an assignment to write an obit for someone who is still alive and is either a celebrity or some kind of public figure. We were encouraged to choose someone we like, or someone we at least find interesting, to make the assignment more enjoyable. After thinking about a couple of people that I decided would be too difficult, for various reasons (Stephen King, Charles Barkley), I eventually settled on Kevin Smith. I got the assignment back today, received an A on it, and thought some of you might be interested in reading it. So here ya go:
Kevin Smith, the writer and director of such films as “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” died in a one-car accident July 14 near his home in Los Angeles. No one else was harmed in the crash. He was 37.
Smith became the poster boy for rags-to-riches success in the world of independent film with the release of his 1994 debut, “Clerks.” The aspiring filmmaker sold his extensive comic book collection and used credit cards to raise $27,000 to shoot the comedy about two friends working dead-end jobs in New Jersey. The film won awards at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, grossed over $3 million, and caught the eyes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who signed Smith to their production company, Miramax.
The director’s films, filled with profane and often vulgar content, consistently stirred up controversy. The late movie critic Joel Siegel got into a verbal sparring match with Smith in 2006 after Siegel walked out of a press screening of “Clerks 2.” He found the film offensive and walked out about 40 minutes into the screening, loudly declaring that it was the first time he had walked out of a movie in “30 (expletive) years.” Smith quickly responded on his web site; he blasted Siegel and said getting a bad review from him was “a badge of honor.” The two men later continued their argument on the syndicated radio show Opie and Anthony.
Smith also embraced controversy in 1999, when his fourth film, “Dogma,” was being protested by Catholic organizations. He found out that a Catholic group was gathering to protest the film at a theater in Eatontown, N.J., near his hometown. Smith made a couple of picket signs and went to protest his own movie, never revealing his identity to the other protesters. “I’ll never understand the folks who can’t simply dislike something” without going to protest it, Smith wrote on his web site at the time.
Over the years, the director developed a cult following of devoted fans, partly because he was always eager to interact with his audience. He frequently gave speeches and did question and answer sessions at colleges, some of which were compiled on the DVD, “An Evening With Kevin Smith,” and its sequel, “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder.”
The director also interacted directly with fans on the message boards of his web site, www.viewaskew.com, and wrote a very candid blog about his life at www.silentbobspeaks.com. In his blog, which he called “My Boring-Ass Life,” he discussed both his career and his experiences as a husband and father in intimate detail.
Smith met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, in March of 1998 when she was a reporter for USA Today and was assigned to write an article about him. The couple married in April 1999.
In addition to writing and directing all his films, Smith had some experience as an actor. Most notably, he cast himself as Silent Bob, a reticent but wise dope peddler, in six movies. He also played a supporting role in the Jennifer Garner romantic comedy “Catch and Release,” and had a small role in the Bruce Willis blockbuster “Live Free or Die Hard.”
Smith was born in 1970 and grew up in the suburban New Jersey town of Highlands. His home state always remained close to his heart, even after he moved to Los Angeles. All of his films are set partly or entirely in New Jersey.
Although none of Smith’s films were true blockbusters (his two highest-grossing movies, “Dogma” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” each made about $30 million), he had a significant effect on the industry. The “Clerks” success story gave hope to legions of would-be indie filmmakers, and Smith was at least partially responsible for making Ben Affleck and Matt Damon household names. Smith served as an executive producer on their breakthrough hit, “Good Will Hunting.”
“I cried when I read it,” Smith said of the “Good Will Hunting” script in the 1998 interview with Schwalbach.
Affleck appeared in almost all of Smith’s films, and starred in “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma” and “Jersey Girl.”
“I owe everything to this guy,” Affleck said of Smith in 1998.
Smith also had a very close relationship with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax and now run the Weinstein Co. The Weinstein brothers financed all Smith’s movies after “Clerks.”
“Kevin is one of the great young directors who has been an integral part of Miramax’s growth,” Harvey Weinstein told Daily Variety in 2003.
Fittingly, Smith was once again surrounded by controversy at the time of his death. His final film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” is slated for release in October 2008, and is not yet rated. The Motion Picture Association of America wants to give the movie an NC-17 rating. At the time of his death, Smith was fighting for an R rating. “The MPAA is gunning for us, I think,” star Seth Rogen told MTV last month.
Kevin Smith is survived by his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, and their daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. He will be buried in a ceremony at Bay View Cemetery in Highlands, N.J. on Thursday, July 17. The ceremony will not be open to the public, and the family requests that mourners do not send flowers.
So that's that. To get to the other part of the bizarre title for this blog post, last Monday I started a new thing where I answer an unanswerable question or respond to some sort of well-known saying (last week's was "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which I conclusively proved false). I have decided to make this a weekly feature, at least until I run out of ideas. According to my computer, it is technically no longer Monday, but 12:12 AM on Tuesday is close enough for me.
This week's unanswerable question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: The egg. I have put a lot of thought into this-- probably more thought than anyone really should, and here's my reasoning. If you answer "the egg," the argument against it is usually that the egg couldn't come first because a chicken egg must be laid by a chicken. And if you answer "the chicken," the standard argument is that a chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg. Quite the conundrum.
But I believe that evolutionary theory conclusively proves that the egg came first. Here's why:
New species are created a little bit at a time, over millions of years, as the gene pool of one species slowly develops mutations and ultimately turns into something different. So the way I figure it, at one point in time there were a number of birdlike animals that closely resembled chickens, but were not chickens. Now imagine an animal that is as close as it could possibly be to a chicken without actually being a chicken. For the purpose of this discussion, we shall call it the Prehistoric Cluckbeast. Now, the Prehistoric Cluckbeast is right on the tipping point of being a chicken. So say one of these theoretical birds lays an egg that contains a slight mutation. This tiny mutation is the final piece in the puzzle-- the chicken has been created. Several weeks later, however long it takes for a chicken egg to incubate, the world's first chicken hatches. But the hen who laid the egg is not a chicken. It is a Prehistoric Cluckbeast. And, presumably, the offspring will not immediately be recognized as a chicken, but will instead be considered a deformed Prehistoric Cluckbeast and will probably be mocked and ostracized by its peers. But it is not a fucked up Prehistoric Cluckbeast. It is a chicken.
So there you have it. Egg came first. No arguments.
All right, kind of tired and I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. I do have other news to tell you-- I am currently in the application process for a number of TA and research assistant jobs, and I recently invented two recipes for a couple of damn fine hamburgers-- but those stories can wait for another day. Peace.
-Nick
Tomorrow I have to do this multimedia project where two classmates and I are going to interview a couple people, take some pictures, get audio recordings of the interviews, and then put everything together into a slide show with the audio playing over it. I'm a little concerned about this because I've never done anything like it before, and I don't think any of us are very familiar with the equipment or software we'll be using, but we'll figure it out. I think most people in the class are in the same situation we're in.
So, to explain the bizarre title of this blog post: Last week in the news writing class, we talked about writing obituaries, and we were given an assignment to write an obit for someone who is still alive and is either a celebrity or some kind of public figure. We were encouraged to choose someone we like, or someone we at least find interesting, to make the assignment more enjoyable. After thinking about a couple of people that I decided would be too difficult, for various reasons (Stephen King, Charles Barkley), I eventually settled on Kevin Smith. I got the assignment back today, received an A on it, and thought some of you might be interested in reading it. So here ya go:
Kevin Smith, the writer and director of such films as “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” died in a one-car accident July 14 near his home in Los Angeles. No one else was harmed in the crash. He was 37.
Smith became the poster boy for rags-to-riches success in the world of independent film with the release of his 1994 debut, “Clerks.” The aspiring filmmaker sold his extensive comic book collection and used credit cards to raise $27,000 to shoot the comedy about two friends working dead-end jobs in New Jersey. The film won awards at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, grossed over $3 million, and caught the eyes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who signed Smith to their production company, Miramax.
The director’s films, filled with profane and often vulgar content, consistently stirred up controversy. The late movie critic Joel Siegel got into a verbal sparring match with Smith in 2006 after Siegel walked out of a press screening of “Clerks 2.” He found the film offensive and walked out about 40 minutes into the screening, loudly declaring that it was the first time he had walked out of a movie in “30 (expletive) years.” Smith quickly responded on his web site; he blasted Siegel and said getting a bad review from him was “a badge of honor.” The two men later continued their argument on the syndicated radio show Opie and Anthony.
Smith also embraced controversy in 1999, when his fourth film, “Dogma,” was being protested by Catholic organizations. He found out that a Catholic group was gathering to protest the film at a theater in Eatontown, N.J., near his hometown. Smith made a couple of picket signs and went to protest his own movie, never revealing his identity to the other protesters. “I’ll never understand the folks who can’t simply dislike something” without going to protest it, Smith wrote on his web site at the time.
Over the years, the director developed a cult following of devoted fans, partly because he was always eager to interact with his audience. He frequently gave speeches and did question and answer sessions at colleges, some of which were compiled on the DVD, “An Evening With Kevin Smith,” and its sequel, “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder.”
The director also interacted directly with fans on the message boards of his web site, www.viewaskew.com, and wrote a very candid blog about his life at www.silentbobspeaks.com. In his blog, which he called “My Boring-Ass Life,” he discussed both his career and his experiences as a husband and father in intimate detail.
Smith met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, in March of 1998 when she was a reporter for USA Today and was assigned to write an article about him. The couple married in April 1999.
In addition to writing and directing all his films, Smith had some experience as an actor. Most notably, he cast himself as Silent Bob, a reticent but wise dope peddler, in six movies. He also played a supporting role in the Jennifer Garner romantic comedy “Catch and Release,” and had a small role in the Bruce Willis blockbuster “Live Free or Die Hard.”
Smith was born in 1970 and grew up in the suburban New Jersey town of Highlands. His home state always remained close to his heart, even after he moved to Los Angeles. All of his films are set partly or entirely in New Jersey.
Although none of Smith’s films were true blockbusters (his two highest-grossing movies, “Dogma” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” each made about $30 million), he had a significant effect on the industry. The “Clerks” success story gave hope to legions of would-be indie filmmakers, and Smith was at least partially responsible for making Ben Affleck and Matt Damon household names. Smith served as an executive producer on their breakthrough hit, “Good Will Hunting.”
“I cried when I read it,” Smith said of the “Good Will Hunting” script in the 1998 interview with Schwalbach.
Affleck appeared in almost all of Smith’s films, and starred in “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma” and “Jersey Girl.”
“I owe everything to this guy,” Affleck said of Smith in 1998.
Smith also had a very close relationship with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax and now run the Weinstein Co. The Weinstein brothers financed all Smith’s movies after “Clerks.”
“Kevin is one of the great young directors who has been an integral part of Miramax’s growth,” Harvey Weinstein told Daily Variety in 2003.
Fittingly, Smith was once again surrounded by controversy at the time of his death. His final film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” is slated for release in October 2008, and is not yet rated. The Motion Picture Association of America wants to give the movie an NC-17 rating. At the time of his death, Smith was fighting for an R rating. “The MPAA is gunning for us, I think,” star Seth Rogen told MTV last month.
Kevin Smith is survived by his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, and their daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. He will be buried in a ceremony at Bay View Cemetery in Highlands, N.J. on Thursday, July 17. The ceremony will not be open to the public, and the family requests that mourners do not send flowers.
So that's that. To get to the other part of the bizarre title for this blog post, last Monday I started a new thing where I answer an unanswerable question or respond to some sort of well-known saying (last week's was "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which I conclusively proved false). I have decided to make this a weekly feature, at least until I run out of ideas. According to my computer, it is technically no longer Monday, but 12:12 AM on Tuesday is close enough for me.
This week's unanswerable question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: The egg. I have put a lot of thought into this-- probably more thought than anyone really should, and here's my reasoning. If you answer "the egg," the argument against it is usually that the egg couldn't come first because a chicken egg must be laid by a chicken. And if you answer "the chicken," the standard argument is that a chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg. Quite the conundrum.
But I believe that evolutionary theory conclusively proves that the egg came first. Here's why:
New species are created a little bit at a time, over millions of years, as the gene pool of one species slowly develops mutations and ultimately turns into something different. So the way I figure it, at one point in time there were a number of birdlike animals that closely resembled chickens, but were not chickens. Now imagine an animal that is as close as it could possibly be to a chicken without actually being a chicken. For the purpose of this discussion, we shall call it the Prehistoric Cluckbeast. Now, the Prehistoric Cluckbeast is right on the tipping point of being a chicken. So say one of these theoretical birds lays an egg that contains a slight mutation. This tiny mutation is the final piece in the puzzle-- the chicken has been created. Several weeks later, however long it takes for a chicken egg to incubate, the world's first chicken hatches. But the hen who laid the egg is not a chicken. It is a Prehistoric Cluckbeast. And, presumably, the offspring will not immediately be recognized as a chicken, but will instead be considered a deformed Prehistoric Cluckbeast and will probably be mocked and ostracized by its peers. But it is not a fucked up Prehistoric Cluckbeast. It is a chicken.
So there you have it. Egg came first. No arguments.
All right, kind of tired and I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. I do have other news to tell you-- I am currently in the application process for a number of TA and research assistant jobs, and I recently invented two recipes for a couple of damn fine hamburgers-- but those stories can wait for another day. Peace.
-Nick
Friday, July 18, 2008
Damn, that was a long week.
This was a pretty good week, but I'm still glad to see the end of it. The way my schedule breaks down, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings are devoted to news writing, while Wednesday afternoons, Thursdays and Fridays are for graphics. So I spent the second half of this week working on my graphics project, while also trying to find time on my lunch breaks and/or after class to contact sources for my cigarette tax story, which is due next Wednesday. As mentioned in my previous post, the story is coming together pretty well, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Tomorrow I'm going to go out to a couple of locations and try to speak to people in person. When I'm home, I'm going to be reading articles and doing further research into smoking statistics online. I also need to catch up on the news I haven't been reading for the past few days (I've been too busy), and there are some non-school related things I've been putting off that I'll try to do this weekend when I have more time than I do during the week. If I use my time efficiently, I think there's even a possibility I could relax and do something just for the pleasure of it by Sunday night. Not sure what that would be, but it's a tantalizing option.
I think I have articulated my resentment and disdain for my graphics class before-- I understand these are useful skills, but I would much rather be doing "real" work than designing something on Adobe. Since I would rather remove my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than ever take a job that involves graphic design on a daily basis, I feel this class is not a practical use of my time. However, the end results of the projects are often pretty cool, as was the case today. The assignment was to make a poster or advertisement for some sort of non-profit organization. I chose the Shakespeare in the Park festival they have in Buffalo every summer. I have never actually gone to the festival, but I've been meaning to for the last few years. As my poster points out, shows run through August 17th this year, and my summer term ends August 8th, so maybe this will be the year. Anyway, I thought the poster came out pretty well, and my professor seemed to like it, so that's a bonus. It's clearly not perfect, and there are some things I would like to fix about it, but I only had so much time to work on it, and since graphics are not a high priority of mine, I am not nearly as concerned about imperfections in a design as I would be about problems in a news article, for example, or any kind of writing.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the poster:
Click on it for a closer look. I kind of made up this design on the fly after my professor told me my original design wasn't working. I just thought it over while on a smoke break and decided that a big picture of Shakespeare's face, mostly transparent, would be a cool design, especially if it were surrounded by even more transparent pictures of Shakespeare. I think it works very well, but I regret that I didn't find a better picture to use. This one looked great when it was small, but when I blew it up you can see it's not a very high-quality image. Also, I didn't do the best job of tracing and cutting out the image in Photoshop, so the images are a little rough. In my defense, I used Photoshop for the first time in my life yesterday.
Right now, I'm just looking forward to next Wednesday. That's when the cigarette tax story is due, so I won't have that to worry about anymore, and I have a group multimedia presentation due the same day. It would take quite a while to explain exactly what we're doing, but it involves taking photographs and recording an audio interview, then putting the sound and images together for an online presentation. The parameters of the assignment were pretty vague; we were just supposed to interview someone with an "unusual job." The two girls I'm working with and I are interviewing a psychic medium who says she helps people communicate with the dead. I'm not saying I believe in this kind of thing, but I'm not saying I don't believe in it, either. I'm kind of open to anything. I'm hoping I see something that absolutely blows me away. Like Mulder, I want to believe.
Speaking of which, only a week until the new X-Files flick. I'm pumped. Too bad it's gonna get trampled by The Dark Knight (even though Batman will be in its second week of release and X-Files will be the big debut. Mulder and Scully still have no chance, sadly). I'm also interested in seeing Stepbrothers, which comes out the same day as X-Files, and Midnight Meat Train on August 1st. I have actually never seen a trailer for this movie, and I don't know that much about it, but my anticipation comes from Eric's hilarious description of a trailer he saw for it one time. So if i see it and it sucks, it's all on you, buddy.
And what about that new Kiefer Sutherland horror flick? Sutherland is one of the most badass human beings on the planet, and it's got an R-rating, so you know it won't be completely lame, but the trailer still isn't doing much for me. It kind of feels like a PG-13 horror movie, then maybe they just inserted a few "fucks" into the script to boost it to an R and give it horror movie street cred. Although that seems unlikely, considering PG-13 movies generally make way more than R. I'll probably give it a shot. Maybe not in theaters, but definitely on video when it comes out. "Mirrors," I believe it's called.
Okay, I did not mean to take a hard left turn into a movie discussion. I think I'm really tired and my synapses are firing in unpredictable patterns. Back to the original topic of the post: Today marked the end of the third week of my summer term, meaning I am exactly halfway through it. Whoo-hoo! I think there will technically be more work in the second half, but I expect it to be less stressful because A-- now I know what to anticipate and B-- the two things I'm worried about most, the cigarette tax story and the multimedia presentation, will both be over on Wednesday. After that I think it should be smooth sailing. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Okay, I'm out. I'm gonna sleep like a dead man on a log. You heard me.
-Nick
PS-- I would be remiss if I didn't give a plug to the blog written by my cousin Eric and his buddy Dan. It's called Masturblog (great title, right?) and there aren't very many posts so far, but its quality absolutely makes up for its slight numbers. Read the Masturblog and you'll never look at turtles the same way again.
PPS-- Without providing any context, here is a comment I made in class this week that drew quite a few confused laughs from the people around me: "I would totally go to a gentlemen's club outlet mall."
I think I have articulated my resentment and disdain for my graphics class before-- I understand these are useful skills, but I would much rather be doing "real" work than designing something on Adobe. Since I would rather remove my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than ever take a job that involves graphic design on a daily basis, I feel this class is not a practical use of my time. However, the end results of the projects are often pretty cool, as was the case today. The assignment was to make a poster or advertisement for some sort of non-profit organization. I chose the Shakespeare in the Park festival they have in Buffalo every summer. I have never actually gone to the festival, but I've been meaning to for the last few years. As my poster points out, shows run through August 17th this year, and my summer term ends August 8th, so maybe this will be the year. Anyway, I thought the poster came out pretty well, and my professor seemed to like it, so that's a bonus. It's clearly not perfect, and there are some things I would like to fix about it, but I only had so much time to work on it, and since graphics are not a high priority of mine, I am not nearly as concerned about imperfections in a design as I would be about problems in a news article, for example, or any kind of writing.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the poster:
Click on it for a closer look. I kind of made up this design on the fly after my professor told me my original design wasn't working. I just thought it over while on a smoke break and decided that a big picture of Shakespeare's face, mostly transparent, would be a cool design, especially if it were surrounded by even more transparent pictures of Shakespeare. I think it works very well, but I regret that I didn't find a better picture to use. This one looked great when it was small, but when I blew it up you can see it's not a very high-quality image. Also, I didn't do the best job of tracing and cutting out the image in Photoshop, so the images are a little rough. In my defense, I used Photoshop for the first time in my life yesterday.
Right now, I'm just looking forward to next Wednesday. That's when the cigarette tax story is due, so I won't have that to worry about anymore, and I have a group multimedia presentation due the same day. It would take quite a while to explain exactly what we're doing, but it involves taking photographs and recording an audio interview, then putting the sound and images together for an online presentation. The parameters of the assignment were pretty vague; we were just supposed to interview someone with an "unusual job." The two girls I'm working with and I are interviewing a psychic medium who says she helps people communicate with the dead. I'm not saying I believe in this kind of thing, but I'm not saying I don't believe in it, either. I'm kind of open to anything. I'm hoping I see something that absolutely blows me away. Like Mulder, I want to believe.
Speaking of which, only a week until the new X-Files flick. I'm pumped. Too bad it's gonna get trampled by The Dark Knight (even though Batman will be in its second week of release and X-Files will be the big debut. Mulder and Scully still have no chance, sadly). I'm also interested in seeing Stepbrothers, which comes out the same day as X-Files, and Midnight Meat Train on August 1st. I have actually never seen a trailer for this movie, and I don't know that much about it, but my anticipation comes from Eric's hilarious description of a trailer he saw for it one time. So if i see it and it sucks, it's all on you, buddy.
And what about that new Kiefer Sutherland horror flick? Sutherland is one of the most badass human beings on the planet, and it's got an R-rating, so you know it won't be completely lame, but the trailer still isn't doing much for me. It kind of feels like a PG-13 horror movie, then maybe they just inserted a few "fucks" into the script to boost it to an R and give it horror movie street cred. Although that seems unlikely, considering PG-13 movies generally make way more than R. I'll probably give it a shot. Maybe not in theaters, but definitely on video when it comes out. "Mirrors," I believe it's called.
Okay, I did not mean to take a hard left turn into a movie discussion. I think I'm really tired and my synapses are firing in unpredictable patterns. Back to the original topic of the post: Today marked the end of the third week of my summer term, meaning I am exactly halfway through it. Whoo-hoo! I think there will technically be more work in the second half, but I expect it to be less stressful because A-- now I know what to anticipate and B-- the two things I'm worried about most, the cigarette tax story and the multimedia presentation, will both be over on Wednesday. After that I think it should be smooth sailing. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Okay, I'm out. I'm gonna sleep like a dead man on a log. You heard me.
-Nick
PS-- I would be remiss if I didn't give a plug to the blog written by my cousin Eric and his buddy Dan. It's called Masturblog (great title, right?) and there aren't very many posts so far, but its quality absolutely makes up for its slight numbers. Read the Masturblog and you'll never look at turtles the same way again.
PPS-- Without providing any context, here is a comment I made in class this week that drew quite a few confused laughs from the people around me: "I would totally go to a gentlemen's club outlet mall."
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Things are looking up
Wow, this week has been intense so far. Fortunately, I found myself with a small amount of free time tonight, so I decide to write a post. Well, "free time" might be a bit of a stretch. There are plenty of things I could, and probably should, be doing, but nothing that urgently demands my attention. It's the first time in... God, I don't know how long... that I haven't felt the pressure to work work work whenever conscious. Speaking of being conscious, I'm learning how to get by on 4 1/2 or 5 hours of sleep a night. It hasn't been too bad. Occasionally, I'll catch myself starting to nod during a particularly boring lecture, but I haven't completely passed out in class or anything. And I don't feel that exhausted, though I am looking forward to sleeping my ass off Friday night/Saturday morning.
So, things took a real turn for the better today. All this week (and this past weekend, and last week) I've been really stressed out, both because of the amount of work I've had to do, and because I was having a lot of anxiety about this story I'm working on for my news writing class. I mentioned it in a previous post-- it's the one about the new cigarette taxes in New York. Well, I've got plenty to say on the subject, and I went to the mall on Sunday and interviewed a couple people to get the average person's reaction to the taxes, and I was always confident I could write a good story. But here's the rub-- one of the requirements for the story is that you need to interview some kind of bureaucrat or public official. And, since this bill was passed into law by the New York State Legislature, I've been trying to contact members of the state assembly. I've emailed them, I left phone messages, and none of them were getting back to me. I began to get very worried that I would not be able to fulfill this requirement of the project. I mentioned my concerns to my professor the other day, and he basically told me I had to find a way to get somebody on the phone. He's a very cool guy, really understanding and helpful, but he tells it like it is.
So, based on his suggestion, I decided to shift my focus away from legislators who might not call me back and try to get in touch with the state Health Department or the bureau of taxation or something like that. That started giving me hope, because I figured I would have an easier time getting someone from one of those organizations to talk to me. So that was my plan. Today on my lunch break, I started calling the legislators and leaving messages for them again. I didn't expect any of them to talk to me, but I wanted to be able to honestly say I had made multiple efforts to contact these people, to no avail.
To my surprise, I got an assemblywoman from Onondaga County (where Syracuse is located) on the phone. At first, I thought she was going to refuse to talk to me and hang up. Right at the beginning of the conversation, she said, "I'm not the person you want to be talking to about cigarette taxes, and I'm very busy right now." But I knew this might be my only chance to talk to somebody from the state legislature, so I was determined to keep her on the phone. I blurted out what I thought would be a fairly provocative question (although I can't remember what it was now, my brain was sort of on autopilot), and she gave me answer. I immediately tossed out a follow-up question, and she kept talking. And talking. She wound up talking to me for over half an hour, and she was a great interview. She also gave the names and numbers of a couple other officials I might want to talk to.
I also called the assemblyman who sponsored the cigarette tax in Albany and got a secretary on the phone. I explained why I was calling, told her when my deadline was, and she assured me the assemblyman would call me back sometime in the next few days. If he does, that would be awesome, since he's the official I wanted to talk to most. But if he doesn't, I'll be okay, because I already got my required interview with a bureaucrat, and the assemblywoman I spoke with today gave me those other names, whom she said would be interested in the subject and will probably talk to me. There are also people from the bureau of taxation and the New York State Smokers' Quitline who are supposed to be calling me back tomorrow. So it looks like getting the necessary sources for this story isn't going to be as big of a problem as I thought it would, which is a gigantic relief to me. Now I just have to write a magnificent story. After all the stress and annoyance this thing has caused me, I am getting an A on the motherfucker.
Speaking of grades, I've gotten an A and an A- on the last two stories I wrote in this class, and I still haven't gotten an F on anything. I don't know if I've explained this before, but you get an automatic F on an assignment if it contains a fact error (i.e. misspelling someone's name, giving an incorrect age for somebody, getting an address wrong, misspelling the name of an organization, just reporting anything that's inaccurate, generally), and they have told us repeatedly that everyone gets at least one F in this course. When they told me that, I swore an oath that I would not. This is partly because I pride myself on my accuracy and my attention to minute detail, but also because I can't remember ever getting an F on anything in my life. And so far I haven't. And now the pressure is off. They announced in class today that from now on, if you get an F due to a fact error, you can fix the error, resubmit the story, write a short explanation/correction of the mistake, and then you'll get the grade you would have gotten if you hadn't made the error. This policy is not retroactive, however, so people who got F's early in the course are stuck with them.
Despite the repeated warnings that F's are commonplace in this course, I've been very surprised by how many people have been complaining about getting them. I mean, I understand if you get one. Everybody makes a mistake once in a while (even I do... occasionally), and I'm sure people are particularly prone to errors when they're just starting out in a class like this, especially if they haven't done reporting before, as most of us have not. But after the first time, wouldn't you learn your lesson and be extremely careful from that point forward? I heard a woman today say that she had gotten an F on every written assignment except the first one due to fact errors. And this is an intelligent person, or else she wouldn't have gotten into the school. I tried not to show how astounded I was by this. I don't know, I guess I've just been blessed with a proofreader's eye, and I'm thankful for it.
The icing on the cake today was that I got my first project back in my graphics class... and I got an A on it. I almost laughed out loud. I can barely draw stick figures. I couldn't design my way out of a paper sack. I mean, I get the impression that this class is not graded very harshly, in general. You take two classes in the summer, and I think for people in my program, the graphics class is partially intended to soften the blow of the grade you're going to get in news writing. But still, I was pleased. And it's not that I was particularly good at this assignment. The first time my professor looked at it while we were in the computer labs last week, he just kind of went, "Whoa... this is not going to work at all." So he gave me some advice, and I just did exactly what he told me to do. I mean, he is clearly good at this stuff, and I clearly am not, so I'm gonna take the dude's advice. I understand wanting to do things your own way and having an independent spirit and everything, but when you don't know what the hell you're doing, and an expert tells you to do it differently, you do what he says.
All right, I better cut this off. Even though, as I mentioned, there is not anything urgent that I need to do tonight, there are a couple things I want to get in order before I go to bed. So yeah, just to sum up... grad school is now going well. I'm still stressed out and sleep-deprived, but I'm starting to see the silver lining around the clouds. And the summer term is six weeks long. This is week three. At the end of the day on Friday, I will no longer be running into the woods-- I'll be running out of them. Good news indeed.
-Niz
So, things took a real turn for the better today. All this week (and this past weekend, and last week) I've been really stressed out, both because of the amount of work I've had to do, and because I was having a lot of anxiety about this story I'm working on for my news writing class. I mentioned it in a previous post-- it's the one about the new cigarette taxes in New York. Well, I've got plenty to say on the subject, and I went to the mall on Sunday and interviewed a couple people to get the average person's reaction to the taxes, and I was always confident I could write a good story. But here's the rub-- one of the requirements for the story is that you need to interview some kind of bureaucrat or public official. And, since this bill was passed into law by the New York State Legislature, I've been trying to contact members of the state assembly. I've emailed them, I left phone messages, and none of them were getting back to me. I began to get very worried that I would not be able to fulfill this requirement of the project. I mentioned my concerns to my professor the other day, and he basically told me I had to find a way to get somebody on the phone. He's a very cool guy, really understanding and helpful, but he tells it like it is.
So, based on his suggestion, I decided to shift my focus away from legislators who might not call me back and try to get in touch with the state Health Department or the bureau of taxation or something like that. That started giving me hope, because I figured I would have an easier time getting someone from one of those organizations to talk to me. So that was my plan. Today on my lunch break, I started calling the legislators and leaving messages for them again. I didn't expect any of them to talk to me, but I wanted to be able to honestly say I had made multiple efforts to contact these people, to no avail.
To my surprise, I got an assemblywoman from Onondaga County (where Syracuse is located) on the phone. At first, I thought she was going to refuse to talk to me and hang up. Right at the beginning of the conversation, she said, "I'm not the person you want to be talking to about cigarette taxes, and I'm very busy right now." But I knew this might be my only chance to talk to somebody from the state legislature, so I was determined to keep her on the phone. I blurted out what I thought would be a fairly provocative question (although I can't remember what it was now, my brain was sort of on autopilot), and she gave me answer. I immediately tossed out a follow-up question, and she kept talking. And talking. She wound up talking to me for over half an hour, and she was a great interview. She also gave the names and numbers of a couple other officials I might want to talk to.
I also called the assemblyman who sponsored the cigarette tax in Albany and got a secretary on the phone. I explained why I was calling, told her when my deadline was, and she assured me the assemblyman would call me back sometime in the next few days. If he does, that would be awesome, since he's the official I wanted to talk to most. But if he doesn't, I'll be okay, because I already got my required interview with a bureaucrat, and the assemblywoman I spoke with today gave me those other names, whom she said would be interested in the subject and will probably talk to me. There are also people from the bureau of taxation and the New York State Smokers' Quitline who are supposed to be calling me back tomorrow. So it looks like getting the necessary sources for this story isn't going to be as big of a problem as I thought it would, which is a gigantic relief to me. Now I just have to write a magnificent story. After all the stress and annoyance this thing has caused me, I am getting an A on the motherfucker.
Speaking of grades, I've gotten an A and an A- on the last two stories I wrote in this class, and I still haven't gotten an F on anything. I don't know if I've explained this before, but you get an automatic F on an assignment if it contains a fact error (i.e. misspelling someone's name, giving an incorrect age for somebody, getting an address wrong, misspelling the name of an organization, just reporting anything that's inaccurate, generally), and they have told us repeatedly that everyone gets at least one F in this course. When they told me that, I swore an oath that I would not. This is partly because I pride myself on my accuracy and my attention to minute detail, but also because I can't remember ever getting an F on anything in my life. And so far I haven't. And now the pressure is off. They announced in class today that from now on, if you get an F due to a fact error, you can fix the error, resubmit the story, write a short explanation/correction of the mistake, and then you'll get the grade you would have gotten if you hadn't made the error. This policy is not retroactive, however, so people who got F's early in the course are stuck with them.
Despite the repeated warnings that F's are commonplace in this course, I've been very surprised by how many people have been complaining about getting them. I mean, I understand if you get one. Everybody makes a mistake once in a while (even I do... occasionally), and I'm sure people are particularly prone to errors when they're just starting out in a class like this, especially if they haven't done reporting before, as most of us have not. But after the first time, wouldn't you learn your lesson and be extremely careful from that point forward? I heard a woman today say that she had gotten an F on every written assignment except the first one due to fact errors. And this is an intelligent person, or else she wouldn't have gotten into the school. I tried not to show how astounded I was by this. I don't know, I guess I've just been blessed with a proofreader's eye, and I'm thankful for it.
The icing on the cake today was that I got my first project back in my graphics class... and I got an A on it. I almost laughed out loud. I can barely draw stick figures. I couldn't design my way out of a paper sack. I mean, I get the impression that this class is not graded very harshly, in general. You take two classes in the summer, and I think for people in my program, the graphics class is partially intended to soften the blow of the grade you're going to get in news writing. But still, I was pleased. And it's not that I was particularly good at this assignment. The first time my professor looked at it while we were in the computer labs last week, he just kind of went, "Whoa... this is not going to work at all." So he gave me some advice, and I just did exactly what he told me to do. I mean, he is clearly good at this stuff, and I clearly am not, so I'm gonna take the dude's advice. I understand wanting to do things your own way and having an independent spirit and everything, but when you don't know what the hell you're doing, and an expert tells you to do it differently, you do what he says.
All right, I better cut this off. Even though, as I mentioned, there is not anything urgent that I need to do tonight, there are a couple things I want to get in order before I go to bed. So yeah, just to sum up... grad school is now going well. I'm still stressed out and sleep-deprived, but I'm starting to see the silver lining around the clouds. And the summer term is six weeks long. This is week three. At the end of the day on Friday, I will no longer be running into the woods-- I'll be running out of them. Good news indeed.
-Niz
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sometimes I am impressed by the narrative structure of my own dreams.
Okay, so I've decided to start something new on the blog. Periodically I am going to respond to sayings we're all familiar with, pieces of conventional wisdom, and I will explain why these things are true or false. I will also answer supposedly unanswerable and/or rhetorical questions (for example: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? But I won't be answering that question today, perhaps not ever. But you get the idea).
Today I will be responding to this old chestnut: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
FALSE.
Last night I had a dreaPublish Postm in which I met, began dating, and fell in love with a rather attractive and interesting woman. For a few weeks or months, everything went well, and then we had some kind of an argument, and I wound up catching her sleeping with one of my friends. In the dream, I understood the nuances and details of this situation, and it all seemed to make sense, but trying to recall it now I can't piece it all together. Anyway, the point is that the discovery of this left me with an absolutely gut-wrenching sense of betrayal and despair. So this dream had the highest of the highs-- falling in love with a seemingly perfect person-- and the lowest of the lows-- being betrayed by that apparently ideal mate AND one of your close friends. So, do we take the good with the bad? Should I have felt happy and fortunate to have experienced those positive emotions before it all went wrong? By the way, this was one of those dreams in which I was completely convinced this was real life. At no time did I have an inkling that this was a creation of my dreaming mind. And when I woke up and found myself in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning, this was the first thought that went through my head:
Well, thank God none of that ever happened.
So, if things are going to work out poorly, it is better to never love at all.
QED.
Today I will be responding to this old chestnut: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
FALSE.
Last night I had a dreaPublish Postm in which I met, began dating, and fell in love with a rather attractive and interesting woman. For a few weeks or months, everything went well, and then we had some kind of an argument, and I wound up catching her sleeping with one of my friends. In the dream, I understood the nuances and details of this situation, and it all seemed to make sense, but trying to recall it now I can't piece it all together. Anyway, the point is that the discovery of this left me with an absolutely gut-wrenching sense of betrayal and despair. So this dream had the highest of the highs-- falling in love with a seemingly perfect person-- and the lowest of the lows-- being betrayed by that apparently ideal mate AND one of your close friends. So, do we take the good with the bad? Should I have felt happy and fortunate to have experienced those positive emotions before it all went wrong? By the way, this was one of those dreams in which I was completely convinced this was real life. At no time did I have an inkling that this was a creation of my dreaming mind. And when I woke up and found myself in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning, this was the first thought that went through my head:
Well, thank God none of that ever happened.
So, if things are going to work out poorly, it is better to never love at all.
QED.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Long weekend
Sorry I haven't been posting much the past few days. Went upstate for Darren and Kate's wedding on Saturday (it was great, by the way), drove home Saturday night, got up bright and early this morning, and worked on various assignments all day (and tried to catch up on all the news I've been missing; they give us daily news quizzes in my writing class). Wanted to write about the wedding and various other subjects tonight, but now I'm exhausted and will probably go to bed soon. Probably try to write something longer tomorrow. Peace.
-nizPublish Post
-nizPublish Post
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Brett to Bills?
Dear Brett, I know it will never happen, but on behalf of the entire Buffalo Bills organization, I would just like to say that you would look fucking great in red, white and blue.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
What I've Been Up To
All right, so I promised to tell you all about what I've been working on, so here goes. I had a smaller shitload of things to do tonight than usual, so I decided I could afford to take a few minutes and blog.
Our first major assignment in my news writing class is to write what they call an "enterprise stoory." Basically, we just have to find something in the news, something that affects the community, and write an article on it. There are a minimum of 6 sources/interviews, and the piece is supposed to be about 1,000 words. This is due July 23rd, but we were encouraged to begin working on it immediately when we got the assignment (which I believe was either Monday or Tuesday of this week). I've already come up with my topic and a list of people I would like to interview for it, but I haven't made any attempts to contact these people yet. It's not that I've been slacking off, I just haven't really had time to get going on it. I'll get started this weekend, at the latest.
Anyway, the topic I've decided to write on is the recent increase in New York State's taxes on cigarettes. Naturally, as a smoker I have my own thoughts on this issue (although they probably aren't exactly what you would expect them to be), but I will strive to keep all bias out of the story. Besides, I can see both pros and cons to the issue, so I wouldn't say I'm exactly biased one way or the other. I intend to speak with members of the state legislature, assuming I can get them on the phone, including the assemblyman who sponsored the bill. I also want to talk to the New York State Smokers' Quitline to see if there has been a marked increase in people attempting to quit since the tax went into effect June 3rd. Then I want to talk to the owners and/or managers of at least two local businesses, the Mallard Tobacconist in downtown Syracuse-- which obviously must comply with the tax-- and the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop, which does not have to charge the tax, or any taxes at all, on cigarettes because the shop is on a Native American reservation. Lastly, I want to conduct on-the-street interviews with Syracuse residents to gauge their response to the tax. Ideally, I want to speak with at least one smoker and one nonsmoker. Assuming I can even contact all these people, I may not be able to use them all in the story, since it can only be 1,000 words, so my scope is limited. Still, this is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I'm looking forward to the story and I'm optimistic that I can write a damn good one.
Some of the other assignments they've had us do in class have been interesting, as well. One day one of our professors came into class, dressed in a costume and pretending to be a redneck named Jon Smythe, who had just won the lottery. It was as if he were appearing at a press conference about his sudden windfall, and he took all our questions. Immediately afterwards, we went back to the computer labs and had about 90 minutes to write a brief news story about it. It was a cool exercise-- especially since my profess was hilarious portraying a drunken redneck-- and it definitely helped us experience being under the gun of a deadline.
The following day, we knew we were going to have a guest speaker in the class (a real one this time). It was John Batiste, a former Major General in the Army, who abruptly retired in 2005 because he disagreed with the way Bush and Rumsfeld were running the war, and he wanted the freedom to speak his mind. He now does a lot of public speaking about Iraq and writes op-ed pieces for various newspapers. He was a very interesting guy and made a lot of great points. His speech lasted a little over 2 hours, including the Q&A. After the speech, we again went to the computer labs and wrote a news story about it, which was somewhat more challenging because it needed to be longer than the lottery story and we had less time-- about 75 minutes, because the speech had run longer than expected. Even more challenging than the time constraint and the added length was the fact that I had taken about 10 pages of notes during the speech, and I now had to write a 750-word story about it. I honestly don't think my article came out very well-- it took me the entire time we had before the deadline, and I had a lot of trouble deciding which pieces of information to include in my article and how to organize it all. I thought it was by far the most challenging writing assignment I've had so far. But it was still a very cool experience.
My other class, graphics, is slightly less enjoyable than contracting double-lung pneumonia (which I have done. I'm speaking from experience here). Our current project, which is due at the end of the day tomorrow, is to make a one-page resumé for ourselves. This doesn't sound all that difficult, but they want us to do all this fancy graphics stuff with it, including making a "wordmark," which is sort of a logo for your own name. I understand that learning how to use this software and how to make an appealing design are good things to know, and they are things I will probably need to do later in my career, particularly if I go into editing, but I despise this project. Today we had a three-hour graphics lecture, followed by four hours in the lab to work on the resumé project, and the whole time I was in the lab I was wishing I could just leave and go work on something that actually matters-- the cigarette tax story, for instance. Tomorrow we're in the computer labs all day, beginning at 9 a.m., and the project is due at 4:30. I got a good head start on mine today (although I need to do some serious re-designing. My first attempt was sort of an abortion. I am not good with graphics.), so I'm hoping to finish mine well ahead of the deadline and get the hell out of there to work on more pressing matters. Or at least relax for a minute.
That's the thing-- as cool as some of these assignments have been, and as much as I think going to grad school was the right thing for me to do, I have been constantly stressed out all week. I don't think I've felt relaxed in like six days. I start working shortly after I get up in the morning, and I don't stop until I go to bed at night. And the work is never, ever done. Again, I suppose this is why they call the summer term "boot camp." Whatever, I'll survive. Unless the stress causes me to have an utter psychotic meltdown, which I am certainly not ruling out.
Oh, I almost forgot about the other project I'm working on for news writing. They assigned us to three-person teams earlier this week, and each team has to find a person in the area with an interesting/unusual job and interview them. Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. This isn't a standard print story, it's a multimedia story. So when we go do the interview, we will record it using a digital voice recorder (but not mine, a better one, which we can borrow from the University) and take photos. Apparently we'll be working on this multimedia project for quite some time, and the final product will be an online slide show with audio. Basically, playing the interview while pictures we shot of the person and his/her place of business accompany the audio. I think we may also record narration to introduce the piece, provide bits of commentary in the middle, etc. But I'm not sure about that. It might be just the interview. Which will have to be edited, of course, since the final slide show is only going to be like two minutes long. Sounds like a lot of work, but I think it will be pretty cool when we're done with it. Oh, that reminds me, I should probably email the other two members of my team and offer some ideas about whom we should interview, since neither of them has contacted me. No rest for the wicked.
Lastly, I want to share with you a piece that I wrote in (I think) April, shortly after I heard about the cigarette tax increase. This is-- obviously-- satire, and it would suggest that I strongly oppose the tax (even though I'm saying the exact opposite-- ain't irony great?), but that is not exactly true. I was just feeling bored and caustic one day, and for some reason I started thinking about Jonathan Swift, so I wrote this. I think it's somewhat amusing. Enjoy.
-Niz
My Modest Proposal
By Nick (Swift) Roberts
Recently, the New York State Legislature approved an increase in the tax on cigarettes from $1.50 to $2.75 per pack. New York was already one of the most expensive states in which to purchase tobacco, and this newest tax hike will make us number one with a bullet. The thinking behind the new cigarette tax says that higher prices on cigarettes will deter teens from becoming smokers, encourage current smokers to quit, lower health care expenses in the long-term by reducing the rate of smoking-related illnesses, and bring some much-needed revenue into the state government from those people who choose to smoke, despite the increased cost. So the government will simultaneously discourage the use of an addictive, deadly substance while selling that same addictive, deadly substance for a profit. I wholeheartedly support this plan. In fact, I see this as only the first step in a process that will ultimately increase the overall health and wealth of our fine state.
I propose we apply the same principle to other products that cause harm to the people who use them. Alcohol, for instance. True, alcohol does not cause nearly as many deaths as tobacco, but excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages may result in a number of health complications, including cirrhosis, liver cancer, birth defects, even gout. That’s right, gout. Alcohol also causes a number of societal ills. Alcoholism breaks up marriages, leads to child abuse, and causes easily preventable motor vehicle accidents. With that in mind, I suggest what I am calling the Six Pack Tax. This would be a fee on the sale of each and every alcoholic beverage in New York State, whether purchased at a store or in a bar, as well as a 75% increase in the cost of obtaining a liquor license. Undoubtedly, this will lead to a more temperate New York, and a much more profitable one.
I believe that once the revenue from tobacco and alcohol sales begins pouring in, our legislators will get even more creative. What argument could anyone make against legalizing all narcotics and other currently illicit drugs and imposing steep taxes upon their sale? Making narcotics so expensive that only the wealthy can afford them may be the only way to win the war on drugs in our nation’s impoverished and crime-ridden inner cities. And if our citizens insist on using narcotics, hallucinogens, and various other harmful substances, we might as well profit from it.
My proposal can be extended beyond just substance abuse. While tobacco, alcohol, and drugs cause many problems, the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease, and the leading cause of heart disease is poor diet. We should encourage people to eat well by heavily taxing the sale of unhealthy foods. I hail from the Buffalo region, and we would surely benefit from a Chicken Wing Tax. Taxes on pizza, pasta, steak hoagies, burritos, and all types of confections wouldn’t hurt, either. I recommend imposing a $2 tax on every item purchased from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. I’m sure our residents would embrace these measures, knowing they would lead to a healthier, thinner, happier and, of course, richer New York.
You hear an awful lot of talk these days about the environment and “going green.” Automobiles are one of the leading causes of air pollution and the current environmental crisis, so driving should obviously be discouraged. The cost of gasoline in New York is already 20 cents per gallon above the national average. This is a good start, but it is not nearly enough. We should raise the price of gas to $5.00 per gallon (and when the national average begins catching up with us, raise it to $7.00). People will drive less, our air will be cleaner, and our State Treasury will be fuller. And what a sense of pride and love will grow in the hearts of our residents, knowing they pay much more for gas than anyone else in the country, and are therefore doing more to combat global warming.
You see, the average person simply cannot be depended upon to make choices that are in his best interest, and in the best interests of those around him. That is why our elected officials must protect the people from themselves, by making it unreasonably expensive to make the wrong choices. And, since some people can always be counted on to make poor choices, regardless of unreasonable cost, the state will continue to turn a tidy profit as a result of our preventative measures.
The New York State government, which has always held itself up as a paragon of propriety, a chapel of chastity, a temple of temperance, and a model of wisdom and fine moral conduct, will now inspire other state governments, perhaps even the federal government, to follow our lead and pick up the mighty sword of taxation and wield it as the ultimate weapon against the problems of modern society.
As you may already be aware, the population of this great state has been falling in recent years. Many of those who leave cite the state’s economic problems, including taxes they perceive as too high, as reasons for their departure. We too often view this as a problem; I choose to see it as a benefit to the state. If these people are either unwilling or unable to pay the price for a cleaner, healthier, better standard of living, then good riddance. In fact, the more people who leave New York, the cleaner our air will be, the emptier our hospitals, the lower our crime rate. We could turn this state into a beautiful paradise, if only all the people would leave. And if they insist on staying and procreating and increasing our state’s problems, well, I suppose we can always eat them. Excelsior!
Our first major assignment in my news writing class is to write what they call an "enterprise stoory." Basically, we just have to find something in the news, something that affects the community, and write an article on it. There are a minimum of 6 sources/interviews, and the piece is supposed to be about 1,000 words. This is due July 23rd, but we were encouraged to begin working on it immediately when we got the assignment (which I believe was either Monday or Tuesday of this week). I've already come up with my topic and a list of people I would like to interview for it, but I haven't made any attempts to contact these people yet. It's not that I've been slacking off, I just haven't really had time to get going on it. I'll get started this weekend, at the latest.
Anyway, the topic I've decided to write on is the recent increase in New York State's taxes on cigarettes. Naturally, as a smoker I have my own thoughts on this issue (although they probably aren't exactly what you would expect them to be), but I will strive to keep all bias out of the story. Besides, I can see both pros and cons to the issue, so I wouldn't say I'm exactly biased one way or the other. I intend to speak with members of the state legislature, assuming I can get them on the phone, including the assemblyman who sponsored the bill. I also want to talk to the New York State Smokers' Quitline to see if there has been a marked increase in people attempting to quit since the tax went into effect June 3rd. Then I want to talk to the owners and/or managers of at least two local businesses, the Mallard Tobacconist in downtown Syracuse-- which obviously must comply with the tax-- and the Onondaga Nation Smoke Shop, which does not have to charge the tax, or any taxes at all, on cigarettes because the shop is on a Native American reservation. Lastly, I want to conduct on-the-street interviews with Syracuse residents to gauge their response to the tax. Ideally, I want to speak with at least one smoker and one nonsmoker. Assuming I can even contact all these people, I may not be able to use them all in the story, since it can only be 1,000 words, so my scope is limited. Still, this is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I'm looking forward to the story and I'm optimistic that I can write a damn good one.
Some of the other assignments they've had us do in class have been interesting, as well. One day one of our professors came into class, dressed in a costume and pretending to be a redneck named Jon Smythe, who had just won the lottery. It was as if he were appearing at a press conference about his sudden windfall, and he took all our questions. Immediately afterwards, we went back to the computer labs and had about 90 minutes to write a brief news story about it. It was a cool exercise-- especially since my profess was hilarious portraying a drunken redneck-- and it definitely helped us experience being under the gun of a deadline.
The following day, we knew we were going to have a guest speaker in the class (a real one this time). It was John Batiste, a former Major General in the Army, who abruptly retired in 2005 because he disagreed with the way Bush and Rumsfeld were running the war, and he wanted the freedom to speak his mind. He now does a lot of public speaking about Iraq and writes op-ed pieces for various newspapers. He was a very interesting guy and made a lot of great points. His speech lasted a little over 2 hours, including the Q&A. After the speech, we again went to the computer labs and wrote a news story about it, which was somewhat more challenging because it needed to be longer than the lottery story and we had less time-- about 75 minutes, because the speech had run longer than expected. Even more challenging than the time constraint and the added length was the fact that I had taken about 10 pages of notes during the speech, and I now had to write a 750-word story about it. I honestly don't think my article came out very well-- it took me the entire time we had before the deadline, and I had a lot of trouble deciding which pieces of information to include in my article and how to organize it all. I thought it was by far the most challenging writing assignment I've had so far. But it was still a very cool experience.
My other class, graphics, is slightly less enjoyable than contracting double-lung pneumonia (which I have done. I'm speaking from experience here). Our current project, which is due at the end of the day tomorrow, is to make a one-page resumé for ourselves. This doesn't sound all that difficult, but they want us to do all this fancy graphics stuff with it, including making a "wordmark," which is sort of a logo for your own name. I understand that learning how to use this software and how to make an appealing design are good things to know, and they are things I will probably need to do later in my career, particularly if I go into editing, but I despise this project. Today we had a three-hour graphics lecture, followed by four hours in the lab to work on the resumé project, and the whole time I was in the lab I was wishing I could just leave and go work on something that actually matters-- the cigarette tax story, for instance. Tomorrow we're in the computer labs all day, beginning at 9 a.m., and the project is due at 4:30. I got a good head start on mine today (although I need to do some serious re-designing. My first attempt was sort of an abortion. I am not good with graphics.), so I'm hoping to finish mine well ahead of the deadline and get the hell out of there to work on more pressing matters. Or at least relax for a minute.
That's the thing-- as cool as some of these assignments have been, and as much as I think going to grad school was the right thing for me to do, I have been constantly stressed out all week. I don't think I've felt relaxed in like six days. I start working shortly after I get up in the morning, and I don't stop until I go to bed at night. And the work is never, ever done. Again, I suppose this is why they call the summer term "boot camp." Whatever, I'll survive. Unless the stress causes me to have an utter psychotic meltdown, which I am certainly not ruling out.
Oh, I almost forgot about the other project I'm working on for news writing. They assigned us to three-person teams earlier this week, and each team has to find a person in the area with an interesting/unusual job and interview them. Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. This isn't a standard print story, it's a multimedia story. So when we go do the interview, we will record it using a digital voice recorder (but not mine, a better one, which we can borrow from the University) and take photos. Apparently we'll be working on this multimedia project for quite some time, and the final product will be an online slide show with audio. Basically, playing the interview while pictures we shot of the person and his/her place of business accompany the audio. I think we may also record narration to introduce the piece, provide bits of commentary in the middle, etc. But I'm not sure about that. It might be just the interview. Which will have to be edited, of course, since the final slide show is only going to be like two minutes long. Sounds like a lot of work, but I think it will be pretty cool when we're done with it. Oh, that reminds me, I should probably email the other two members of my team and offer some ideas about whom we should interview, since neither of them has contacted me. No rest for the wicked.
Lastly, I want to share with you a piece that I wrote in (I think) April, shortly after I heard about the cigarette tax increase. This is-- obviously-- satire, and it would suggest that I strongly oppose the tax (even though I'm saying the exact opposite-- ain't irony great?), but that is not exactly true. I was just feeling bored and caustic one day, and for some reason I started thinking about Jonathan Swift, so I wrote this. I think it's somewhat amusing. Enjoy.
-Niz
My Modest Proposal
By Nick (Swift) Roberts
Recently, the New York State Legislature approved an increase in the tax on cigarettes from $1.50 to $2.75 per pack. New York was already one of the most expensive states in which to purchase tobacco, and this newest tax hike will make us number one with a bullet. The thinking behind the new cigarette tax says that higher prices on cigarettes will deter teens from becoming smokers, encourage current smokers to quit, lower health care expenses in the long-term by reducing the rate of smoking-related illnesses, and bring some much-needed revenue into the state government from those people who choose to smoke, despite the increased cost. So the government will simultaneously discourage the use of an addictive, deadly substance while selling that same addictive, deadly substance for a profit. I wholeheartedly support this plan. In fact, I see this as only the first step in a process that will ultimately increase the overall health and wealth of our fine state.
I propose we apply the same principle to other products that cause harm to the people who use them. Alcohol, for instance. True, alcohol does not cause nearly as many deaths as tobacco, but excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages may result in a number of health complications, including cirrhosis, liver cancer, birth defects, even gout. That’s right, gout. Alcohol also causes a number of societal ills. Alcoholism breaks up marriages, leads to child abuse, and causes easily preventable motor vehicle accidents. With that in mind, I suggest what I am calling the Six Pack Tax. This would be a fee on the sale of each and every alcoholic beverage in New York State, whether purchased at a store or in a bar, as well as a 75% increase in the cost of obtaining a liquor license. Undoubtedly, this will lead to a more temperate New York, and a much more profitable one.
I believe that once the revenue from tobacco and alcohol sales begins pouring in, our legislators will get even more creative. What argument could anyone make against legalizing all narcotics and other currently illicit drugs and imposing steep taxes upon their sale? Making narcotics so expensive that only the wealthy can afford them may be the only way to win the war on drugs in our nation’s impoverished and crime-ridden inner cities. And if our citizens insist on using narcotics, hallucinogens, and various other harmful substances, we might as well profit from it.
My proposal can be extended beyond just substance abuse. While tobacco, alcohol, and drugs cause many problems, the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease, and the leading cause of heart disease is poor diet. We should encourage people to eat well by heavily taxing the sale of unhealthy foods. I hail from the Buffalo region, and we would surely benefit from a Chicken Wing Tax. Taxes on pizza, pasta, steak hoagies, burritos, and all types of confections wouldn’t hurt, either. I recommend imposing a $2 tax on every item purchased from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. I’m sure our residents would embrace these measures, knowing they would lead to a healthier, thinner, happier and, of course, richer New York.
You hear an awful lot of talk these days about the environment and “going green.” Automobiles are one of the leading causes of air pollution and the current environmental crisis, so driving should obviously be discouraged. The cost of gasoline in New York is already 20 cents per gallon above the national average. This is a good start, but it is not nearly enough. We should raise the price of gas to $5.00 per gallon (and when the national average begins catching up with us, raise it to $7.00). People will drive less, our air will be cleaner, and our State Treasury will be fuller. And what a sense of pride and love will grow in the hearts of our residents, knowing they pay much more for gas than anyone else in the country, and are therefore doing more to combat global warming.
You see, the average person simply cannot be depended upon to make choices that are in his best interest, and in the best interests of those around him. That is why our elected officials must protect the people from themselves, by making it unreasonably expensive to make the wrong choices. And, since some people can always be counted on to make poor choices, regardless of unreasonable cost, the state will continue to turn a tidy profit as a result of our preventative measures.
The New York State government, which has always held itself up as a paragon of propriety, a chapel of chastity, a temple of temperance, and a model of wisdom and fine moral conduct, will now inspire other state governments, perhaps even the federal government, to follow our lead and pick up the mighty sword of taxation and wield it as the ultimate weapon against the problems of modern society.
As you may already be aware, the population of this great state has been falling in recent years. Many of those who leave cite the state’s economic problems, including taxes they perceive as too high, as reasons for their departure. We too often view this as a problem; I choose to see it as a benefit to the state. If these people are either unwilling or unable to pay the price for a cleaner, healthier, better standard of living, then good riddance. In fact, the more people who leave New York, the cleaner our air will be, the emptier our hospitals, the lower our crime rate. We could turn this state into a beautiful paradise, if only all the people would leave. And if they insist on staying and procreating and increasing our state’s problems, well, I suppose we can always eat them. Excelsior!
I haven't forgotten you!
Sorry about the lack of updates the past few days. I'm more swamped with work than I have ever been in my life. As soon as I get the time, I plan to post here describing exactly what it is I've been working on, because some of it is pretty cool, and I think people might be interested in it. But right now, I need to head off to class from 9 to 5, and possibly stay in the computer lab until it closes at 9 p.m. to work on a project. Christ.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Another busy day (I think this is going to be a recurring theme)
Due to time limitations and the fact that I said pretty much all I had to say about the movie in my last post, there will be no full-lenth review or in-depth analysis of Hancock. Go see it for yourself, it's a good time. And, if it's as hot where you are as it is where I am, it's worth the cost of the ticket to sit in a dark, air-conditioned room for a couple hours. Oh, I did have one funny thing to add about the moviegoing experience, though. I went to see the movie alone, since none of my friends responded-- at least not in the affirmative-- to the invitation I texted them. Even though I realize that going to the movies alone could be seen as sort of sad or depressing, I've got no problem with it. I think it's because, when I took all those film criticism classes in college, there were a lot of times when I didn't really have any close friends in the class, so I would be sitting next to people I didn't really know and/or had no intention of talking to.
But ANYWAY, these two guys walked in shortly before the movie started and began looking for seats. Which was not a difficult task. I would estimate the theater was only at 30% capacity (even though the flick made a ton of money. I would guess the poor attendance at my theater was because it was sort of a late show, and I was seeing it at a mall theater where almost all the stores were closed, so there weren't a lot of people around). For some reason, these two gentlemen decided to sit in my row and, specifically, one of them took the seat next to mine. There were enough seats between me and the aisle that they could have spaced themselves out and not sat next to me or each other if they chose to do so, but I guess this guy enjoys the camaraderie of fellow moviegoers. Anyway, it didn't bother me all that much because he wasn't an excessively large person and he wasn't infringing on my elbow room. Things were okay.
But it turned out this guy was the sort of person who likes to make loud, obvious comments about the movie while watching it. Not in an obnoxious way; he wasn't yelling at the screen, or making bad jokes, or anything like that. He would just sort of narrate what was happening on screen in a normal tone of voice. Not all the time, but enough that it was aggravating. Example: Hancock, who at this point in the film has been trying to keep his drinking under control, gets very upset about something and responds by walking into a liquor store. The guy next to me enriches the scene by saying, "Oh... no... he's gonna get drunk." Thanks, Peter Travers.
Okay, so today I had my normal Monday class schedule (9-5, with a one-hour break for lunch). I also got up earlier than usual this morning, because I wanted to get my oil changed before class. This project was a failure, as I could not find a mechanic near me who was open and did not already have appointments (I wound up finding a place after I got out of class this afternoon). Then, the classes today were pretty intense, or at least busy. We had a few hours of lecture, we had to write a news story in class, we took a quiz, we did some other activities, we got a new out-of-class assignment to start working on, etc. So I'm pretty tired. But there's still quite a bit I need to do tonight, so it might be another late one. I'm starting to see why they call the summer session of my program "boot camp."
Don't take this to mean I'm complaining. I'm still really enjoying the program, and I'm becoming more and more pleased that I decided to do this. But yeah... it's a lot of stuff. Also, they recommend that we read both the local Syracuse paper and the New York Times every day, so I've been trying to keep up with the news as much as I can. This is time consuming, but I don't really look at it as a burden, since I like reading the news anyway. There are usually at least a few very interesting stories, although it can be frustrating to read the same stories over and over again. I mean, really, the gas crisis is a serious problem and an important issue, but there hasn't been anything new or interesting to say about it in roughly a month. Yet it's still in the paper and on the TV news programs every day. All the time. It's killing me.
I got my first major assignment back today, the personality profile I wrote about one of my classmates. I got a B on it. Obviously, I would have preferred an A, but I'm more or less satisfied with a B at this point. Based on the professor's comments, I think he was a tough grader on this assignment, and he gave a brief speech about not freaking out if you got a bad grade. So, presumably I did better than quite a few others. I was more pleased by the way he started his comments at the end of the article: "You're a good writer. You're a very good writer. But you need to work on your reporting." Of course I need to work on my reporting-- I just started doing it. And I will work on it, and I will get better. A lot better. I believe I am eventually going to be very good at this. More than anything else, I was pleased that he considers me a good writer (enough to say it twice, even). So, yeah, off to a solid start in the news writing class, and I'll nail that A next time out.
All right, I guess I should go be productive now. Perhaps I shouldn't even be taking the time to blog, at least not as extensively as I do, but I enjoy writing the blog and for some reason I still feel really dedicated to it, unlike some previous blogs and journals I started in the past. So for now, there's no reason to worry. No matter how busy I get, the blog's not going anywhere.
-Nick
But ANYWAY, these two guys walked in shortly before the movie started and began looking for seats. Which was not a difficult task. I would estimate the theater was only at 30% capacity (even though the flick made a ton of money. I would guess the poor attendance at my theater was because it was sort of a late show, and I was seeing it at a mall theater where almost all the stores were closed, so there weren't a lot of people around). For some reason, these two gentlemen decided to sit in my row and, specifically, one of them took the seat next to mine. There were enough seats between me and the aisle that they could have spaced themselves out and not sat next to me or each other if they chose to do so, but I guess this guy enjoys the camaraderie of fellow moviegoers. Anyway, it didn't bother me all that much because he wasn't an excessively large person and he wasn't infringing on my elbow room. Things were okay.
But it turned out this guy was the sort of person who likes to make loud, obvious comments about the movie while watching it. Not in an obnoxious way; he wasn't yelling at the screen, or making bad jokes, or anything like that. He would just sort of narrate what was happening on screen in a normal tone of voice. Not all the time, but enough that it was aggravating. Example: Hancock, who at this point in the film has been trying to keep his drinking under control, gets very upset about something and responds by walking into a liquor store. The guy next to me enriches the scene by saying, "Oh... no... he's gonna get drunk." Thanks, Peter Travers.
Okay, so today I had my normal Monday class schedule (9-5, with a one-hour break for lunch). I also got up earlier than usual this morning, because I wanted to get my oil changed before class. This project was a failure, as I could not find a mechanic near me who was open and did not already have appointments (I wound up finding a place after I got out of class this afternoon). Then, the classes today were pretty intense, or at least busy. We had a few hours of lecture, we had to write a news story in class, we took a quiz, we did some other activities, we got a new out-of-class assignment to start working on, etc. So I'm pretty tired. But there's still quite a bit I need to do tonight, so it might be another late one. I'm starting to see why they call the summer session of my program "boot camp."
Don't take this to mean I'm complaining. I'm still really enjoying the program, and I'm becoming more and more pleased that I decided to do this. But yeah... it's a lot of stuff. Also, they recommend that we read both the local Syracuse paper and the New York Times every day, so I've been trying to keep up with the news as much as I can. This is time consuming, but I don't really look at it as a burden, since I like reading the news anyway. There are usually at least a few very interesting stories, although it can be frustrating to read the same stories over and over again. I mean, really, the gas crisis is a serious problem and an important issue, but there hasn't been anything new or interesting to say about it in roughly a month. Yet it's still in the paper and on the TV news programs every day. All the time. It's killing me.
I got my first major assignment back today, the personality profile I wrote about one of my classmates. I got a B on it. Obviously, I would have preferred an A, but I'm more or less satisfied with a B at this point. Based on the professor's comments, I think he was a tough grader on this assignment, and he gave a brief speech about not freaking out if you got a bad grade. So, presumably I did better than quite a few others. I was more pleased by the way he started his comments at the end of the article: "You're a good writer. You're a very good writer. But you need to work on your reporting." Of course I need to work on my reporting-- I just started doing it. And I will work on it, and I will get better. A lot better. I believe I am eventually going to be very good at this. More than anything else, I was pleased that he considers me a good writer (enough to say it twice, even). So, yeah, off to a solid start in the news writing class, and I'll nail that A next time out.
All right, I guess I should go be productive now. Perhaps I shouldn't even be taking the time to blog, at least not as extensively as I do, but I enjoy writing the blog and for some reason I still feel really dedicated to it, unlike some previous blogs and journals I started in the past. So for now, there's no reason to worry. No matter how busy I get, the blog's not going anywhere.
-Nick
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Busy Sunday
I intended to write a pretty lengthy post today, including a review of Hancock, but I've been working on stuff more or less since I got up this morning, and I still have more to do before I can relax. For now, suffice it to say that I liked the flick. It sure wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it sure wasn't the worst, and better than average by the standards of superhero movies. It was very funny at times (but it seemed to have trouble transitioning between funny parts and serious parts, making the whole thing feel a little uneven). There was one big plot twist that took me by surprise, and you might love or hate that twist, depending on your own personal taste. It worked for me. You get into the origin of Hancock midway through the film, how he got his powers, where he came from, etc., and the whole story is pretty ridiculous, but the origin story of any superhero is pretty ridiculous. I had two primary complaints about the movie; the villain was not developed nearly enough and wasn't really menacing at all, and I think the movie actually needed to be longer. I rarely say that, but it only clocked in around 90 minutes, so they easily could have made it a half hour longer without seeming excessive, and I think the movie would have benefited from a longer running time. Felt very rushed at times. Still, an enjoyable movie, just the kind of mindless, action-packed entertainment you would expect from a midsummer blockbuster. Might write more about it later, but not a lot of time to spare at the moment. Might be back tomorrow, depending on how much I have to do when I get out of class.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Voice recorders are awesome, going to see Hancock tonight, etc.
Yesterday was a pretty fun holiday, all around. The barbecue at the dean's house was cool and the food was solid (but not great, considering it was catered. One of the items served was chicken grilled with Chiavetta's sauce, which was vastly inferior to what I make. I rule). Last night I went out to a bar downtown, Al's, which I'd never been to before. Definitely my favorite bar that I've been to in Syracuse (well, with the possible exception of the Bills/Red Sox bar, for obvious reasons). It was a tad pricey, but definitely worth it. A good mix of music on the sound system-- mostly jazz, with some rock thrown in, and they didn't play it so loud that it was impossible to have a conversation; I hate it when bars do that-- and they had probably the most well-stocked bar I've ever seen. And the bartenders knew what they were doing. One guy made me an excellent shot of Liquid Cocaine, and another bartender served up a Long Island that tasted great but still packed a powerful punch. And the place had some awesome leather furniture you could sit on while drinking and chatting with friends. Overall, just a great place.
I slept in pretty late this morning (by my standards, anyway. I think I got up around 9), since I didn't get home until 2 or 2:30 last night. After the breakfast-shower-coffee routine, I drove out to the Onandaga Indian reservation to buy some tax-free cigarettes. This was a bit of a disappointment. Their prices were way lower than in regular stores, where you can pay up to seven bucks a pack these days, but they were not nearly as cheap as the cigarettes sold on the Seneca reservation back home. So I just bought one carton, and I'll probably go to the Seneca reservation when I come home next weekend for Darren and Kate's wedding.
This afternoon, I went to Target to pick up a few things I needed. One thing that I bought there was a digital audio recorder. The professor in my news writing class sent out an email yesterday or the day before recommending that we buy one of these to use during interviews. The particular model he recommended runs about $120, he said. I found a Sony recorder at Target for $40 and bought that (there were even cheaper models, but I didn't want the bottom of the line). Considering the low price, I wasn't sure how well it would work, but when I got home I busted it out of the packaging and played around with it a little bit. This thing rules. The first time I tested it I was sitting on the couch in my apartment. Since I am lazy, I didn't get up to turn off my music before testing out the recorder. When I played back the message I had recorded, you could hear my voice pretty clearly, and you could also hear the music in the background well enough to tell I was listening to Muse. Then I did another test without any background noise in the apartment, and my voice came through clear as a bell. You also don't have to talk directly into the thing to get good quality. When I'm doing an interview, I'll be able to set it on a table or whatever and just let it record, and it should be fine. You can also adjust the sensitivity of the microphone and the quality of the recording as the situation dictates. I'm so fascinated with this thing. I want to take it everywhere and record random conversations. But people might find that suspicious.
Tonight I'm going out to the Regal theater at the closest mall to see Hancock. I texted a few of the people I've been going out with since I moved to 'Cuse to see if they'd be interested, but I'm going either way. Even used Fandango ahead of time to ensure I don't get shut out. If I'm feeling ambitious when I get home tonight, I might write a review and post it up here.
So yeah, that was my day. Tomorrow will probably be much less active. I have quite a bit of stuff I need to do for class on Monday, so I imagine I'll spend most of the day at the apartment working. Oh, and watching the Wimbledon final. Federer-Nadal, baby. It's strange, considering I've never played tennis in my life, but it's a sport I really enjoy watching. All right, take it easy.
-Niz
I slept in pretty late this morning (by my standards, anyway. I think I got up around 9), since I didn't get home until 2 or 2:30 last night. After the breakfast-shower-coffee routine, I drove out to the Onandaga Indian reservation to buy some tax-free cigarettes. This was a bit of a disappointment. Their prices were way lower than in regular stores, where you can pay up to seven bucks a pack these days, but they were not nearly as cheap as the cigarettes sold on the Seneca reservation back home. So I just bought one carton, and I'll probably go to the Seneca reservation when I come home next weekend for Darren and Kate's wedding.
This afternoon, I went to Target to pick up a few things I needed. One thing that I bought there was a digital audio recorder. The professor in my news writing class sent out an email yesterday or the day before recommending that we buy one of these to use during interviews. The particular model he recommended runs about $120, he said. I found a Sony recorder at Target for $40 and bought that (there were even cheaper models, but I didn't want the bottom of the line). Considering the low price, I wasn't sure how well it would work, but when I got home I busted it out of the packaging and played around with it a little bit. This thing rules. The first time I tested it I was sitting on the couch in my apartment. Since I am lazy, I didn't get up to turn off my music before testing out the recorder. When I played back the message I had recorded, you could hear my voice pretty clearly, and you could also hear the music in the background well enough to tell I was listening to Muse. Then I did another test without any background noise in the apartment, and my voice came through clear as a bell. You also don't have to talk directly into the thing to get good quality. When I'm doing an interview, I'll be able to set it on a table or whatever and just let it record, and it should be fine. You can also adjust the sensitivity of the microphone and the quality of the recording as the situation dictates. I'm so fascinated with this thing. I want to take it everywhere and record random conversations. But people might find that suspicious.
Tonight I'm going out to the Regal theater at the closest mall to see Hancock. I texted a few of the people I've been going out with since I moved to 'Cuse to see if they'd be interested, but I'm going either way. Even used Fandango ahead of time to ensure I don't get shut out. If I'm feeling ambitious when I get home tonight, I might write a review and post it up here.
So yeah, that was my day. Tomorrow will probably be much less active. I have quite a bit of stuff I need to do for class on Monday, so I imagine I'll spend most of the day at the apartment working. Oh, and watching the Wimbledon final. Federer-Nadal, baby. It's strange, considering I've never played tennis in my life, but it's a sport I really enjoy watching. All right, take it easy.
-Niz
Friday, July 4, 2008
America-- Fuck Yeah!
Hey gang, and happy Fourth of July to all (random question-- in Mexico, do they celebrate the Fourth of July by getting drunk on shitty American beer and eating hot dogs? I feel like it should be the way Cinco de Mayo is up here).
So, I'm through with my first week of grad school. Granted, it started a day late because Monday was orientation and it ended a day early because of the holiday, but these are just details. One week of grad school in the books! And so far, I've gotta say I'm digging it. There are some things that are sort of tedious (one of my classics is about graphic design, and my first project is to design a resumé for myself, complete with fancy typefaces and a logo for my name. I despise working on my resumé when I'm just using a word processor, let alone when I have to do all this graphics stuff). But my other class for the summer term is an introduction to news writing and reporting, which I think will be pretty cool. They gave us our first assignment on the first real day of classes (Tuesday), and it was due the following morning. So that night when we got out of class, we had to interview one of our classmates to write a profile about him/her, and then contact at least two additonal sources-- friends, family, etc.-- as research. I'm not entirely confident I'll get a good grade on my profile, but I really enjoyed writing it. I did a better job with the interviews than I thought I would, and I wound up with about half a dozen pages of notes for my profile. The biggest problem, for me at least, was deciding what to include and what to exclude in the article, since we had a limit of 2.5 pages. They also suggested that we be descriptive and find good, small details to reveal things about the subject, so I tried to be pretty descriptive in my writing, but then I found that I was quickly running out of room for facts and actual information. So the space limitation was the biggest hurdle for me, and I suspect that will be a recurring theme throughout my career as a journalism student and, eventually, a journalist. As anyone who has ever read one of my NFL previews on Rage Pirates (or this blog, for that matter) could tell you, I like to write at great length. So I guess I'll have to learn to be more succinct.
There was not much of interest to report on in my life this week, outside of class, as I've been quite busy. I did drive out to the Turning Stone casino the night before last, because I'd never been there and I've been meaning to check it out ever since I moved here (it's only a 30-minute drive away). It's a really nice facility, it has both smoking and nonsmoking sections on the floor, free and ample parking in outdoor lots, and a large poker room. I've had the itch to play cards for a while, so after wandering around the casino for a bit, just to see what there was to see, I went over to the poker area and bought into a $1-$2 no-limit game. Things went very well at first, and after an hour or two, I had more than doubled my $100 buy-in to about $220 or $230. Then my cards went ice cold. I feel like I did nothing but fold before the flop for about an hour. I should have walked away with my profit at that point, but instead I got frustrated and started playing hands I shouldn't have, making stupid calls, trying to catch cards, and I lost back most of the money I'd made. I still walked out with more than I had when I walked in, but the profit was minimal. In retrospect, I'm glad that I made any money at all, considering that in the few hours I played, I never had a pocket pair or AK or AQ. My best hand was when I held K-10, and the flop improbably came down 9-J-Q, giving me the nut straight. One of my opponents kept calling me all the way to the river, and I won a big pot (I can't remember exactly what he was calling with. I think he might have had a high two-pair, or he was chasing a flush).
So that was Turning Stone. Cool place. I actually could go back as soon as tomorrow. I think I'm going to drive out that way anyway, to pick up some cheap cigarettes at the Indian reservation, but maybe I won't stop at the casino. I've got plenty to keep me busy this weekend (mostly reading and work for class, but there are some other random errands I want to take care of, as well).
What else is new... I'm hoping to see Hancock this weekend, even though the reviews have been pretty bad. I normally don't get excited about these big summer blockbusters (I saw Indiana Jones, but had no interest in Iron Man, and I don't give a shit about The Dark Knight. Batman Begins sucked, and no one will convince me otherwise) but everything about Hancock looks cool to me. I'm also interested in seeing where they take the story, because I once came up with a similar idea about a reluctant, apathetic superhero. The only other movie I'm really looking forward to this summer is The X-Files: I Want to Believe, because we all know I'm a huge geek. Oh, and Choke, although I'm not sure when that's coming out. Definitely going to see that one, as Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name is one of the best books I've read in the past few years.
So today I'm going out to a barbecue for students and faculty of the communications school at the Associate Dean's house. I'm wondering if they're going to have alcohol at this thing, but it's a moot point since I committed to be a driver for some fellow students who don't have a car (damn you, lack of foresight). Should be a decent time. Tonight I'm not sure what I'll be doing. I'm always a fan of fireworks, so I might try to get somewhere to see a display, but I also might go to the movies or do something else entirely, if somebody suggests something at the barbecue.
All right, I guess that's all for now. Enjoy the holiday, and remember:
Freedom isn't free,
no there's a hefty fuckin fee.
Freedom isn't free,
freedom costs a buck-oh-five.
So, I'm through with my first week of grad school. Granted, it started a day late because Monday was orientation and it ended a day early because of the holiday, but these are just details. One week of grad school in the books! And so far, I've gotta say I'm digging it. There are some things that are sort of tedious (one of my classics is about graphic design, and my first project is to design a resumé for myself, complete with fancy typefaces and a logo for my name. I despise working on my resumé when I'm just using a word processor, let alone when I have to do all this graphics stuff). But my other class for the summer term is an introduction to news writing and reporting, which I think will be pretty cool. They gave us our first assignment on the first real day of classes (Tuesday), and it was due the following morning. So that night when we got out of class, we had to interview one of our classmates to write a profile about him/her, and then contact at least two additonal sources-- friends, family, etc.-- as research. I'm not entirely confident I'll get a good grade on my profile, but I really enjoyed writing it. I did a better job with the interviews than I thought I would, and I wound up with about half a dozen pages of notes for my profile. The biggest problem, for me at least, was deciding what to include and what to exclude in the article, since we had a limit of 2.5 pages. They also suggested that we be descriptive and find good, small details to reveal things about the subject, so I tried to be pretty descriptive in my writing, but then I found that I was quickly running out of room for facts and actual information. So the space limitation was the biggest hurdle for me, and I suspect that will be a recurring theme throughout my career as a journalism student and, eventually, a journalist. As anyone who has ever read one of my NFL previews on Rage Pirates (or this blog, for that matter) could tell you, I like to write at great length. So I guess I'll have to learn to be more succinct.
There was not much of interest to report on in my life this week, outside of class, as I've been quite busy. I did drive out to the Turning Stone casino the night before last, because I'd never been there and I've been meaning to check it out ever since I moved here (it's only a 30-minute drive away). It's a really nice facility, it has both smoking and nonsmoking sections on the floor, free and ample parking in outdoor lots, and a large poker room. I've had the itch to play cards for a while, so after wandering around the casino for a bit, just to see what there was to see, I went over to the poker area and bought into a $1-$2 no-limit game. Things went very well at first, and after an hour or two, I had more than doubled my $100 buy-in to about $220 or $230. Then my cards went ice cold. I feel like I did nothing but fold before the flop for about an hour. I should have walked away with my profit at that point, but instead I got frustrated and started playing hands I shouldn't have, making stupid calls, trying to catch cards, and I lost back most of the money I'd made. I still walked out with more than I had when I walked in, but the profit was minimal. In retrospect, I'm glad that I made any money at all, considering that in the few hours I played, I never had a pocket pair or AK or AQ. My best hand was when I held K-10, and the flop improbably came down 9-J-Q, giving me the nut straight. One of my opponents kept calling me all the way to the river, and I won a big pot (I can't remember exactly what he was calling with. I think he might have had a high two-pair, or he was chasing a flush).
So that was Turning Stone. Cool place. I actually could go back as soon as tomorrow. I think I'm going to drive out that way anyway, to pick up some cheap cigarettes at the Indian reservation, but maybe I won't stop at the casino. I've got plenty to keep me busy this weekend (mostly reading and work for class, but there are some other random errands I want to take care of, as well).
What else is new... I'm hoping to see Hancock this weekend, even though the reviews have been pretty bad. I normally don't get excited about these big summer blockbusters (I saw Indiana Jones, but had no interest in Iron Man, and I don't give a shit about The Dark Knight. Batman Begins sucked, and no one will convince me otherwise) but everything about Hancock looks cool to me. I'm also interested in seeing where they take the story, because I once came up with a similar idea about a reluctant, apathetic superhero. The only other movie I'm really looking forward to this summer is The X-Files: I Want to Believe, because we all know I'm a huge geek. Oh, and Choke, although I'm not sure when that's coming out. Definitely going to see that one, as Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name is one of the best books I've read in the past few years.
So today I'm going out to a barbecue for students and faculty of the communications school at the Associate Dean's house. I'm wondering if they're going to have alcohol at this thing, but it's a moot point since I committed to be a driver for some fellow students who don't have a car (damn you, lack of foresight). Should be a decent time. Tonight I'm not sure what I'll be doing. I'm always a fan of fireworks, so I might try to get somewhere to see a display, but I also might go to the movies or do something else entirely, if somebody suggests something at the barbecue.
All right, I guess that's all for now. Enjoy the holiday, and remember:
Freedom isn't free,
no there's a hefty fuckin fee.
Freedom isn't free,
freedom costs a buck-oh-five.
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