the end is not yet

I arrived at school at 9 a.m. My first exchange of the day was telling a lost guy I didn't know where building G was.

The newsroom was closed so I called the front desk. After holding for five minutes I hung up and went to the washroom. I called again and held for another five minutes. I went to the security desk and they got as far as radioing a guard to go open the room for me before asking to see my after hours pass. You see, technically it's a holiday here. My after hours pass was not in my backpack. They sent me to G230 to get approval or something after deciding the first place they wanted to send me would probably just send me there anyway.

"Go up, take a right and another right," one of them said when I asked how to get there.

Up, right and right took me to building H. Not G.

It's at about this point that I should explain that Humber was probably designed by someone on acid who thought they were an ant designing a colony. On top of that, there is no easily discernable rhyme nor reason to what makes this assymetrical wing one letter and this other another.

I went back to the newsroom, hoping to find that somebody else had come in to finish the magazine and had the foresight to bring an after hours pass. I turned down the hall and the green door was open into the hall. I walked in and the securty guard was there, waiting for me to sort out my after hours pass problem. Which I hadn't, so off I went again.

I'll summarize the rest as best I can so you can get back to blog surfing.

A trip to our faculty office had the cute brunette behind the desk consulting a map and sending me on my merry way. About where she said I should go (the map is really no help because it's a patchwork of blocks with letter labels but no hallways), I found a big G with an arrow pointing up. The stairs beside the G took me to E2, E3, and E4, but no G. On E2 a lady asked me if I know where F was and another lady sent me down where she thought G might be, but wasn't. In desperation I went to Guelph Humber (there's a G in that), but it was GH. Then I went down a staircase and found myself in front of the security desk again.

The lady waved me up and when I said I hadn't found G230 yet, she shook her head and said someone else had shown up anyway.

At 9:45 a.m I walked into the empty newsroom.

Want to send an E-card with a twist? The Crime Library (part of the Court TV's website) lets you send E-cards with pictures of criminals like Bonnie & Clyde or Lucky Luciano on them.

On page five there's a bloody hilarious headline on a column with a photo of three handguns:

Harper, it's a trap

The paper version has a deck (sub headline) that clears things up a little:

Paul Martin's handgun ban is just trick to make the Tories look like 'right-wing gun-lovers'

Jer was working at the computer beside me when I started laughing. He looked over and started laughing too. Nicole came over to see what the fuss was about.

Jer covered Harper's name with a hand so the only part that could be seen was 'it's a trap.'

"That's the first thing I saw and all I heard in my head was Admiral Akbar from Star Wars saying, 'It's a trap! Pull up!'"

Despite all the snow, the drive into the city from the boonies was uneventful. Though I did pass a propane truck getting pulled out of the ditch.

I decided to contact only three of my six sources for new comment on the Homolka story. These three are the working journalists of the people I talked to, so getting a hold of them is a matter of persistence.

I've got comment from two of the three and am having fun getting a hold of the third.

So today is about writing the new stuff into the old stuff.

Then tonight I'm picking up Christa in Brampton and she's going to spend the weekend hiding and studying for the three exams she has next Monday and Tuesday. You might wonder why she's coming at all. Sunday she will be joining my family as we tramp around a bush looking for the perfect tree to kill, decorate and display for Christmas. Then I'll be driving her to Guelph in the afternoon.

Enough procrastination for now. Better get back to the article.

There goes my head again. Watch out for skull fragments.

I wish I could say this was writer's block. It's so much worse.

For the last 48 hours I've had the article rotating in the background of my brain like the 3D schematic of a fortress on a computer screen. I can't fucking find my way in again, even though I built the damn thing.

An article over at the Independent Institute about Proposition H in San Fransisco and about gun laws in general. The interesting thing is it's written by a criminologist.

Mr. Picasso Head

Since the Homolka story changed so drastically this week, I need to gut my story. Everytime I sit down to do it, I go catatonic. That's the word that I've always used to describe when I'm working on something in my head but not a lot of physical work is getting done. For fun, I looked it up on diciontary.com and found this:

catatonic

A description of a system that gives no indication
that it is still working. This might be because it has
crashed without being able to give any error message or
because it is busy but not designed to give any feedback.

Jer: Any questions?
Aaron: Yes. One. Why isn't everybody dead from the shrapnel of my skull?

Long story. In short, my near finished article on the coverage of Homolka is now only half finished and I'll be scrambling to rewrite it in light of yesterday's developments. On top of that, I'm the senior news editor of the campus paper next semester and all of the legwork for the election coverage needs to be done before and over the holidays. Jer's the coordinator for that, but that's still a lot of work for us all.