the end is not yet

The Globe and Mail had this headline in the front section today:

'ER delays killing heart patients'

Go meet Billy. Please.

(Again, thanks Eden!)

This is cute. Thanks Eden for passing this along! (And thanks person I don't know for letting me link!)

Especially when they protect humans from sharks. Yes, Jer linked to this first.

For some reason long forgotten, the tweezers from my 1st Aid kit have been on my shelf for months. Yesterday I cleaned my room. I put the tweezers away and found my Tylenol 3s in the 1st Aid kit. This was cause for celebration. I've been looking for them for months. I'd never given myself the credit of putting them somewhere logical, so they'd gone unfound.

They're left over from when I had my kidney stone at the end of last winter. I've been having mild twinges in my left flank for the last week. New readers may be unaware that 'left flank' is what they refer to your left lower back as when you go in to an ER complaining of pain there.

So, I've been a little uneasy about not knowing where my super-painkillers were.

I feel much better now that I know where the little bundles of codeine are. Though the twinge is making itself felt right now as I type.

I think I'm going to go drink some water. Staying hydrated might be a good idea.

Hope it's a good one!

She comes back a month from today.

Oops.

I stood on (sic) line for two hours Tuesday to vote, predicting that a big turnout of young people and new voters would push John Kerry over the top. This morning I'm looking in the mirror, wondering, as a journalist and a citizen, if there is something fundamentally myopic about how I see the world.
- 'confessions of an alienated journalist'; poynter online; nov 4, 2004; roy peter clark

Anyone who has asked any variation of the question "How could American voters be so stupid?" should read this article and the comments that follow it, whether you're a journalist or not.

The comments are almost more valuable than the article. Links to the most recent comments follow the article. Click on 'view all' and then go to the bottom of the last page to get to the first comment. I've only read a third of them, but a lot of interesting points are made.

(N.B.: I've stolen this from Caitlin's LJ.)

Ask me anything you like and I'll answer. Don't put too much thought into it. Just ask. Now.

Actually, one topic is off limits. My "love life." It's in limbo. Leave it alone.

Now ask away.

I went to bed just after midnight because I was exhausted. It didn't work. Apparently crashing for three hours this afternoon was a bad idea.

My head is so muddled right now. I wish I could sleep and clear it.

Red Bull is scary.

The sugar free stuff tastes awful, which is why Shannon was so willing to part with it. It is also wonderfully effective.

I commented on it while Jer, Shannon and I were waiting for the bus about an hour ago.

She started to say something, looked at me, noticed I was bouncing up and down on my toes, smiled and said, "You're still bouncing off the walls from it, aren't you?"

Still going up and down, I grinned and nodded.

I drank the can at about 10 a.m.

Can't wait to see what the kind with sugar does to me.

I've been really low energy for a long time. Decided last night that this has to stop.

The reason I'm low energy is that I don't sleep enough. So I'm always tired. So I don't have much energy.

I plan to do the smart thing. The smart thing is to sleep more and pay back my sleep debt. According to the sleep expert I interviewed for a service piece recently, it'll take about two weeks of sleep expansion before I start feeling better. And having more energy.

Unfortunately, I'm a very impatient person.

Which is why in the meantime I'm consuming large amounts of sugar and caffeine in the daytime. I have to rely on Coca Cola though. I don't like coffee.

However, Shannon's bringing me some Red Bull tomorrow. So we'll see how that goes.

Maybe once I catch up on sleep I'll actually be able to write an entry that flows.

Everybody came back.

Shannon and Dave volunteered to write the story. The people who interviewed the bus drivers, the owner of the dog's dad and brother (the owner was at work), and others typed up their notes and gave them to Shannon and Dave.

Each was to write a copy of the story and email it to our instructor Ken on Saturday. He would edit them into one piece. It would go into the Humber student paper under a pseudonym meant to mean our class. He also suggested they try selling their pieces to local papers.

The Etobicoke Guardian wants a look at Shannon's. I just edited it and she's sent it off.

Here's what happened.

A woman was walking her dog. A pit-bull escaped from its yard and attacked the dog. Two bus drivers stopped it. Both dogs seem to be okay.

For anything more, you'd have to read Shannon's piece. Which is quite good.

Damn, I miss being an editor. Which surprises the hell out of me.

I got off the bus today and made my way toward the crosswalk. Everybody was frozen, looking away from the school in one direction. Thirty people? Forty? More?

Being a half-trained journalist, I figured something interesting must be happening. So I looked too.

In time to see a bus driver raise a red cylindrical object over his head and bring it down hard. He was one of three people clustered together. A white dog was being held by one of the people. A pit-bull was being held by another.

The bus driver brought the object down on the pit-bull's head at least twice.

A young woman with black and blonde hair started toward them, swearing. Then she saw the white dog and said, "Oh."

She drew the same conclusion I had. That the pit-bull had attacked the white dog and the driver was hitting it to get it to release the other dog.

The white dog was carried away. The man holding the pitbull continued holding it. The man carried the red cylinder, which I then saw was a small fire extinguisher, to his bus (and presumably the radio in the bus) which was parked on the other side of the street. As he crossed the street he asked if anybody had a cell phone and told them to call 911.

The man was still holding the dog tightly and it wasn't moving very much. Its eyes were open.

I stood staring with three people from my class.

"Do we want to get the story?" one of them asked.

We continued to stand staring. A highpitched wailing started. The man, who wore a burgundy jacket that looked like the kind TTC drivers wear, leaned over the dog. The wailing continued.

Was it the dog wailing in pain, or was the man I thought was a TTC driver actually the owner and screaming over a dead dog? I couldn't figure that out.

What was going through my classmates' minds, I don't know. I know what was going through mine.

I was remembering three years ago when my dog was killed by a truck. When I knelt mumbling in shock in a ditch over her body in the dark.

I was remembering nine years ago when I'd stalked a deer for half an hour, shot it from a bad angle and then had to shoot it again to make it stop screaming.

A lot of people were standing about ten feet back from the woman and the dog.

"I don't think we want to see this," said the classmate who had spoken before.

I thought about pulling out my notebook. I thought about getting quotes. I thought about puking.

We left.

Numb, I walked through the school. Stopped into the newsroom to tell them, but nobody was there. Went into news reporting and sat beside Shannon. Tried to tell her what I'd seen, but couldn't process it. Couldn't find the words. Rebecca, who had also seen it, did a better job.

Our instructor walked into the room.

"Who wants to cover a story?" he asked. "Right now!"

He sent us all out. All twenty of us.

The two buses were stilled stopped on either side of the road. An ambulance sat with lights flashing. Two police cars were pulled in. People in uniforms were all over. The man still covered the dog. There was no wailing.

Some of us were faster than others. They started talking to people. I got there with the second wave.

"I don't feel right about this," I said to Scott.

He agreed. There were too many of us standing around with notebooks. Caroline and a few others straggled up. We all expressed the same discomfort and kept looking over at the commotion. Shannon was in the first wave. We caught each other's eyes for a moment.

We second wavers continued griping, but nobody did anything. There were about ten of us.

"Look, let's go," I said. "There are enough of us here to get the story. We shouldn't be here."

We left.

I came back to class and sat down. Starred into space for a bit. Thought about dead and dying animals. Logged into Blogger and tried to sort out what the hell was going on my head by writing this entry.

Everybody's coming back now.

After more than two straight days of sleepy, apathetic grumpiness, I'm ready to call uncle.

This sucks and I'm not going to take it anymore.

My priorities have somehow gotten screwed up and I'm going to try and put them back in order.

For the next week, my priorities will be as follows:

1. Sleep.
2. Food.
3. Homework.
4. Exercise.

Nothing else matters.

At the end of the next week, I will evaluate how I feel and redistribute my priorities as needed.

The following list of web sites was distributed in my computer assisted reporting class. It is the one used by Maclean's fact checkers to do their job. Since I have something else far more important that I should be doing right now, I'm going to put this online so that I don't have to carry the damn thing around with me wherever I go.

Procrastination truly is a skill.

Old Faithful
Google

General Reference
RefDesk
Canadian geographic names
MapQuest
International maps
Time and date
Canada 411
Metric coversion tables
Bartleby quotations
Famous Quotations Network
ABE books
Flags of the World
Polling Report
Urban Legends
Find a Grave

News
Google news
Yahoo full coverage news
Globe and Mail
New York Times
BBC News
Maclean's (three year archive)

Flack sites
Canada Newswire
PR Newswire

Government
Government of Canada
Parliament
Supreme Courth of Canada rulings
Statistics Canada
2001 Census
Canadian trademark database
Toronto Police Service

Finance
Yahoo Canada finance
Bank of Canada
Exchange rates
Sedar (Ontario Securities Commission filings)

International
CIA World Factbook
US government
US economic data
Energy Information Administration (US Dept. of Energy)
Other statistical agencies in the world

Entertainment
Internet Movie Database
Metacritic: Film
Apple movie trailers
Political Humour
All Music
Rolling Stone
Sports Illustrated

Technology
Tech Web's Encyclopedia
Wired magazine

Journalism
JournalismNet
Poynter Institute

I'm going to bed. Maybe there will be a miracle while I sleep and NBC will be wrong.

Regular readers and those who know me well should find it no surprise that I loved The Last Thief by Lee Lamothe once they read this. I've been meaning to review it on The Guelsh Salon since finishing it, but kept putting it off because I had so much to say. Thankfully, Ian beat me to it and saved me the trouble. He also said it better than I was going to be able to.

Hope the day is good!

It's noon. I've done nothing. But dear god do I have a lot to do.

The weekend was excellent. Friday I went drinking for the pure hell of it and cut loose for a change. Saturday I got together with a bunch of people, got dressed up for Halloween (thanks Laura!) and went to the Dance Cave. Sunday, I watched television and lazed around for much of the day with the girls downstairs.

All of that built up some fearsome inertia.

This morning I read. I talked on MSN. I read blogs. That's it.

All I feel like doing is crawling back into bed with a book and spending the rest of the day there. Thank god I have no classes Mondays.

So crawl in my head as I puzzle out what I want to do for the rest of this day and motivate myself to do it.

It's Monday, so I need to get some exercise in. I took last Wednesday off and nearly took Friday off too. Didn't though. Managed to rescue what was left late in the day by putting in 72 storeys on the stairs and nearly killing myself with situps and pushups.

I have a huge pile of laundry and will have no time to do it later this week, so I should do that today.

I have a fair amount of homework. I've got to write a query letter for magazine class for an article I haven't decided the topic of. I've also got to track down a woman in the municipal government in a small town in northern Ontario so I can interview her for my news reporting class sometime this week.

It's also Christen's birthday, so Jer and I are going to get together with her later to do stuff.

I also need to clean my room before I go mad.

Okay, here's the plan for the day. (I know you don't really care. I also don't really care that you don't really care. You can stop reading if you want.)

First, I'm going to shave. It's such a simple task that it should be easy to start my assault on inertia with. Maybe then I'll do dishes.

Once I've got some momentum going, I'll sort my laundry and put the first load in. Maybe even two at once.

Riveting, eh?

While the laundry is going, I'll run the stairs, do calisthenics and spend some time stretching as the shaking wears off. It's not a bad shaking. It's the kind you get after pushing yourself nearly as far as you can go before stopping.

When I finish a quick shower, I'll get a bite to eat.

Then I'll hop online and track down that government administrator. Figure out what I want to ask her. Maybe send a preliminary email asking for a time that I could speak to her. Though it would be better just to call. I'll see what I feel like.

At some point, Christen will call and we'll figure out when we're going to get together and who will make the long commute (her to here, or us to there).

Then I will figure out which article I'm going to write for magazine class. Then write a quick query letter rough draft that I don't care about and can make beautiful over the course of the week.

Then I'll crank Metallica and clean my room.

Okay, I figure I've got at least three hours before Christen calls. Time to get moving.

Imagine taking hundreds of leaves made of plaster and pressing them vein-side down into your ceiling so tightly that you can't see the edges of the leaves. Only the thick white ridges of the veins.

That's kind of what the ceiling in my bedroom looks like.

Sometimes when I lay there awake, I look at it and find shapes in the ridges. Kind of like lying on your back in a field searching for patterns in the clouds.

Most often it's cave painting stick finger people. There seem to be a lot of those up there.

I'm not sure why, but cave paintings fascinate me. I think one day if I find a picture of one I like - maybe a deer? - I'll have it tattooed somewhere. Maybe.

Midway through the summer I finally figured out what I want my first tattoo to be. A quill. Being a writer, I thought it was clever and original. I'd never heard of or seen such a tattoo before.

Then came the night back in September when Jer and I took the TTC to Shannon's place down by the Lakeshore and from there walked to Mississauga for funnel cake and back. It took forever and Shannon at one point said she was worried that we were never going to get there and that Jer and I would get so frustrated with her for saying it'd be a short walk that we'd throw her off a bridge into the fog that swirled randomly that night.

On the long walk back, tattoos came up in conversation and Shannon said she'd decided to get a quill if she ever got one.

I still think it's clever and still want it. Even if it's not quite as original as I first though.