To the bastard who stole our newsroom's portable police/fire scanners (also known as my lifeline): May you get in a major vehicle accident while distracting yourself with the scanners. And may you live to rue the day you made my job even harder than it already is, considering that I'm working with a blown knee.
So, fellow reporters, when is the last time the mayor sang to you in your voice mail (when it wasn't even your birthday, or the song you're named after)?
As promised in my previous entry, I'm going to post some links about last night's firing of the city's attorney and hired counsel. Because money must be made everywhere and someone has apparently decided that having news online and available for the masses is a way to make money, I don't know how long these links will work. Please feel free to ask me for any article, and if it's drawing enough interest I'll make the text available on my own Web space (assuming it's an article I wrote).
Hours into a closed session last night -- at which I was doing things like chatting with attorneys and fellow reporters in order to pass the time -- the city fired its attorneys, including the city attorney and their hired counsel. (I got some of the state bar info in that last article hours before the meeting started. I love digging up that kind of stuff.)
I could keep posting tons of links, as I've written dozens of articles on this saga. I'm so glad I don't work for TV news, because there's no way they can sum it up in 30 seconds for viewers. The result is that they don't cover something that's racked up $23 million in city fees alone -- without removing any contamination from the ground, 15 years after it was first discovered.
I just finished a 13-hour work day. I just watched attorneys get fired, "effective immediately." And in 12 hours, I'll be in federal court, watching the city make do without those attorneys. (See my last entry, or the next one, in which I will post links to the madness.)
In the meantime, my kitties are sparring with each other. Mickey, with his ears back against his head, reminds me strangely of one of the attorneys who was just terminated. Yes, I should go to bed.
Yesterday was a very fun day for any reporter who had the good fortune of being in a courtroom on the 15th floor of the federal courthouse in Sacramento. It was there that a judge, rather than hearing arguments on motions, chose to instead blast the city's attorneys for all they were worth.
Today also makes for a crazy day, because the city is considering firing the attorneys, one day before a huge trial is scheduled. How on earth would I get through life without being a reporter?
The editor in chief of the newspaper that's my main competition is suddenly unemployed. Employees, who apparently didn't know it was coming, were informed of this Wednesday, and some even cried. After working for the paper for 10 years, he was scheduled to become the next president of a California newspaper editors association.
I've met him on more than one occasion when we attended meetings together, and he seemed like a nice guy. Of course, I've never worked for him, so that's completely different. I do think it says something, though, that there were tears at the announcement, and that it sounds like it wasn't at all expected.
I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that the paper was bought by Dow Jones & Co. in April.
Plenty of people are charged with assault with a deadly weapon. But here's a new charge I accidentally created: "Assault with a deadly woman." My editor thinks it would make a good crime/mystery novel title.
The "Favre from finished" headline might be cheesy, but then again, it's the content that matters: Green Bay beat Seattle today in football. They're that much closer to the Super Bowl!
(Some of you know I've rooted for Green Bay since high school. Since it's playoff time, that means I'm following football a little more closely now. It also means this weblog could be subjected to more sports posts.)
In the first few minutes after I wake up, it sometimes feels as though I'm still in dream mode -- where things happen that are sometimes stranger than real life. Such a thing just happened to me, six hours before I'm scheduled to fly home from New York.
I woke up, found my eyeglasses and then awoke my computer from hibernation mode. (I'm an avid news reader, and that was compounded by the events of Sept. 11. It's never eased up.) I waited the few seconds for my computer to turn on, then checked e-mail. While I was doing that, I had a thought of "must check CNN" going through my head. In the short amount of time it took before I got to a browser window and glanced at the news headlines, a whole scenario had played through my head, probably due in part to the fact that I'm flying today, and also to the fact that specific international flights to the U.S. have been canceled this week due to terrorism warnings.
I imagined that some sort of 9/11-type thing with airliners had happened and that I knew I wasn't going anywhere, on any plane, for a while. That meant someone else was going to have to cover my busy court day I had planned for work on Monday.
My brain completely froze for a few seconds, then revived itself and quickly scanned the article, learning that it was an Egyptian airliner with 148 passengers, mostly French tourists, and that officials believe it was an accident.
Scanner thief
To the bastard who stole our newsroom's portable police/fire scanners (also known as my lifeline): May you get in a major vehicle accident while distracting yourself with the scanners. And may you live to rue the day you made my job even harder than it already is, considering that I'm working with a blown knee.Posted by Layla at 11:46 AM, January 26, 2004. Comments (0)