It's All About The Story (old site)

beer tragedy

2009-07-17T12:10:00.007-05:00

See http://dustinchristopher.com/2009/07/the-gutters-run-gold/

Gone for Good

2009-07-14T21:20:00.002-05:00

I have abandoned Google's Blogspot for a new writing home at www.dustinchristopher.com . Please follow me there and update your links and RSS feeds accordingly.

Heart,
Dustin Weis

Things Afoot

2009-07-09T23:57:00.003-05:00

And ten days into July, I still haven't touched the blog for the month. I apologize. There's a lot I want to write about, but I've been scheming, and it's likely I'll have a couple of announcements to make on Monday.

Thanks for checking in.

The L Word

2009-06-29T21:52:00.003-05:00

Layoffs.

I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that another media outlet in town is going to axe some more hard-working folks this week because of the GlobeEcDown (and thanks to the newest member of the Madison-area media, Christie Taylor of the Baraboo News Republic, for introducing me to that delightfully tacky abbreviation!). The rumor mill got to churning today that Channel 3 has scheduled staffing meetings for later this week, and around a half dozen people aren't expected to make it back from those.

Even when you're talking about a direct competitor, you never like to see a bloodbath in someone else's house. But in this case, Channel 3 is our "media partner," a concept that's helped understaffed newsrooms in radio and television stay abreast of all the news of the day by counting on each other to catch what might slip through the cracks. I've collaborated with a lot of the staff at 3, and I hate to see any of them catch it in the face.

If the rumors are indeed true, a few folks will pack up their desks this week in that already bare bones news room, and the harried remainder will be left to shoulder those work loads.

Then, for the next several weeks, the city's newsies will spend every spare moment looking over their shoulders for that axe it seems is chasing after every one of us. When meeting each other in public, conversations will begin, "Hey, how are you holding up," and end, "Well, good luck. Hopefully we'll see each other soon." Journalists will cross their fingers and hope that their numbers people, holed up late at night trying to eliminate the red in the budget, don't happen to glance over at a headline about media layoffs and get any bright ideas.

For once, I hope the rumor mill got it wrong.

Weekend: Accomplished

2009-06-28T22:28:00.004-05:00

They say idle hands do the devil's work. I don't know who "they" are, but they'll get theirs eventually.

At any rate, I'm finding myself shocked more and more often at the declining amount of the devil's work my own hands are doing. While I'd like to write that off as a growing degree of maturity, I think it would be more honest to say I'm just keeping busier than I've ever been. And while there's a lot of work in there, both in the job and the blog and the band and whatever side project has captured my fancy, I find that same crippling work ethic has now affected the way I play.

Take this weekend for example, which consisted of non-stop enjoyment spanning three distinct regions of Wisconsin and approximately a half hour of idle time that was not spent asleep. The weekend started at 3 PM Friday, when I snuck out of work early (to make up for accrued overtime) and swung out to my friendly, locally-owned motorsports shop to pick up the bike, which now sports a brand new set of tires and brake pads (in preparation for Cam and my planned "motorcycle odyssey" later in July, which will take "motivated recreation" to a whole new level).

I rode the bike to my buddy Ben's, where we loaded up the car and booked it out to Miller Park watch the Brewers beat up on San Francisco. While I've seen the Brewers play in other venues, it was my first trip to Miller Park, so we didn't exactly hold back in terms of enthusiastic tailgating. I was duly impressed by the stadium and its amenities, and plan to make a few more trips out this summer if possible.

We ducked out of the stadium, drank another beer in the parking lot, and embarked for Madison. I got home, cleaned up, and passed out in short order.

Seven hours of coma later, I was up and prepping for a trip on two wheels to Shawano. I figure if Cam and I are going to ride cross country later this summer, I'd best start getting my motorcycling muscles into shape (yes, you have them, no you don't know you do until you use them and they hurt like the dickens the next day). I also wanted to get a good idea of the bike's overnight cargo capacity, so I packed very light... only what I could fit in the saddle bags.

I dodged stormclouds the entire 150-mile journey to Shawano, where I was promptly drenched as I entered town. Unfazed, I polished off the final half mile of the trip and pulled up at my buddy Tim's parents' house, where a hot shower and some good people were waiting for me.

We didn't hang around the Lundt household for long, as we had a movie screening to get to. Yes, that project I stressed my balls off on intermittently for three years finally hit a big screen at the Your Signs world premiere in Shawano, Wisconsin. Give it time, there'll be a screening in Madison. We debuted to a packed house and some positive feedback, and then it was time to celebrate the occasion in healthy Wisconsin fashion -- with a backyard cookout.

We ate, we drank, we were merry, we ate some more. We got a campfire going and sat around rehashing old war stories until the dead of night. Then we passed out wherever happened to be convenient. We woke up, made some breakfast, and I got a chance to spend some quality time wrestling with my Godson (he's a half-grown black lab puppy that will be able to take down a zebra when he reached maturity). Then it was back onto the bike for the return trip to Madison.

It was after I returned that I finally took the first breather of the weekend. After I unloaded the bike and collapsed on my couch, I watched some PGA golf while I caught up on the news. But the respite was short-lived, as I mounted up again to hit the south side for band practice.

Following three hours behind the drum kit, I could have called it a night, but a few of the bandies and I agreed it would behoove us to catch the (lucky for me) rescheduled Rhythm and Booms fireworks show. Of course, I wasn't about to ruin my weekend by getting stuck in traffic on the north side, so we watched from the pier behind our keys player's apartment on Langdon Street. Not surprisingly, Jeff wasn't the only resident to have had this idea, and I'm pretty sure we were just a few hundred pounds away from sending that pier and the forty or so people on it into the drink.

So here I am, and the clock on my computer reads 11:08, and I honestly can't think of anything else I would have liked to have accomplished this weekend. Plans are already coming together for next weekend's holiday, and they sound every bit as enjoyable and exhausting.

The problem is, I'm beat from having relaxed so hard. With a full week's work to accomplish in four days, when do I make time for resting up?

Man Pants

2009-06-24T23:05:00.005-05:00

It's not often, but there are times when I finish reading a press release from the Madison Police Department and I just have to throw my head back and laugh.

We're lucky here in Madison to have a former reporter of Joel Despain's caliber working as a spokesman for our police force. One of Joel's greatest strengths is his knack as a story teller, and there are times when it shines through in something like a police press release, which is generally intended to be bland and to the point at best. I've seen some from other departments come across my desk that almost require a cryptographer to decipher.

But the Madison press corps got a good chuckler from Joel today. As with most of them, you have to read between the lines to get the joke.

Incident report for Case#2009-182844
Released 06/24/2009 at 11:51 AM by PIO
Joel DeSpain
Incident Type
Injured Person
Incident Date
06/23/2009 -
3:08 AM
Address
400 block West Doty Street
Suspect(s)
Female, white,
5'6", 115 lbs., with curly, red shoulder-length hair, slender build, wearing a red sundress.
Victim
Male, age 21, MadisonVictim suffered multiple
abrasions to his back, including two cuts requiring 11 stitches. He also had a bruised chest, a cut lip, and a sore nose.
Details
On Tuesday, a 21-year old Madison man came into the Central District to report a battery that happened around 3:00 a.m. that morning. He said he was at a downtown house party, sitting on a porch, when a woman started dancing and taking her clothes off. The victim said he - and others - laughed as they watched the disrobing. As he chuckled, another woman, clad in a red sundress, slapped him across the face, saying, "You don't know who you're dealing with." The man backed up, sat on a railing, and continued to guffaw at the striptease. Suddenly, the woman responsible for the slap "rushed" the victim - knocking him off the railing. He says he fell more than six-feet onto concrete. The woman descended with him, landing on his chest. Friends cleaned him up, and he discovered his back was bleeding profusely. He ended up in the emergency room, and wishes to pursue charges against the assailant. She has not been located.

By the time I finished reading this story, I had nearly fallen out of my chair. I have no idea how the police officer that took this report was able to keep a straight face.

If this 21-year-old "victim" has any motive other than getting a phone number in wanting to file charges against this "assailant," I'd like to sit him down and have a talk about finding him a decent pair of man pants. I mean that. I don't know any self-respecting member of the male gender that would come forward to police to admit he'd had the crap kicked out of him by a girl.

Based on the "victim's" description, we're not talking about a bruiser here. Girls that are 5' 6" and 115 pounds don't play for the women's hockey team. With the red hair and sundress, guys should have been lining up around the block to get cracked in the jaw by this young lady.

Let's face it, there's a fair chance this guy got exactly what was coming to him. As a member of the male gender, I'm realistic enough to admit that 3 AM at a house party is not when most guys are at their most gentlemanly, and I find it hard to believe this guy was half the "victim" he makes himself out to be. I say good on this mysterious red-clad firebrand for being able to lay down the law with the punk.

But for this guy to take his pitiful, fabricated story to police is an unprecedented level of weak. There are certain unspoken rules all men should abide by. You never hit, push or otherwise lay an ungentle hand on a woman. If a woman takes a swing at you, you get out of the way or you take the hit. There's no excuse for fighting back. And if a woman gets the upper hand and bloodies you up a bit, you sure as hell don't tell anyone!

That's what I find so baffling about this story. So the guy needed a few stitches and will probably be the butt of a running joke among his buddies for a while. Dragging police in the matter won't solve either of those problems. In fact, it will likely prolong the humiliation, first when his buddies see the police report, then when some media attention is paid to it. If they actually catch the young woman, that will reopen the wound, as will any court appearances to follow.

I can just picture this guy, tears streaming down his face, describing to a jury the "brutal beating" he sustained at the hands of the five-foot-six pixie in a red sundress. Call protective services! He's going to need protection from this monster!

I've got to think that this guy was just a little concussed when he made the decision to take his story to police, and didn't think ahead to the guffaws that would follow any time one of his buddies mentions "that time Jimmy got his ass kicked by a girl."

So let that be a cautionary tale to any young men who haven't learned these lessons yet. Fiery things can come in small packages, and while there are times they will bruise your pride, you're just going to have to man up and get over it.

WSJ Creates a Monster

2009-06-18T13:12:00.004-05:00

I have a beef with Dean Mosiman from the State Journal. I'm not alone in this, either, as I'm pretty sure most of the city government has the same beef this week. It's the kind of beef you would have if there was a grease fire burning in your kitchen, and someone came along and helpfully poured five gallons of gasoline on it.

The Madison City Council has its share of talkers, and they speak with varying degrees of eloquence, tact and relevance to the subject at hand. But when one of our fair city's leaders is recognized by the mayor to speak during a meeting, there's no reaction as universal among the rest of the alders as when Alder Thuy Pham-Remmele takes the floor.

Typically, they know they're in for a roller-coaster ride of dead-end logic, inane questions, incoherent invective and split-second mood swings when Pham-Remmele takes the floor. While I typically respect a leader with spunk, which Pham-Remmele has in spades, her wildly unpredictable behavior in meetings evokes memories of second-grade report cards -- the phrase "does not play well with others" fails to do her spiteful demeanor justice.

If someone had been keeping a tally of minutes "wasted" on the council floor so far in this new term, Pham-Remmele would have lapped the rest of her colleagues combined, twice over.

So when I saw Dean Mosiman's article in the State Journal Monday, entitled "Ald. Pham-Remmele Speaks Her Mind, No Matter the Cost," I had a hunch he had doomed those of us who attend city council to some fresh horror at Tuesday night's meeting. If I had to guess, I would say Mosiman feels no guilt for doing this, as he wasn't stuck in attendance at the meeting himself.

But the danse macabre we witnessed outpaced even my own expectations. It's painfully indicative of a wildly out-of-control martyr-in-training with serious and dangerous delusions of grandeur.

Her self-image as a folk-hero of the southwest side reinforced by Mosiman's article, and riding high on a wave of fluff publicity-induced pride, Pham-Remmele proceeded to take the council floor and unrelentingly wield her alder's privilege like an ice pick, ramming it deep into the ears and eye sockets of everyone in the room.

During the questions segment of a motion to build a relatively non-controversial 700-foot segment of bike path across a green space in her district, Pham-Remmele unyieldingly held onto the chair's recognition for more than 60 jaw-dropping minutes. A one-woman circus, she first interrogated several of the registered speakers on the proposal, with all the gusto of a lawyer cross-examining witnesses in a high-profile murder case.

I'm not exaggerating here. For a blow-by-blow running narrative of the exchange, you can see citizen-blogger-extraordinaire and former Alder Brenda Konkel's post on the meeting.

Next, Pham-Remmele turned her new-found expertise as grand inquisitor on the city's staff, and the city council's chambers gradually devolved into chaos. As Pham-Remmele repeatedly pitched inane or unrelated questions at the city's legal, engineering and parks experts, it became clear she was trying to make a point of some kind, though I'm not sure she even knew what she was driving at.

If the point was supposed to be that she was doing her due-diligence as alder, as portrayed in Mosiman's story, her attempt utterly backfired. Asking city staff to repeatedly explain to her how restrictive land covenants work, or precedents of alder privilege, or who she should address with questions about the project only served to prove she either had not done her homework with regards to the proposal, or else is completely unable to grasp the finer details of her job.

I certainly wasn't able to penetrate the murky depths of her motivation, and neither were the other 18 members of the council in attendance. It almost seemed Pham-Remmele was staging some kind of unfeasible filibuster. At any rate, several other city leaders agreed with me the outrageous grandstanding was both unwarranted over such a petty project and out-of-character for someone who famously told other alders to "stop hogging the microphone" during last year's budget proceedings.

Several of her neighbors on the council floor excused themselves from their seats so their reactions to her tirade would not be seen by the city channel's cameras.

In small doses, Pham-Remmele's eccentricities can be pretty amusing as she careens perilously along the line that divides logic from borderline schizophrenia, bouncing from topical rebuttals to obtuse observances and back again. Lines from Tuesday night's rambling coup comparing the plight of residents in her district to that of Native Americans rank right up there with her infamous, incoherent tirade against Madison's certification as a bicycle-friendly community, captured in infamy on Youtube for all to see.

But after 45 minutes of "The Thuy Show," the other alders started getting restless. Again, I'm not exaggerating here when I say there was an active effort among the city's leadership to lure as many alders as possible into the hallway in an attempt to break quorum and temporarily shut the meeting down.

When freshman Alder Steve "the Gunslinger" King moved to call the question (close discussion and vote immediately) on the issue, it was a testament to either the principles or the masochism in the room that the motion failed, albeit barely, after city staff explained to Pham-Remmele what exactly it means to call the question. With the floor still open, the city council was in fact treated to an encore presentation from Pham-Remmele, as she monopolized their time for another ten minutes to urge them to vote against the proposal.

The motion passed, 18-1.

So thank you, Dean Mosiman and the Wisconsin State Journal, for an evening of entertainment on par with watching a quartet of yowling, rabid west-side coyotes disembowel a herd of vocal cats. Whether Thuy Pham-Remmele's charade will be enough to undermine every bit of positive perception you tried to build for her is yet to be seen, but rest assured this is not the last time she will prove her ineffectiveness as a city leader in full view of the public.

Under Cover Budgeting

2009-06-15T20:30:00.003-05:00

One of the more frustrating parts of my job is that my schedule is often at the mercy of politicians and policymakers, and they are NOT notorious for being punctual. Most of the time that's okay, because I'm not notorious for being punctual either.

As a great man once wrote, and then I bastardized, "A reporter is never late. Nor is he early. Instead, he arrives precisely when he means to."

However, when a city council debate has stretched on for hours and everybody wants their turn to talk, but nobody's really saying anything and it's getting on toward my bed time, I can occasionally get a little peeved. As much as I would sometimes like to, I can't bail out when the policymakers get long-winded, because then we don't get the story. And so, I'm stuck.

But I would rather be stuck in a sixteen hour budget hearing than be stood up by my elected officials. Unfortunately, it seems Wisconsin's state lawmakers have opted to combine both approaches, and it's more than just an annoyance for reporters. It's bad for every Wisconsin citizen.

I've only been the direct victim of our state legislature's heel-dragging once this year, and it made me want to pick a legislator at random and punch them in the face. I was assigned to cover a portion of the Joint Finance Committee's hearings on the budget. The hearing was scheduled to begin at 10:00 in the morning. I figured given the legislature's record of late, I could show up at 2:00 and catch plenty of action.

I was wrong. The JFC had not yet convened at 2:00. I spent two hours of my afternoon sitting in their chambers waiting for them to get underway before uttering a string of cusswords a nearby lobbyist thought was directed at him and storming out of the capitol.

That hearing didn't happen on that particular day. It was rescheduled for noon the next day. It finally got underway at 5:30 that evening. I didn't care. Our news director had decided to rely on secondhand sources for the remainder of our state budget coverage. With only two bodies in the newsroom on afternoons, I think she made the right call too. It certainly wouldn't have been a good call to halve our news coverage strength and wrack up overtime to cover one story that might not have even happened.

The problem is that if pulling coverage on the state budget proceedings was the right call for our newsroom, it was the right call for a lot of other newsrooms as well.

And the delays in addressing the budget aren't because State Sen. Fred Risser has gotten turned around wandering in the wrong wing of the capitol. Every minute the start of these meetings is delayed is a minute lawmakers are caucusing, doing the nitty-gritty work of negotiating a budget behind closed doors instead of in open session where the public and their watchdogs can follow along with every step.

How did Wisconsin's state budget wind up with plans to allow illegal immigrants to get proxy driver's licenses attached to it? How did a 75-cent monthly fee on cell phone users get the thumbs up, and how did it become okay for oil companies to pass on some of their tax burden to regular folks at the pump? Gosh, I really wish I could tell you, but those decisions were made without public or media oversight in a closed caucus.

That leaves 132 grown-up children unsupervised in a $62.2 billion candy store, and that should be enough to alarm any Wisconsin citizen, politically ambivalent or not.

And if by chance a member of the public had wanted to sound off on a particular budget item, they'd have had to hang around the state capitol for a couple of days straight, waiting for the body to convene at its own leisure. That's no way to involve the citizenry in government.

There's a reason lawmakers are required to give the public notice listing exact start times well in advance of any kind of meeting. Wisconsin's closed caucus system violated the spirit of those laws, and it needs to go.

Our Wisconsin Heritage

2009-06-11T22:18:00.004-05:00

Several years ago, I may have had a hand in what we'll call the "creative redecoration" of a handful of signs leading into a small town in Wisconsin. No, this is not that story. I've got to wait a little longer to make sure the statute of limitations puts me in the clear on that outrageous little stunt.

However, the next time I'm feeling that mischievous, I've got an idea in mind. Wisconsin needs a sign on our southern border, something that makes all the northbound flatlanders on a Friday afternoon shift in their seats and look at each other uncomfortably. Something along the lines of, "Wisconsin: Come for our beer, brats, cheese and football, stay for our serial killers!"

"Live like you mean it" eat your friggin' heart out!

There have been some creepy bastards that have gone on epic reigns of terror in this state, but everybody knows that Plainfield's Ed Gein wins the title of "bull goose loony" without a fight. The guy was the inspiration for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, for frig's sake!

My appreciation of the morbid, the macabre, the absurd and the profoundly irreverent is well-documented, so when I got word that there are some filmmakers from Appleton working on a project called "Ed Gein: The Musical," I probably got a little more excited that would be considered healthy. The potential for hilarity is almost endless.

But watching the trailer they've released with a co-worker, we couldn't help but squirm. I understand the filmmakers are striving to be "historically accurate," but without some element of more blatant farce, I can't see sitting through an entire feature-length presentation of this. It's just... uncomfortable!

Here's the trailer. Judge for yourself.

Preach

2009-06-11T22:00:00.003-05:00

The holy men and women who have impressed me in my 24 years have been few and far between, but there are a handful. During today's Madison Police press conference, I added another to that list -- Pastor David Smith, who spoke both as a community leader and a black man about the senseless killing of Karamee Collins Tuesday night.

Pat Simms rolled tape, so I don't have to futz around myself to upload his speech. There's more, but these were the best parts

I hope Smith's cause resonates with the southwest side and gathers some steam. He closed his speech by calling on other members of the clergy to join him. I hope something comes of it.

The Corral Ain't Okay

2009-06-10T19:47:00.004-05:00

Apparently, the big fad among young people around town is to indiscriminately blast everyone and everything in sight at the slightest provocation. I'm a little alarmed, mostly on account of the fact that I myself am something of a young person (though feeling less and less so after reading this week's headlines), but I didn't get the memo.

Well there's that, and then there are the bullets whizzing all over the side of town I work on.

You'd be hard-pressed finding anyone to argue that the drive-by shooting of 17-year-old Karamee Collins last night wasn't senseless. Sadly, you could find about 20-30 people, by police estimates, who would argue the recent string of nine shoot-em-up-don't-hit-shit gun crimes aren't outrageous, reckless, and foolish beyond belief.

But they're just idiots... 20-30 heavily-armed idiots with terrible aim who spray dozens of rounds willy-nilly around Loreen Drive as kids are coming home from school.

Police haven't be able to figure out for sure what's at the root of all this senseless violence, but there are some pretty good theories. When a 17-year-old is shot, it's likely he was shot by other 17-year-olds over whatever petty dramas 17-year-olds get fightin' mad about. The theory about the nine shootings is that there are four groups of people duking it out in a ridiculous Romeo and Juliet scenario spun rapidly out of control, to the point where they think it's become acceptable to walk down the middle of Allied Drive shooting the windows out of random apartments as a means of exacting revenge.

So brace yourselves. Now that we're in the midst of a spike in gun crimes, the old hot air machines will be firing up shortly to deafen us with insipidity. The anti-gun nutjobs will begin crying these tragedies could have been prevented by stricter gun control. The pro-gun nutjobs will start screaming a concealed-carry law would keep these thugs cowering in their basements instead of shooting up our streets. Both sides will lose all connection with reason.

And if the people of Madison are scared enough, they'll listen to whoever's solution is most outrageous.

I'm going to hazard a wild idea and say the guns are not the issue here. Guns are simply tools, a means to an end. People were killing each other for millennia before the first human had the idea to propel fragments of metal at other humans using a mix of saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur. Having more guns on the street will not lessen violence. Having fewer guns on the street will not lessen violence.

The shootings in Madison are a product of a problem with our society. This isn't a problem that's caused by television, or video games, or rap music. Those are all just symptoms of the problem.

The problem is there are some segments of our population that are so far out of touch with their humanity that they can momentarily justify using a gun, or a knife, or a bat to solve their own, smaller, insignificant problems. They've lost sight of the big picture of humanity as a whole and allowed themselves to become just a caricature of what they see on television and video games and rap music, because it's all they've let themselves know.

The young people who shot Karamee Collins didn't do it to protect their own lives. The 20-30 heavily-armed idiots running around the south side could lay down their arms and safely live out the rest of their days.

These criminals are acting out of line because of some perceived, irreconcilable wound to their pride, a pride which they've let become bigger to them than the sanctity of human life. And they'll suffer for it, but not before they exact even more suffering on the people around them.

But this problem of people losing touch with their humanity, it's not just limited to poor black neighborhoods on the south side. It runs through every strata of society. It lead a handful of Enron execs to try and steal billions of dollars from their employees. It lead two students to slaughter thirteen of their teachers and classmates before ending their own lives. It even lead an entire democratic nation into an immoral war. And the ends never justify the suffering that accrues along the way.

Collins was Madison's first murder of the year after a particularly bloody 2008, an inevitability given the way bullets have been flying. As my mom used to say, I guess it was only a matter of time until someone got hurt. But when I open the newspaper tomorrow or Friday and see police have released a "motive" in Collins's murder, I'll be hard-pressed to overcome the feeling of dread that will well up in me.

I know no matter what these foolish kids thought gave them reason enough to kill Collins, it will make me want to cry for them.

Parma-bomb

2009-06-08T17:58:00.002-05:00

I just finished rifling through my closet, looking for laundrables and something to wear to my cousin's wedding this weekend (a northern Wisconsin wedding, mind you, meaning whatever I wear had better be beer-proof), when I realized I haven't worn khakis since I was a newspaper reporter.

They're still there, hanging toward the back where I left them about a year and a half ago, a reminder in three shades of tan how completely I detest khakis. I don't like the way they feel. I don't like the way they ride. I don't like the half-assed way they try to be both casual and formal at the same time, because they fail utterly at both. I kind of like the color, but only in a shirt or a jacket -- NOT pants.

I don't miss my khakis at all, ever. I do occasionally miss working for the newspaper.

The similarities and differences between being a newspaper reporter and a radio reporter, the appeals and the downsides, are the material for a book, not a blog post. But what occasionally gets me longing to get out from behind the mic, more than glancing at khakis in the closet, is the desire to take a really juicy story that comes across my desk and sink my teeth all the way into it. There was little as satisfying in my old job as being able to break a story down into its component parts and reassemble a dozen divergent narratives into one cogent storyline.

Poring over stacks of documents and recorded interviews, drawing time lines or illustrating action sequences, they're all ways of loading pellet after pellet of fact into a shell, resulting in a shotgun blast of information to the consumer's face that should leave them with few -- if any -- questions.

Conversely, reporting for broadcast is like sniping with an automatic rifle. Each story has to be delivered in a quick, precise, neat little package before you move quickly to deliver the next. It doesn't carry nearly the stopping power of a newspaper article, but given a sufficient volume of stories, it serves to lay down an impressive cover fire.

Yes, it's a little absurd I find it so easy to compare delivering the news with shooting the news consumers. Chew on that for a while.

My long-forgotten point is that every once in a while a story comes along that gets me yearning for the time to rip it open in detail, and last week, my friends Jen McCoy and Shannon Green at the Portage Daily Register got to write that story. If I were still working in the Portage office, I would have dropped whatever I was doing to have a hand in covering the saga of the "Food Fight Five."

If you haven't heard the tale yet, it's quick and dirty. In their final days of the school year, four sophomores and a super senior at Portage High School decided to instigate a classic food fight in the lunch room. The fray was short-lived, but apparently served to coat the floor and the fighters in foodstuffs. The offending students were lead off to the Principal's office, where I'm sure they received "a good talking to," and that's where this story should have ended.

Except it didn't.

School officials called in the cops, who came and dragged the kids downtown in cuffs on charges of disorderly conduct. One account of the story I read said the students were given a standing ovation on their way out, and while I'm sure that cheered them somewhat, it doesn't exactly justify the hands-on approach that was used.

I say this as someone who knows and has worked with a good number of the police and school officials involved, but seriously -- lighten up a little, guys. It's not like the kids strapped rows of hot dogs to their chests and claimed to be wearing bombs. They hucked a little food around the cafeteria and made a mess. A punishment befitting the crime would have had these kids on hands and knees scrubbing the mess up, not in a containment cell downtown while the janitor did the dirty work. I guarantee not a one of the boys would have complained that a day's janitorial duty was out of line as far as punishments go.

I respect the hell out of the fact that even when pressed, the boys have not been willing to say they'd go back and do anything differently. My blog's title, "It's All About the Story," can be correctly interpreted several ways. Long after these kids have started losing their hair and settled into "responsible" jobs, they'll have the tale of the time they were hauled out of Portage High School for throwing some yogurt around to baffle their co-workers or laugh about over a beer.

Detective Lt. Mark Hahn of the Portage Police Department, who I would fathom from personal experience was something of a hellion himself when he was in high school, told the Daily Register, "Anything minor like that can escalate into a larger problem... Some kids were upset because of the food on them."

To which I'm obligated to respond, "They deserved to get food on them!" By all accounts, the Food Fight Five conducted themselves in a manner befitting the deeply-rooted traditions of the food fight. In accordance with the Treaty of Chicken Kiev, the instigators of the fracas declared from a place of prominence, vociferously, "FOOOOOD FIIIIIGHT!" before any foodstuffs were indeed hurled. This allowed noncombatants and civilians ample warning to seek cover.

Besides, any high schooler who's convinced him-or-herself he or she is so mature as to actually get vocally upset upon being plastered with a tray full of taco salad should be skipped back four grades and forced to try high school again, but with a sense of humor and withOUT such a material dependence this time around. They're just clothes, and you're only in high school once.

Portage High School Vice Principal Brian Seguin told the Daily Register, "A vast majority of comments from other kids was it was inappropriate that it happened."

Well, DUH! Of course it's inappropriate, and by definition then, fun. As mentioned, there comes a time when you can't get away with nearly as much fun as you can at that age. Miss your chance to sling grub when you can't be charged as an adult, and you'll have to wait until you're stuck in a nursing home and are old enough to blame it on senility.

Settle Down

2009-06-02T11:41:00.007-05:00

Maybe the biggest advantage of bringing in an outsider to run the Dane County 911 Center is that he won't have been mired in this kerfuffle since the beginning. Sometimes, it takes a view from outside the building to tell if you've got a kitchen fire or a full-blown house fire on your hands.

John Dejung officially assumed the mantle of 911 Center Director this week, and I'm hoping my initial impressions are accurate. I only had about 20 minutes or so to meet Dejung yesterday, part of which was spent in a press conference-style briefing with other reporters, but he struck me as very level-headed, coolly competent and completely nonplussed by the size of the dynamite sandwich chunk he's bitten off to chew.

His resume certainly inspires confidence, but what I really took heart in was that in his first day on the job, he did what many other local officials haven't been able or haven't chosen to do -- he drew a line between what constitutes good, common sense 911 policy and what's just looking for something to scream about.

I asked Dejung whether the policy regarding non-emergency calls at his award-winning 911 center in Minneapolis would have yielded a different result in the sad but overly-politicized death of Farrell Kurlish last March, and what I got -- a straight answer -- floored me.

"This is perhaps going to sound flip, but, frankly, the operators that talk with residents on the phone aren't clairvoyant. Sometimes they have to deal with what they have to deal with, and unfortunately, once in a blue moon, there are things that can come along and bite you... It's very unfortunate, and an opportunity to look at procedures and policies and beef them up where they need to be beefed up, but frankly in Minneapolis I'm not sure that would have been avoided."

I always appreciate a straight answer, but coming from a guy that exudes an almost Mister Rogers-like sense of safety and security, I left the meeting feeling pretty confident that John Dejung is not another Joe Norwick. The underlying message to be taken away from all this, at least for the time being I think, is "Everybody chill the hell out. JD's got this thing."

There's just one thing I find disconcerting about John Dejung, and that's the eerie resemblance he bears to Dane County Supervisor Matt Veldran. The two men met for the first time yesterday, and I felt a chill run up my spine when they faced each other and shook hands. Veldran said something like, "I'm not on the 911 oversight committee, I just had to stop out and meet this guy everybody keeps saying looks so much like me."

It was a Kodak moment, and there I was without my camera. But honestly, judge for yourself. That's Dejung on the left and Veldran on the right.

John Dejung and Matt Veldran -- separated at birth?

Outta Town

2009-05-31T22:08:00.003-05:00

I spent $25 on a Wisconsin State Parks season pass this weekend. I'm pretty convinced it was a wise, worthwhile investment.

This time of the year gets to be intoxicating for me, as the weather finally becomes consistently tolerable. In two weeks' time, I've watched the skin on my arms grow consistently darker with the beginnings of a summer tan. While I'm cooped up for 45 hours a week in a studio, almost every spare moment since mid-May has been spent outdoors, hiking, riding, running or fishing.

I'm giddy to know that I can finally soak up the outdoors again. I feel like it's my 21st birthday again and I'm on State Street, but I'm almost certain there's no way to get overserved on a Wisconsin summer.

Saturday marked my second trip to Devil's Lake near Baraboo in as many weeks, and I figured if I keep up at this pace, I'll get my money's worth out of a season pass. It's only 25 bucks, compared to seven for a day pass, and I have no doubt I'll make at least three more trips to a state park by the end of the year.

The problem is I have to make them in my car now, because I can't transfer the pass to my motorcycle. It's kind of a dumb system, but I wouldn't have anywhere to stick a season pass on my bike anyway. That much said, now that I have a season pass, I won't feel bad about maybe skirting the system with my bike a bit, just because they aren't as accommodating of motorcyclists as they could be.

Regardless of my personal vendettas, Devil's Lake is a rare treasure, and we're lucky to have it. But as I hiked up the Balanced Rock trail this weekend, I couldn't help but wonder -- how is it some drunk hasn't pushed that damn thing over yet?

Natural wonder or not, Balanced Rock (pictured above) is like a beacon of temptation. It beckons the 12-year-old boy in each of us, much the same as a sheet of bubble wrap and a rolling pin, or a magnifying glass and an anthill, or a gasoline puddle and a book of matches, or that sculpture in front of Camp Randall and a giant condom.

So I figure with the thousands of people who visit the park a year, there's got to be a drunk guy or two each year who figure they can muscle that rock off its perch and start it rolling down the slope toward the lake. That begs the question, how is that thing fastened on there, because unless they just keep helicoptering it back into place every time some ass pushes it off, it doesn't look like anyone's succeeded yet.

Anyway, it's clear I'm delirious from exposure to fresh air and sunshine, but I'm glad to have had the chance to hike somewhere in the ballpark of six miles this weekend (that's NOT counting vertical, either). I'm hoping to log even more miles this summer at some of the other state parks I haven't visited yet.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

2009-05-26T23:00:00.004-05:00

I know the Dane County 911 Center has become the political kickball de jure over the past year, and I'm very glad of the shortcomings that have been exposed and addressed to some degree. But I'd like to take a moment to try and draw a line between what constitutes a legitimate gripe and what's just piling on.

By now you've read the tragic story of Farrell Kurlish, the 32-year-old man who was found dead in his car last March, poisoned by a carbon monoxide leak. The story has generated quite a bit of controversy, because the vehicle sat out on the street idling for seven hours after a neighbor phoned in a complaint to the 911 center's non-emergency line.

Mind you, this was a call to the center's non-emergency line, and if you read the transcript of the call, at no point does the caller indicate there was any kind of problem that required police intervention.

Call taker: "Police and fire."
Caller: "Yeah, there’s a pickup truck that’s
been idling in front of my house for one half-hour. Is that legal?"
Call taker: "Sure."
Caller: "Hmm?"
Call taker: "Yeah, sure."
Caller: "In the street?"
Call taker: "Uh-huh."
Caller: "Holy (expletive), what’s the town
coming to?"

And at that point, without any further ado, the caller hangs up. With that 20-20 hindsight we always hear about, yeah, it might have helped to have dispatched police officers to the scene immediately. But what the 911 Center's biggest critics are trying to say is that, based on those 35 syllables of information from the caller, the 911 operator should have sent help, or at least followed up on the call.

Now, none of the news stories that I've seen so far (that I haven't written myself) make note of the fact that this same 911 operator, Nathan Waite, was in fact commended for his performance in the line of duty as recently as January, when he gave instructions on birthing a premature child to a father parked on the side of a snowy road near McFarland. At the time, county officials hailed Waite as the hero who saved the day by keeping his head, making sure the panicked mother and father on the other end kept their heads, and calmly talking the husband through procedures as delicate as using a shoe lace to tie off an umbilical cord.

I myself covered the press conference that was thrown together by County Executive Kathleen Falk's staff as an election loomed against a foe who had made the 911 center a key issue. While I'm not surprised that the County Executive has not arranged a press conference in his defense, I did get a chance to meet Mr. Waite and chat with him briefly.

Nathan Waite is competent, humble, young and kind of quiet. I certainly don't see him as being "complacent," or lacking "the appropriate attitude of concern," to quote the internal investigation into the matter. In fact, I posit he reacted in exactly the right way.

My tax dollars pay Nathan Waite's salary, just the same as they pay for the police officers that patrol our streets. As such, in no way do I want either 911 operators or police officers wasting time responding to calls about every vehicle left running in the street. Following that logic, there should be a police response every time a garden hose is left running, a door is left ajar or a dog is heard barking in the distance.

Nathan Waite is a very busy man with a lot of important duties on his plate who was reacting to a stupid question from a person who was at best lazy and at worst an imbecile. The caller to the non-emergency line didn't say anything was wrong. She didn't sound like she was under duress. She certainly didn't open her front door and walk the thirty feet to the idling car and peer inside to see if everything was all right, which could potentially have saved a life.

The caller simply peered out a slat in the blinds and did what misanthropic old ladies are prone to do -- she complained to the first person who would listen. You can ask any 911 operator, and they will tell you the non-emergency line is a source of more useless complaints than Charter Communications' customer service.

Now I agree with Police Captain Carl Gloede that some kind of written procedures should be implemented to sort out non-emergency calls that might have some kind of urgent nature to them. It certainly could have helped in the Lake's Edge Park murder last fall.

But trying to link Farrell Kurlish's death to a failure on the part of the 911 Center is akin to kicking an opponent when they're down. Whatever political point or progress critics of the 911 Center are trying to make gets lost, especially when hard working civil servants like Nathan Waite get dragged into the fray to have their reputations tarnished.

I hope Waite sticks it out through the coming weeks of punishment and retraining he's going to be put through, then goes on to become a supervisor at the 911 Center. Maybe we can even talk him into running for County Exec.

Defense Mechanism

2009-05-19T21:53:00.002-05:00

I was just sending my end of the day wrap to the boss, having just landed at home after a long day in the field, when the magnitude of what I was a part of today hit me like a ton of bricks.

When I got paged out to cover the massive police sweep of Hoyt Park early this afternoon, I guess I went into the story with my "happy ending" sights set pretty low. Let's face it -- Steven Weber, the guy police were searching the heavily forested, cave-ridden, 27-acre park for, had already murdered his ex-wife before going on the lam. When cops found his truck at the park this morning, the best case scenario we could hope for was that they would find him alive and he could be tried for his heinous act.

From there, the possible scenarios got grimmer. Police could find Weber dead by his own hand, which they eventually did, but at least the situation is resolved now and no one else has been hurt. But police could also have found nothing, leaving an armed and dangerous fugitive on the loose. Or, there were the nightmare scenarios, where Weber could have elected to take a hostage or shoot it out with the cops.

So yeah, I went into my work day today with some low expectations.

Nothing that happened today could undo Francie Weber's murder. Nothing could erase the years of domestic abuse that lead up to it or the impact it had on the couple's children. As a reporter on a breaking story, I have to accept the old facts and focus on getting the new ones straight so I can relay them to the public. I have to push the tragedy that has already unfolded out of my mind long enough to do my part to keep it from turning into a bigger tragedy.

Duty is a fine defense mechanism, though anyone who's seen me in a tense situation will tell you I rely just as heavily on a dark sense of humor which sometimes verges on inappropriate. I get that from my Dad, who once quipped, "This is great, I've always wanted a convertible," as paramedics cut away the roof of the car that was literally wrapped around him, mangled when another vehicle ran a stop sign at 70 miles an hour and broadsided my Dad in his driver's side door.

In a standoff or other "hurry up and wait" situations like today, there's ample time to yuck it up with cops and other reporters stuck at the same scene. There's nothing disrespectful intended in it, and I opine that there's nothing wrong with it if it's done discreetly and without crossing the line. Many in law enforcement and the press share that same strong defense mechanism, I've learned, and as they say, misery loves company.

For instance, I was part of a cadre of press and cops that spent 15 minutes or so delighting in the predicament of a pizza delivery driver this afternoon who had a delivery assigned to him within the police perimeter and couldn't get the deliveree to answer his or her cell phone. After all of our snickering and goading, the driver actually took us up on our offer, and we bought the pizza off him on the cheap and tipped generously.

Eating Glass Nickle pizza out the back of Channel 3's news van was as surreal as it was hilarious -- and necessary too, because most of us hadn't eaten in quite some time.

And as long as we're on the subject of food, I found something else to be particularly heartening today. I eventually settled on a vantage point a little further down the block, with another police officer and a few other reporters, and we spent most of the afternoon camped on that corner. Elation is the best way to describe the reaction when a neighbor brought out, first, a tray of drinks and, later, a plate of elaborately constructed ham sandwiches.

The random generosity of the kindly woman who lives next to Capital City Church on Blackhawk Avenue felt, at the time, like the stuff of legends.

But it was at that corner that I met Madison Police Officer Jxxxxxk, who had been on duty since 5:30 in the morning. After sharing that corner for only a couple hours, we were delighting not only in speculating what grim scenarios might be unfolding in the hills and houses to our west, but also in ripping on each other relentlessly.

When a series of loud pops echoed out of the bluffs around 6:35 PM, Jxxxxxk instinctively dropped to a crouch, hand on his gun butt, and I drew pen and microphone with equal ferocity. The moment passed, and we determined the sound was gas canisters discharging in the park's caves, designed to smoke a suspect out of hiding.

But that's the way the mechanism is supposed to work. It doesn't interfere with the job, it just keeps you from losing your head while you're doing it. If we had spent the day focusing on the horrors of a repeated domestic abuse case taken to the final extreme, we'd have been miserable, and not very capable of doing our jobs.

So I survived the day with nothing more harrowing than a serious sunburn, and Jxxxxxk eventually got home to his three kids. And this is where the tough part begins, because now we have to turn the defense mechanisms off.

We have to do that because to neglect to do so does a disservice to the two people who weren't dead three days ago but are now. It's disrespectful to their families, for whom the real suffering is only just beginning. And leaving those defense mechanisms on all the time is not healthy for us, could in fact choke the humanity out of us eventually, turning us into the worst incarnations of our respective professions.

Tomorrow, back in the shelter of the news room, we start the task of asking the bigger questions. Why did this slimeball Weber think it was okay to beat on his wife and kids the way he did? Why was he allowed out on a measly 500 dollars bail after he was charged with one particularly awful case of domestic violence? How many other Webers are there out there committing atrocities we don't even know about?

And how do we stop this from happening?

Good Intentions, Some Cement

2009-05-18T22:55:00.005-05:00

I have to preface this piece by saying that, in the so-called "war" between bicyclists and motorists in the City of Madison, I am a neutral party. I am Switzerland. I'm the freakin' Red Cross. I'm convinced that if you people all just stopped hating on each other, we could all get to where we're going in one piece/peace. But no matter how you try, none of you is going to convert me to your side. As a motorcyclist, I sympathize with both sides, but I also see where both sides are out of line.

Even with that established, there are those who will try to paint what I say next as "anti-bicycle," but here goes:

Madison's "Ride the Drive" event, as planned, is an absolute disaster waiting to happen.

In case you haven't read the mayor's proclamation, "Ride the Drive" is an event, based on similar events in other cities, where people are supposed to "leave their cars behind to experience some of Madison's most scenic byways a whole new way -- via bicycle, skate, stroller or foot." In other words, for six hours on August 30, the city plans to close down a handful of major thoroughfares so people can take non-motorized traffic on them, and they want this to be a regular thing.

Okay, cool, it's a warm fuzzy feeling for the whole family, except it's going to hamstring east-west traffic in a city that doesn't move north and south. If you look at the map, the proposed closures are in green, and the proposed "detour" is in pink. By closing East Washington Avenue and John Nolen Drive, the city is effectively limiting traffic in and out of its densest center of population and commerce to ONE route. In the case of Gorham Street, the recommended westbound detour, traffic is limited to ONE LANE because of construction.

Now, granted, the event will take place on a Sunday morning, from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM -- not exactly high traffic time. But on a typical Sunday morning, with all routes across the isthmus open, I've observed traffic on Gorham Street backed up several blocks due to the construction, from Broom Street to Wisconsin Avenue or so. If the city takes away John Nolen Drive and East Washington Avenue as an option for motorists traveling east to west, that will triple the traffic volume on Gorham.

It's not that closing major arterial streets to allow people to walk and bicycle on them is a bad idea -- it's just a bad idea for Madison. The proposal here is based on an event they host in Chicago on Lake Shore Drive called "Bike the Drive." Chicago, as you know, is that city of 3 million people situated to the south on the shore of Lake Michigan.

It is not a moderately-sized city planted smack dab between two lakes on an isthmus less than a mile wide. If Lake Shore Drive is closed, motorists have any number of options to detour it. In Madison, drivers will have one detour -- two, if you count the 25 minute drive around Lake Monona.

So what's the big deal? Can't we deal with a traffic hell for six hours on a Sunday morning? Normally I wouldn't take issue with a bunch of folks getting outside to enjoy themselves on their non-motorized-transportation-of-choice, and on the weekends I generally tend to leave the car parked and walk or take a bus anyway. Under different circumstances, I might consider joining in on the "Bike the Ride" festivities. But this isn't a typical Sunday morning.

Sunday, August 30 2009 is the last day for students to move into their downtown dorms and apartments before fall semester classes start at the University of Wisconsin. As anyone who's ever lived downtown or any parent who's ever helped their student move in knows, it's a day of pandemonium as thousands of stressed-out people from both coasts try to navigate U-hauls down streets they've never seen in their lives.

Gorham Street and University Avenue will already be a construction mess for this day, and there's nothing to be done about that. But adding more road closures, bicycles and strollers running right through the heart of that campus mess (yes, Lake Street between Sellery and Witte Halls, the two largest dorms on campus, will be closed as well) to the recipe is inviting the perfect storm. It's a bad idea.

I live along Gorham Street. I can attest to the fact that it's a main route for ambulances en route from parts east to any one of three hospitals located in the city's core. If Gorham is backed up all the way to Tenney Park, I don't even want to fathom what's going to happen to the poor sap who has a heart attack in Maple Bluff, unless the city has a speedboat they can equip as an ambulance.

This isn't about bikes versus cars. This is about something that could be a neat event in a unique city, but because of flagrant disregard or blatant oversights on someone's part, could stand to deadlock Madison on what's already one of its most hectic days. And for an event designed to "invite Madisonians to consider adding non-motorized means of travel to their daily lives," pissing off thousands of motorists doesn't seem like a very diplomatic way to further those ends.

Reveille's a Bitch

2009-05-12T21:25:00.003-05:00

Someone needs to invent a cell phone that activates a recording device when it rings at godawful hours of the morning, because I'm pretty sure I mutter some of the most toe-curlingly vulgar, colorful words that have ever been strung into a sentence when mine goes off at 4:00 in the AM. I just can't be sure, because I'm not nearly coherent enough to remember.

Technically, I think my first wakeup call came at about 3:45 AM, four hours earlier than my alarm clock was set. But at full volume four feet from my head, my cell phone ringer wasn't even jarring enough to disrupt my REM patterns. The second call penetrated a very vivid dream I was having about yelling at the Monroe School Board (see last night's post) and dragged me reluctantly to a state of semi-consciousness.

At that point, I was trying to determine whether I'd really heard my phone ring, and trying even harder to convince myself it was just a part of the dream. I was weighing the effort it would take to check my phone versus the probability that it was actually an important call when the bastard rang again, and I shot out a misguided arm to snap it open.

"Yahisduzzy," I croaked.

On the other end, my boss, Tara, was full of her typical pep, but a little perplexed. "Uh, is Dustin there?"

I was far too bamboozled to grasp the fact that my slurred growl was completely unrecognizable as me. Likewise, I had nowhere near the wits about me needed to shoot back a witty rejoinder like, No, this is his secretary, Dustin stepped out to run some early morning errands. Instead, I just enunciated, slowly, "No, I am me."

And that was how I came to find out I would be watching the sun come up in Columbus this morning.

In case you hadn't heard, an impressive feat of deafness to be sure, a warehouse at Columbus Chemical Industries blew up last night, and then burned for half a day before there was nothing left to combust. All the common sense and firefighting protocols I've ever heard indicate fire officials on scene did the right thing by pulling away and letting the fire run its course. Because they didn't know which caustic chemicals were fueling the fire, emergency management decided to evacuate an area around the site, and all bajillion of the emergency response agencies on scene today deserve some serious props for their role in what could easily have been a much worse situation.

So, granted, there was some drama to the situation, but I still couldn't help but laugh when Pat Simms from the State Journal raised an eyebrow at the collection of reporters representing every newspaper, radio and TV station between Milwaukee and Madison assembled at the 9:00 AM press briefing, and said, "What are we all doing here?"

Not that anybody's complaining, with every newsroom I know of short on staff, but it's been a slow news year.

In spite of being not quite with it, I had a helluva morning in the trenches riding a lucky streak of "gets" that could have lasted all day, if I had stayed. The first four "just folks" I spoke with in Columbus were a former member of the fire department willing to reminisce about the days when they ran fire response drills at the plant, a plant employee who had been laid off a week earlier (who I still suspect started the whole thing), the fiancee of a firefighter who had come home in paper clothes after his turnout gear had been confiscated as hazardous materials during the decontamination process and a woman who lives a half block from the plant itself and witnessed the whole thing.

But then again, that's small town Wisconsin. Steve Walters is the one who taught me the best stories about a disaster or crime scene won't be found at the scene itself, but in the cafe, restaurant, bar or gas station down the street.

The one negative on the day, other than having to get up at 4:00 AM and the fact that a warehouse blew up, happened as a result of me being a complete dope, so I can't really complain. Sleep-deprived as I was, I set my notebook on the roof of my car as I loaded up my bag and my laptop case, then climbed in and sped off down the road.

It wasn't until I was talking "the fiancee" that I realized my microphone hand was occupied as it should be, but my notebook hand was notably empty. A brief panic ensued during which my tactile memory was clicking enough to tell me I set it somewhere at shoulder height, but not specifically where. I ran up and down the gas station, checking on top of the dryers in the bathrooms and the shelves stocked with soup and Doritos before that last synapse fired.

I found the notebook not 20 feet from where I had parked earlier, flattened squarely in the middle of the road with a massive tire tread mark running diagonally across it. Honestly, the tire that did the flattening was more than a foot across, so for the sake of The Story, I'm going to say it was a fire truck that hit it, but I really don't know.

I do know that the fire truck scored a direct hit on the wire coil that binds the pages together, so taking notes on any other page than the one headed "N4335 Tempkin Rd" is next to impossible. With no one injured in the fire itself, this strikes me as the day's biggest tragedy. That notebook was only halfway through its useful lifetime!

What a sad, sad waste.

Sharpen the Axe

2009-05-11T23:30:00.004-05:00

Why is it that when a small town school board is looking to trim some funding from the extra curriculars, they go straight for the throat of the district's strongest arts program?

I've often pondered this particular rhetorical question before, but I think I found my answer tonight. I was in my hometown Monroe ("Give me cheese or give me death." - Arabut Ludlow, not quite verbatim, circa 1873) helping a group of locals make a case to spare the district's band program from having its instructors cut from four to three.

Without getting into too much background, but putting that cut in perspective, there were five band directors in the district six years ago when I graduated with the Monroe High School Class of 2003 (Motto: "Hey, this whole Iraq War thing won't last more than a year or so, right?"). In the face of the last round of cuts, the district's dedicated core of professionals maintained the program as one of the envies of other schools in the conference.

But with two of those professionals retiring this year, there's a movement on the school board to replace them with just one teacher. And when one of the people I was speaking against the cuts with asked the question, "How many of you were in band?" of the school board, my jaw dropped.

Not a single one of them raised their hands, or even flinched.

So we each had a turn speaking our piece. I rambled on a bit as I tend to, and expounded the values and applications of the band program in the real world speaking as a recent alum now working as a semi-productive member of society. There were about a half dozen of us who spoke, but what said volumes more were the 60-70 people, mostly high-schoolers, who packed that board room.

Whatever decision the Monroe School Board makes, they'll have to do it knowing that those kids, my little sister Taylor among them, are looking over their shoulder. And good on 'em, too, for taking an ownership role in the future of a program that literally touches more than half the kids who pass through that school district.

And if the school board doesn't have the first-hand experience themselves to understand the value of the band program, then I hope they take account of the fact that the eyes of Monroe's voters are looking over their shoulders as well. Not that a lack of first-hand experience is an excuse for throwing the arts into a wood chipper any time the budget gets tight.

Mike Shuda, the guy who organized "the resistance," is my case in point. Shuda admitted off the bat, as he addressed the board, that he never took an interest in band when he was a student. But since he became a parent, his daughters have all participated in the program with escalating vigor, his youngest with the most fervor of all.

So when Shuda heard the program his daughter cherished was in jeopardy, even though he didn't quite understand it himself, he did the research and then did something about it. He did what the school board needs to do: analyze the situation, and then do what's best for the kids.

I don't know where the Monroe School District should look to cut the funding they need to cut, but I do know this: the arts have done their time as the budgetary whipping boy for too long while athletics have skated by unscathed.

Hail to the Chief!

2009-05-05T21:06:00.006-05:00

When City Council President Tim Bruer steps in to run the city council meeting, you know a party can't be far away.

Yes, those are liquor bottles -- 200 ml of Jack Daniels and a half liter of really bad vodka, to be precise. No, unfortunately, Bruer didn't bring them to the meeting himself. A member of the industry lobbying corps set them down as visual aids to make a point that is now lost in the sheer hilarity of seeing a pair of liquor bottles positioned in such a manner.

Unfortunately, the liquor baron carried his visual aids off with him when he was done. Perhaps he would have had better luck keeping this ridiculous prohibition on selling cheap liquor in small amounts from passing if he would have left them... in front of every alder's work station.

...Though the press corps would probably appreciate it more.

If I get bothered enough, I'll post on this later, but I think the ban is a terrible idea. And if it means liquor bottles will mysteriously appear more often, I think the mayor should turn the reins over to Tim Bruer every meeting.

***Update*** The item on banning the sale of cheap liquor in small containers was referred to a later meeting. The council wasn't happy about it, but they bowed to pressure from the industry to work together on a (hopefully) more productive solution. Some alders were so cheesed, they made veiled threats about liquor license renewal time. We'll see how it turns out.

H-One-N-FUN!

2009-05-04T10:29:00.005-05:00

With swine flu threatening an almost indubitable apocalypse within weeks, I figure those of us in the general public had best get started on our pre-ordained roles in the planet's last hurrah. And whether it's reuniting what's left of the human race into a ragtag coalition just scraping by, pillaging and looting the weaker survivors or dying an unspeakably awful death somewhere along the line, each of us is fortunate enough to have decades worth of accumulated source material to pull helpful notes and tips from.

I'm talking, of course, about three of the greatest stories ever told about the end of the world, two novels and one a movie. I don't know what I find so fascinating about the annihilation of the human race, but it just so happens it's one of my favorite fictional subject matters, and I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of works about the end times.

Before you ask, no I have not read the Left Behind series. Yes, I'm perfectly comfortable living out the rest of my life, short though it may be, without crossing that one off the list.

But I feel works like Stephen King's The Stand, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, and Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead are must-read (and view) material, even when there's not a final reckoning at hand. They're death by biology, natural disaster and zombies, respectively, so spending a weekend boning up on these classics basically prepares you for all the realistic possibilities.

Because, let's face it, as such bastions of entertainment, cannot we also assume they're factually sound enough to hold water in the event of the real deal?

I say I've got five points of advice gleaned from these works that I'm willing to stake my life on, and anyone who wants into my compound of survivors had best think likewise. The lessons to be learned from these works could spare us fatal mistakes and years of toil.

1. Buy a handgun. And then a rifle. And then a flamethrower. And then stock up on plenty of ammunition.

On a less-crucial note, it wouldn't hurt to know how to use all those things, but I understand money can be easier to come by than time. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that anyone can pick up a firearm and learn to use it effectively and safely as soon as the first bad guys come storming in.

And there will be plenty of bad guys in the post-swine flu world too. After an engineered version of the flu killed off 99.4 percent of the world's population in The Stand, a maniacal incarnation of Satan himself mobilized society's surviving evil element to attempt genocide on the gentler denizens of North America. In Lucifer's Hammer, a cannibalistic band of Army irregulars, criminals and religious zealots terrorized the Californian countryside, alternately conscripting or eating the innocents they encountered until a well-organized coalition of survivors and Boy Scouts (sidenote: befriend a Boy Scout) routed them in a bloody counter-attack.

Shaun of the Dead had zombies. The application of firearms explains itself.

But even before you fire a shot, you'll find your arsenal useful. The societal breakdown that inevitably prefaces any endgame scenario effectively reduces social interaction to a "might is right" set of circumstances, and those who invest the time and energy stockpiling foodstuffs, water and petrol will invariably find themselves robbed and stranded by armed brigands, if they're lucky.

If you think post-Katrina New Orleans was an ugly situation, just wait until concepts like "FEMA" and the "National Guard" lose their relevance to otherwise good, but desperate, people.

2. Have a designated fortress or stronghold in mind. As mentioned in step one, for all the survival preparations you make, there will be someone lazy looking to mooch off you or just take what you've got, and without a headquarters that enables you to keep them out and your stuff in, you can make a go of it on the streets and roads for a little while, but you won't make it in the long run.

The size and complexity of your compound really depends on your longterm goals (sidenote: set short- and long-term goals shortly after apocalypse, adjust as needed). If you feel comfortable in being as ambitious as the heroes of The Stand, settle on a small city somewhere with a favorable climate and natural defenses like mountains and get to work rebuilding the infrastructure and, eventually, a society. Boulder, Colorado is already taken, so don't think about it.

Others, like the characters of Lucifer's Hammer, might set their sights a little lower and settle for surviving the post-apocalyptic winter. For them, a mountainside ranch and a nearby town elevated above the tsunami-caused devastation of an asteroid strike was the only obtainable option, but had the advantage of being farmable and providing abundant natural game. The strength of their stronghold was in the type of people they allowed in, welcoming farmers and engineers but turning away many others.

And of course, you can't concentrate on surviving the winter if living through the night is in question. For the Shaun of the Dead crew, a neighborhood pub provided limited protection, stockpiles of food and plenty of drink. Then again, a number of them were eaten by zombies.

Personally, I've had my stronghold picked out since high school, when a group of friends and I laid plans for any worst-case scenario. If we're unable to meet up in our exodus from the city but you, gentle reader, still want to join our band of survivors, you can look for us at a certain low-profile ranch home on a rural farm road, set amongst the rolling farm fields and fed by a creek in northwest Green County.

But of course, we have to get there first. Hence,

3. Mobility is life. In a rural setting, it's crucial to patrolling the countryside for danger and foraging for supplies. In an urban area, a set of wheels lends you the added benefit of separating you from the dangers of the streets and alleys and allowing you to quickly escape dangerous situations. And if your stronghold is 45 miles away, like mine is, the notion of walking that far with your supplies in tow is just silly.

What are you trying to do, after all? Go green? Save the planet? Mission failed. And luckily, with tens of millions dead, supply and demand dictates you should have no trouble appropriating an automobile suitable to your needs.

But they will be unique needs, to say the least. The potential pitfall in procuring transportation is that, when the world ends, so do the services we take for granted like snowplowing, road maintenance and repair garages. While a Toyota Camry will last you decades in the pre-apocalyptic world, it can't mount a snowy incline, offroading around a patch of washed-out roadway or backed up traffic is out of the question and the first technical failure will strand all but the most skilled of mechanics.

As such, The Stand and Lucifer's Hammer each outline the same two diametrically-opposed schools of thought, the simpler of which is riding a motorcycle. While limited in terms of cargo and passenger capacity, the maneuverability and ability of a bike to surmount obstacles is surpassed only by its badass factor. The simplicity of an engine connected to two wheels via a drive shaft or chain means proper maintenance can keep one running long after a more complex piece of machinery would break down beyond repair, and most intermediate-level repairs on a bike are simple enough for an untrained gearhead to attempt.

Being as I own a motorcycle, I think I would tend toward that option, but for those more safety-conscious or not wishing to hibernate through the winter months (sidenote: snowmobiles could be a good idea as well), there's another option. That option entails going out and finding the most monstrous, solidly-built, gas-guzzling four-by-four you can dig up, filling her to the brim with supplies and striking out. A winch, a light bar and auxiliary fuel tanks will extend the usefulness of your new beast, but as gasoline will be an even more limited resource once the refineries stop churning, it would be best to embark on journeys in your post-reckoning tank only in times of dire need.

And of course, Shaun of the Dead demonstrates how your stepdad's Jaguar can be used as a passable battering ram... for zombies, nonetheless. And as long as we're on the topic,

4. Leave your tragic, crippling psychological flaws at home. And I mean that. Surviving without prepackaged food and electricity is going to be hard enough without unresolved daddy issues popping up at inopportune moments, like when the survival of the damn species is hanging in the balance.

Decades from now, the survivors of H1N1 influenza are still going to have nightmares about the horrors they witness in the next month. Post-traumatic stress disorder is just one of the hazards associated with being an Omega-man or woman, and nobody's saying coping is going to be easy.

So I like to think the sheer exertion of staying alive will force the Harold Lauders out there to shy away from their homicidal ego-mania, the Harvey Randalls of the world to move beyond the overwhelming guilt they'll feel for cheating on there soon-to-be-dead wives, but I've read too many books and seen too many movies to really believe it. Not even Shaun's best buddy Ed could stop, well, fucking everything up, and they had to deal with zombies!

Things are going to be ugly , and I'd just as soon spend the rest of my life as the lone survivor (sidenote: stock up on spare reading glasses) rather than devolve into a 30-page character development arc when I could be doing something important like bringing the power grid back online or whatever. And how's someone who can't kick a drug habit when there's work to be done supposed to have the fortitude to deal with the obliteration of the human race as we know it, Nadine Cross?

So steel yourself for the end. Honestly, if you can't stand watching the majority of your friends and loved ones die in agony without losing it, we're probably better off without you in the new world anyway. Which brings us to our next point...

5. If you can't handle post-apocalyptic life, consider dying in the first wave. Warring hordes. Cities populated with corpses. Crapping outdoors. There's a lot that's going to be unpleasant about the day after Judgment Day, and unless you're willing to commit to the full time job of surviving, you might want to save yourself the effort and make an early exit.

That part, thankfully, is much easier to achieve than survival. When the H1N1 virus takes a fatal turn, just make yourself an easy target. Do not wash your hands. Do not wear a face mask. Do not obey quarantine notices. Make your way to the nearest hospital and stake out spot as "greeter," exchanging hugs with victims as they're carted into the emergency room. You'll feel good about your new proactive role, they'll feel a little better and with any luck you'll both be dead within a week.

Going in the first wave will guarantee you a hospital bed, a sympathetic medical staff and a hale supply of morphine to get you through your last 24 hours. You'll be one of the lucky ones that gets to skip out on the storm of funerals that's sure to precede the breakdown of society, although your friends and loved ones will probably have to sit through yours.

So if you don't have the stomach to witness the end of the world as we know it, leave the struggling, the starvation and the panicked riots to those of us suckers with a foolish, bullheaded urge to push on in the face of certain doom.

Hope the tips here help make your end of days a once in a lifetime, successful event. Happy apocalypse, everyone!

Block and Roll

2009-05-03T22:26:00.006-05:00

Now that, my friends, was one helluva Mifflin Street Block Party.

I was absolutely thrilled, as I tooled around the best unprompted celebration in the midwest this weekend, microphone in hand and occasionally nursing a brew, to see everything I found disheartening about last year's block party on the mend. Even though the overall attendance was higher this year, arrests dropped through the floor. Instead of (just) staring out over the crowd and pounding beers, party-goers meandered between the food carts or danced to the live music.

Police, for the most part, played the role of peace keepers and let the party happen.

Having a main stage as a central focus is exactly what the Mifflin Street Block Party needed, and as a WSUM alum, I could not be prouder of the UW's student radio station for taking a leadership role in making it happen. In my time as a leader at WSUM, fronting the main event at what is arguably the most beloved annual celebration for UW students was something we could only dream of. The station, founded in 2002, was too young. Now, they're revelling in every ounce of credit they have due them after an uproariously successful first bout as the patron saints of the block party.

The fact that the organizers who simultaneously brought city-sanctioned music, focus and porta-potties back to the block party made their way through every bit of red tape the city could throw at them in nine days is a testament to what this event could become. I'm not talking about something gated, stamped and bled of all its verve like (don't say Freakfest) Halloween on State Street.

Instead, many of the organizers, and I as well, hope to see Mifflin grow to its former glory. Certainly I don't want it to become a violent clash between war protesters and police again -- in fact, I'd prefer it if there wasn't a war to protest at all. But if one stage with DJs can succeed, what about another stage full of local rock acts, and another stage featuring hip-hop artists, or reggae, or indie.

It took a whole lot of people to get the block party headed back toward these ends. Alders Mike Verveer and Bridget Maniaci tried group after group, looking for one viable enough to front the money and expertise to make it happen. WSUMers, particularly general manager Dave Black, engineer Matt Rockwell and station manager Jenny Underwood, turned their full focus like a sharply-honed tool on bringing every puzzle piece together in breathtaking time. Mayoral aide Joel Plant and dozens of other city staffers exercised patient wisdom in helping, guiding and, eventually, green-lighting the entire fiasco. David Coleman and Ny Bass from DCNY Pro helped pull it all together through promotion and organization. Central District Police Captain Mary Schauf was just as involved every step of the way as she was on the day itself, exhibiting a dedication that was topped only by the discretion with which her officers acted throughout the course of the block party.

All in all, it was truly a Mifflin Day Miracle, and I'm more excited than ever to see what next year's block party will bring.

Cross-Post

2009-04-29T12:49:00.003-05:00

Wondering what else I've been up to lately? Check out my band Common Swift's blog for an update on the release of our first EP and the aftermath of our tour in La Crosse last weekend. Also, there are pictures up on our myspace page of the tour and the ensuing pandemonium.

God, but there's a lot going on right now.

Press Corpse

2009-04-29T00:36:00.006-05:00

I don't find it particularly funny that I already heard this phrase once today. In reference to a different time but a similar situation, someone once said, "Would the last business out of Wisconsin please hit the lights?"

Today, it's starting to feel like "Would the last member of the media out of Wisconsin please hit the lights?" would be more appropriate.

My dislike of Clearchannel is well-documented, but until today, it wasn't personal. It may have been moral, political and professional, but they had never before done something directly to me or a friend of mine. Of course, in the current news climate, I guess it was only a matter of time.

Jason Fischer is a younger guy like me, and worked for the company for several years, first at their Milwaukee affiliate and then here in Madison at WIBA. He primarily covered their nightsides, meaning we saw each other at a lot of city council meetings, county functions, school board hee-haws and the other miscellaneous news nuggets that happen in the hours after normal people get to have their dinner and call it a day.

As the reporter for WIBA, Jason was my primary competition, but that didn't stop us from hitting it off right away. Perhaps it's a self-defense mechanism in a hostile environment, but cracking wise becomes a way of life in the back row during five-hour city council meetings, and Jason I have been jokingly reprimanded by the Mayor himself for "appearing to have way too much fun" during serious budget sessions.

He's sharp, brutally competent, positive in a pinch, well-read and now... unemployed, thanks to the Clearchannel corporate masters in San Antonio.

He's not the only one. As I understand it, Clearchannel gutted the WIBA news room this morning, leaving only a couple members of the morning team. I don't know who all went, but there were a lot of veterans in that news room. You don't need a lot of veterans, though, when your plan is to have Madison act as a "spoke" for a larger regional "news hub" that pipes the news of the day out to cities hundreds of miles away.

Call me naive, but I can't to this day believe that Clearchannel's business model is still legal.

So to take a quick tally, this reduces the City Hall Press Corps to two and a half people, tops. Kristin Czubkowski from the Capital Times can be found reliably in the back row at all hours of a city council meeting and at most important committee meetings as well. I seldom miss a city council meeting, save when I have to fill in on the early morning shift (the one that starts at three AM).

And of course, there's Nick Heynen, the nightside reporter from the State Journal, who shows up at meetings when there's not something else more pressing happening on the scanner. Somewhere out there, Dean Mosiman is floating in the aether gathering his information in mystical ways only a city hall vet can, but we don't see him at council meetings.

If there's blood, guts or tears, the TV stations might stop out, and they will now outnumber the regulars. If there's a campus-related issue, the student papers will send a reporter and a shooter each, and THEY will now outnumber the regulars.

I texted Kristin about Jason being let go, and she echoed my own sentiments: "Clearchannel has no idea what it's given up. Idiots."

And she was more right than she knew, because to the people thousands of miles away who made the decision to let Jason and his co-workers go, the newsies they fired today were nothing more than names on a spreadsheet. That's another danger of massive media ownership in America, and as more names fall off the front of media row, I get more concerned about the future of our country.

In 2003, the American people were unwittingly lead into a war in part because the national press corps didn't ask the right questions of our elected officials, and an angry punk rock band called Anti-Flag wrote a song about it called the "Press Corpse" that, in part, inspired me to become a reporter.

In 2003, ad revenues were fat and juicy compared to today, and the press's ranks were likely once-and-a-half to twice what they are right now. I feel safe in saying Anti-Flag hadn't seen anything yet.

Drinkability

2009-04-27T23:52:00.003-05:00

There isn't much I don't resent about Budweiser, like being from Missouri and pretending to be able to make a goddamn beer. But one of their recent advertising campaigns, the one flaunting their swill's so-called "drinkability," has really got my goat.

It's not that I object to their minor manipulation of the English language. Stephen Colbert tweaks words all the time, and I admire the hell out of him for it.

Foremost, I'm cheesed off that they co-opted a term that was already sort of part of the vernacular and turned it into a trademark. I'm even more cheesed off that they think they can claim a monopoly on being drinkable when their product makes me gag like gasoline mixed with ipecac. You know what it takes to be drinkable? Two atoms of hydrogen, one atom of oxygen and a steady temperature between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius.

So I've been bound and determined for some time to re-claim the term from Budweiser's corporate sluts, and it just struck me the other week how to do it.

As I was wrapping up a particularly enjoyable phone interview at work the other week, I nodded to myself and chuckled, "Man, I wouldn't mind sitting down for a beer with that guy." This got me to thinking about the number of elected, state or municipal officials who, while they may be very competent and even good at their jobs, are not particularly engaging, at least at first blush.

But there are a select few who leave me in a better mood after speaking with them. For whatever reason, they're just all-around, fascinating and seemingly good folks, and I really would like to sit down and have a beer with them.

To reclaim the word from the corporate sluts, they have good drinkability.

Now, I know it's an unfortunate and somewhat established fact that when Americans were polled in the months leading up to the 2004 election, they overwhelmingly said they would be more interested in sitting down to have a beer with George W. Bush than John Kerry. We all know how that turned out, and I'm not saying drinkability in an official is the end-all be-all as a measuring stick for the kind of public steward a person is.

But the notion did get me thinking, and I've decided to start a list of public officials I'd really like to sit down for a brew with. I'll add to it from time to time, and hopefully I'll get to cross a few off as well. But without more ado, here are the first five.

1. State Representative Jeff Smith. I'll admit, I'm starting the beer list with a partial. While I haven't sat down specifically to have a beer with this Eau Claire Democrat, I did bump into him at my Wednesday night hangout on the outer capitol loop a couple months ago, and we had a brief discussion at the bar.

Smith, a handful of other legislators and it seemed their entire office staffs must have spent the evening working late on a big project, because they were out en masse that night. My buddies and I watched, bemused, for a while, then I went up to the bar to introduce myself to Smith and a certain young-legislator-with-a-lot-of-power-who-shall-go-unnamed.

When I identified myself as a reporter, Smith's colleague suddenly became much less interested in our end of the bar and, engrossed in his Blackberry, wandered into a solitary corner to bask in its cold glow. I watched him go, then turned back to Smith and grinned.

"He doesn't care much for the press, does he? Was it something I said?"

Smith looked at his beer and smirked. "He's kind of the jumpy type."

"And you?"

"Me? I'm just a guy from Eau Claire who works well with other people and enjoys a cold beer," he said. I told him I respect the hell out of that. We chatted for a while about his work on the state's new Committee on Elections and Campaign Reform before I closed my tab and took off. I'd still jump at the chance to finish my conversation with this laid back legislator who clearly understands that reporters are people too.

2. State Treasurer Dawn Marie Sass. Yeah, I know, the freakin' state treasurer. Sounds boring, right? What the hell does she even do?

Well, for starters, she tells a helluva story. I've never met her in person, but there have been times when she's had me nearly in tears of laughter while on the phone. Being able to tell a good old-fashioned ripping yarn is rapidly dwindling as a skillset in today's society, but Sass was either schooled in the trade, or else she was born a prodigy.

And I'm talking about on-topic stories she was telling me, nothing off the record or meant simply to entertain. I am absolutely convinced this woman is just a font of entertainment in a social situation. She's gregarious, engaging and impeccable in her timing. A dirty joke from Dawn Marie Sass could probably reduce a barfight to a fit of jocularity in mere seconds.

3. UW-Madison School of Journalism Director Jim Baughman. And it's basically my fault that I haven't been able to sit down with this icon yet, because I was too dumb when I was a student in one of his lectures to go up and introduce myself. Unfortunately, I took "A History of Mass Communication" before I had fully grasped the concept that professors can be fascinating human beings and can even be approached outside of class.

Instead, I satisfied myself by faithfully attending his lectures, which I once described to a friend as the most enlightening standup routines I'd ever sat through. His impression of George W. Bush never failed to bring down the house, and stories about his grandmother became the stuff of legends. Looking back at my notes, unfortunately, it seems I was too busy trying to take down the sheer volume of knowledge he was imparting to scribble many of his quotations in the margins, other than a now-inexplicable, "Our journalism commandos will burst into History and say, 'Major in Journalism or DIE!' -JB-"

It's rumored that Baughman is a regular at a select number of local watering holes. Try as I might, I'm fighting fate, and I've never seen him at a brewpub.

4. Dane County Supervisor Eileen Bruskewitz. I'm fond of saying there's no disagreement that can't settled over a beer or two. Eileen Bruskewitz and I would need a keg to get through the list of points we would likely spar over.

Waunakee's representative on the County Board was a relentless promoter of Nancy Mistele's sometimes tasteless election bid for the county executive's seat. She fights many moves by the board to preserve and conserve Dane County's natural areas, arguing it's not the government's place to act as a landowner, but also saying some flagrantly dismissive things about environmental concerns that really get my green hackles up.

Bruskewitz is even a staunch opponent of creating a Regional Transit Authority to fund and build a commuter rail line across the county. On election night at Nancy Mistele's campaign headquarters, our friendly conversation turned to this topic, and we did have a bit of a verbal tussle on the subject.

I heartily enjoyed it. There's something to be said for a good argument against a well-researched opponent. Bruskewitz may be alarmingly right-wing compared to the crowd I normally move with, but she's incisive, quick-witted and doesn't take the disagreement personally.

We agreed on election night that a more proper venue and a little more time to kill would be appropriate for a "final showdown" over the train issue, and I do hope we get a chance to get the drinks we sort of promised each other.

5. Dodge County Sheriff Todd Nehls. And to be fair, there are a number of law enforcement officials I wouldn't mind having a beer with -- Sheriff Dennis Richards and Chief Deputy Mike Babcock in Columbia County, Sheriff Randy Roderick in Green County, Sheriff Dave Mahoney in Dane County, Madison Police Chief Noble Wray and spokesman Joel Despain, just to name a few.

But I gained a lot of respect for Sheriff Nehls during a phone interview recently. We were discussing the alarming number of car crash fatalities involving young people in the Beaver Dam area, and instead of the formal, rehearsed "this is a tragic day for (blank)" speech I've come to expect from many officials, he spoke to me from the heart.

Nehls lamented the lack of activities for young people in the small community to keep them from drinking in the country, a popular past time in Smalltown Wisconsin. Nehls and I compared notes about our individual small towns, and the perception that one must drive everywhere.

Throughout the conversation, his emotions ranged from deep regret through frustration and even borderline anger when he told me one story. As they were taking the body of one young person from the car she was killed in, Nehls told me they found the obituary of one of her classmates, killed several weeks before, in the glove box.

It was one of the most real conversations I've ever had with an official, but Nehls can always be counted on to bypass the bullshit. I'm always willing to buy for anyone who's that sincere.

Fairly Painless

2009-04-21T21:19:00.003-05:00

I feel like my audition for the afternoon hosts's job went pretty damn well. Special thanks to Kristin Czubkowski from the Capital Times and Jesse Russell from Dane101 for coming up, sharing their stories and easing the burden on a freshman afternoon show host.

And now we play the waiting game. It's out of my hands, and it's in the management's.

I hate the waiting game.

If you're morbidly curious, here, finally are a few clips from the experience.

Different Hats

2009-04-19T23:22:00.004-05:00

If you had asked me to draw an ideal road map for my career three years ago, I probably would have started with a dot that said, "Graduate College" then progressed through a series of jobs in the media to pump up my resume and ended with a dot that read, "Get a radio show where I can shoot my mouth off indiscriminately." I also probably would have added a few more steps after that, something to the affect of "lose the rest of my hair," "get fat and happy" and then "retire."

Yet here I am three years later, and I've got an outside shot at crossing that big end goal off my list. It's a little overwhelming...

...No, I didn't mean the "lose the rest of my hair" goal, though I suppose I'm within striking distance if this week doesn't go well. What I mean is I'm getting ~~two~~ one afternoons this week to audition as an afternoon talk show host on AM1670 WTDY in Madison. If I can pull it off, and it's a big if, it would be a huge step up and perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The two previous afternoon hosts, Prebil and Murph, departed WTDY for a pretty sweet gig in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago, and since then, listeners have heard a parade of varying drive-time personalities while the management has worked behind the scenes to fill the spot permanently. I consider myself a betting man, but I would just as soon keep my money to myself as far as who they will settle on to fill the slots.

Yet somehow, I like to think through cunning and conniving, I'm in the running. Now it's just a matter of not blowing it.

So I'm going to try to approach the audition the same way I approach the blog -- with a grain of salt, but also with a healthy curiosity and holding nothing so sacred it can't be laughed at. It's been almost two years since I hosted the last edition of "Slightly Off Kilter," my contribution to the world of college radio. College Broadcasting Incorporated sat up and took notice when they named our show 2007's best regularly scheduled program in the nation.

So Monday ~~and Thursday~~ this week, from 3:00 to 6:00, I'll be hanging up my reporter's hat and switching the safety off for a bit. Hopefully, after two years on the coat tree, my Host's Hat hasn't collected so much dust that I can't turn a few heads on the commercial radio scene.

For the most part, I'll keep the topics lighthearted, but nothing's off limits. And it's a call-in show, so I look forward to being told how wrong I am by everyone that can operate a touch-tone.

Tune in. It'll be something, anyway!

***Monday morning edit -- Change in plans, and I'm only hosting for sure on Monday now. Thursday could still be in the mix, but things are very fluid***

Mifflin Day Miracle?

2009-04-14T09:50:00.009-05:00

And almost 365 turns of the world later, we're here again -- poised on the eve of another Mifflin Street Block Party with no accord reached between police and partiers.

Yet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love this event. When I was a student, I laid plans for the day weeks in advance. I had to make sure I had room to sleep however many guests I was expecting, there had to be a guaranteed source of meat to grill and beer to drink, and, if there was time, it helped to have a destination in mind on the street itself.

But that, to me, has always been the glorious part of the block party. Sure, it's nice to know someone and have a porch or balcony to stand on. But if not, there's always the option of wandering up and down the block seeing the sights, pausing to take in a good band and sparking random friendships with people you'll never see again.

I honestly think Mifflin Day is more magical than Christmas.

Unfortunately, those good vibes have been on the decline in recent years because of rising arrests, increasing noise citations and the resulting decline in the number of bands. If somebody doesn't do something, one of the most unique traditions in Madison is going to become what outsiders have always said it was anyway. Take away the music and the high spirits, and you're left with a bunch of people standing around drinking in front yards, eyeing the police suspiciously.

It would be a "drunkfest," to quote a wise man I worked with once.

The Wisconsin Union Directorate tried, heroically, to step up to the plate and organize the event. And by organize, I don't mean "suck the fun out of," which some argue is what happened to Halloween. They wanted to work with the city to get a street use permit and noise permits, thus cutting down on arrests and citations, and set up a music stage with a line-up.

I'm told the chancellor's office pulled the plug on that pretty quickly, wanting no association with the block party. Never mind that it takes place only a few blocks from campus. Never mind that 80 percent of the revelers are UW students or alumni. Never mind that some of my favorite college memories will be forever rooted in that scrubbly excuse for grass that grows between the houses and the street on Mifflin.

This is the new, re-imagined University of Wisconsin, damnit! IF there's drinking that takes place, we certainly didn't sanction it!

So since Bascom Hall has torpedoed WUD's effort to work with the city, now the students themselves are pulling together to get the permits needed to make it a "legitimate event" in the eyes of police and city officials. They face an uphill battle with less than three weeks until the event takes place May 2, but they've got neighborhood Alder Mike Verveer backing them up.

Verveer is a Mifflin lifer, like I hope to be one day, having never missed a block party since his freshman year in college. His streak's considerably longer than mine (this will be number six for me). He understands what the block party can be, and what it's become. I think he would move heaven and earth to bring the music back to Mifflin.

I applaud Verveer and the students both for their efforts, and now the onus is on city officials. It's certainly an unusual notion to give a group of people with no organizational affiliation street and noise permits, but it's not without precedent.

It's certainly late in the game to get a process like this started, but nobody counted on WUD getting the rug ripped out from under them. The very fact that a group has coalesced to take up WUD's fight is proof they have the capability and the resolve to make this work.

The City of Madison needs to recognize this and do everything to expedite the permitting process. What we need now is a Mifflin Day Miracle.

Fruits of Our Labor

2009-04-10T15:41:00.002-05:00

After several delays, we've finally put together a master cut of our rookie piece for Wis-Kino's 48 hour film kabaret last March. It seems like a lot of blood, sweat and tears for a five minute piece to end up on Youtube, but damn was it fun! Enjoy!

When I See It

2009-04-07T16:41:00.004-05:00

In response to a few observations I posted on the blog last week, my friend and mentor Tim Morrissey said a few nice things about me at his blog, "The Way Things R." They're intimidating things, flattering things, the kind of things that paint me as a civil, sensitive, responsible adult.

Thankfully, my pals at Dane101 have offered me a chance to associate with something so vile and repugnant (I hope), my name will be free from those kinds of connotations for months to come.

Justice Potter Stewart once wrote in a Supreme Court opinion about obscenity, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." This has always just struck me as a really long-winded spiel to go off on, when all he needed to say was, "the Aristocrats."

If you're unfamiliar with the Aristocrats joke, it's basically carte blanche to say the most outrageous things imaginable under the guise of telling a joke. Put less succinctly at Dane101, "The concept and set up of the joke is fairly simple as it typically starts with a man or a family walking into a talent agent's office and pitching an act. The next part is the difficult part as the comedian launches into a lengthy description of the most offensive act the dark recesses of his or her mind can dream up. The act typically includes quite a bit of cursing and a whole lot of sexual deviance. The goal is to make it to the punchline which is always the same. The agent asks "What the heck do you call an act like that?" and the comedian says with much flourish "I call it 'The Aristocrats'."

Like Stewart, I know it when I see it too, and I even have a respectably unhealthy appreciation for the obscene, which is why I'm thrilled that Jesse Russell at Dane101 asked me to be part of a local spin on the old topic. I'll be part of a panel of judges with Scott Gordon from The Onion's Decider and Katjusa Cisar from 77Square, and up to a dozen local comedians will take a stab at making us wince.

Bring it on.

And if you think listening to a dozen different versions of the Aristocrats joke would wear thin after a while, you've obviously never seen the documentary bearing the same name. I think this is going to be an absolute scream, and I hope to see a good turn out.

Just make sure you don't plan on eating shortly before or after the performance.

And in all seriousness, Tim, thanks for the kind words.

Deuce ex Machina

2009-04-05T23:22:00.004-05:00

I won't say the race for Madison's district two city council seat has gotten more dull since the field of candidates was narrowed down from five to two. While the much-anticipated defeat of Dennis deNure sapped its entertainment value somewhat, things have only heated up between the victors in February's primary, incumbent Brenda Konkel and challenger Bridget Maniaci.

My personal attention has been wrenched elsewhere. There have been a lot of work and life things popping up -- things that are afoot and could eventually mean exciting things for me and the blog alike.

But I also got so caught up in reading other media's coverage of the Rumble in the Deuce, I forgot to do some of my own. Hands down, this race caught the most attention out of any of the city council races, as you can tell not only by picking up a local paper, but by perusing Konkel and Maniaci's donor lists as well.

There have been big name endorsements. Konkel comes in packing the Progressive Dane Mod Squad, plus a big nod from Wisconsin Assemblyman Mark Pocan, while Maniaci has amassed a trifecta of mayoral magnificence with endorsements from Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and former mayors Paul Soglin and Joe Sensenbrenner. The Cieslewicz endorsement was predictable and could have even been damaging to Maniaci's campaign, had it not been for the nod from Soglin, which surprised a lot of people and leant her campaign the scrapper image Konkel had previously had a monopoly on.

There has been a glut of newspaper coverage, complete with an even split in endorsements as the Capital Times pushed Konkel and the Wisconsin State Journal backed Maniaci. The student papers both swung for Maniaci, which was not terribly surprising.

There has certainly been an explosion of yard signs, popping up like teal and purple springtime flowers as the snow disappeared. More unexpected were the pair of billboards, commissioned by the Madison Professional Police Officers Association, urging residents of the Deuce to vote for Maniaci.

For her part, Maniaci says she was just as surprised as everyone else about the billboards. When the MPPOA endorsed her, she says it involved a lengthy phone call during which the question was posed, "How do you feel about billboards?"

"I kind of stopped and said, 'Okay I guess,'" Maniaci told me. "I just didn't want my picture on it. But that was all I heard about it for a while."

Lo and behold, within a few weeks time the pictureless billboards sprouted up without another mention from the police union, a situation Maniaci says hasn't yet ceased to strike her as "surreal."

There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to analyzing support and predicting who will come out on top. It's easy to just go ahead and use yard signs as an indicator of expected vote totals, so I will.

After all, I think the yard sign count runs pretty parallel to the race as I've observed it. In the weeks just before and after the primary election, Konkel's purple yard signs were by far the most prevalent, particularly in the more eastern portion of the deuce -- likely leftovers from one of her previous runs at the seat.

But as the Maniaci campaign has picked up steam, her aqua plaquards have exploded across the deuce. Just last week, a Maniaci sign has appeared in front of every property along the left side of Gorham Street between Brearly and Paterson Streets. All the buildings are larger apartment complexes, and I'm willing to stake money on my hypothesis that Maniaci has picked up the support of an enthusiastic landlord and not staged a coup in the 900 block of Gorham, but anything's possible.

Most streets, however, are much more evenly divided. A walk down Sherman Avenue or Blair Street will demonstrate how this race has pitted neighbor against neighbor, with clusters and rows of purple pitted against the encroaching aquamarine, or whatever that damn color is.

It is aquamarine, right? I was one of those kids with the 12-crayon box.

If I had to call the race based solely on yard sign support, I'd say it's a dead heat right now, which does not bode well for the incumbent. After the primary, a lot was riding on which way Adam Walsh and Sherman Hackbarth's supporters broke, and it seems like they've scattered willy-nilly.

Both campaigns have fielded massive teams of volunteers. Both have flooded front porches and mailboxes with literature, to the point where I'm seriously questioning the environmental cred of each.

Konkel has stood her ground and defined herself, wisely, as a fighter and city hall troublemaker. Maniaci has rooted herself strongly in the discontent of a few, then used that to expand into what's become a solid base of support.

It's going to be a fight to the finish -- as a wise albeit dead man once said, "That's a good place to end." Now I just need to figure out who the heck to vote for.

Corpse-back Riding

2009-04-03T00:01:00.003-05:00

I hate obligatory remembrances as much as the next guy, but they serve their purpose. So yes, it was a year ago today that UW-student Brittany Zimmermann was murdered in her Doty Street apartment.

And here's where obligatory remembrances serve their purpose. I have typed or spoken some version of that phrase, "UW-student Brittany Zimmermann, murdered in her Doty Street apartment," literally hundreds of times in the past year -- maybe more. As a news reporter and anchor, I've made mention of the event so many times that... well, I don't want to say it lost its meaning to me, but over time, the bitter anger I felt over her death had begun to abate.

But the first anniversary of this tragedy gave me all new sources of that stinging clean, white-hot rage that first welled up inside me and inspired me to start blogging.

I didn't know Brittany personally, but I felt her loss as a Badger alum, a member of the community and a guy with a little sister Brittany's age living within blocks of the murder scene. The outrage I felt stemmed from a combination of shock, alarm that the system could fail this woman so completely and disappointment in our local officials for their lies, half-truths and complete unwillingness to disclose answers about the debacle.

These are all distressing, ugly feelings to have, and with time, it becomes easier and healthier to let them fade away. It's more comfortable to remember "Brittany Zimmermann, who was murdered in her Doty Street apartment," than it is to fathom the full human scale of the tragedy.

So it was with considerable chagrin that I approached my first assignment of the day -- covering the Brittany Zimmermann remembrance under the bell tower atop Bascom Hill. I certainly recognize the news value in the event and the interest we as members of the public have in peering into it, but nothing will ever stop me from feeling like a voyeur when I'm literally going out of my way to watch other people suffer.

But I have a job to do as a journalist, and self-hating reporter or not, I'm comfortable with myself if I cover these sorts of events in as sensitive a manner as possible, clutching my humanity and decency close. Reporter or not, I'm a human being first, and while it may cost me some so-called "competitive edge," as a matter of principle I won't ever do anything I wouldn't want done to my family if I was the one in the ground.

Apparently, though, two people left their humanity and their decency at home in recognition of Brittany's death.

A Madison Police press release in the week leading up to the anniversary made it clear that Brittany's family did not want to deal with the media, and those members of the media with a soul respected that. My assignment at the remembrance today was to roll some nat sound and then talk to a few students and get their take on the atmosphere around campus.

When I arrived, the family was gathered around the base of the bell tower. Nearby, posses from the university and police administration hovered respectfully. Keeping a 20-yard perimeter around them was a small ensemble of media, mostly newspaper photographers and television crews, all respectfully silent.

The ceremony began as a color guard approached the tower, and the bell began to sound, once for each of the years in Zimmermann's short life. All in all, it was very nice, until the tool bag with a camera and a long lens moved in for the kill.

While I can find a lot of stones to throw at our Modern American Mediascape, I'm often the first to take offense when someone accuses the media of being too pushy. I maintain that, like with any line of work, 99 percent of reporters are decent people doing their job the best they can that know where the line is and will go to extremes to avoid crossing it.

But there's one in every crowd, and as a former newspaper photographer, I can tell you exactly what tool bag was trying to do with his long lens. Faced with a row of sobbing family members, he had to move to within five feet to get a sharp picture of his subject, framed from the eyebrows to the chin, of tears running down the subject's cheek. The depth of field in a shot like that is so shallow, the other family members are reduced to fuzzy cardboard cutouts, but the tears pop off the paper like gems.

It's a layout editor's wet dream.

And he didn't just shoot a few photos. That bell tolled 21 times, and from clangs two through fifteen, he was crouched up and down that row of mourning family members, shutter clicking like a machine gun until police spokesman Joel Despain tapped him on the shoulder and gave him a look that said the only thing that needed shooting was tool bag with the long lens.

I didn't recognize tool bag with the long lens, so I can't call him or the publication he represents out yet. But while the rest of the media kept a respectful distance, he was in there milking that family's grief for all it was worth, and it cast all of us as a whole in a poor light.

But as inappropriate as his behavior was, there was someone else at that remembrance even more hollow as a human being.

In hindsight, I should not have been surprised to see county executive candidate Nancy Mistele there. She's staked her entire campaign on faulting incumbent Kathleen Falk for the tragedy, sometimes fairly, but usually in ways that make me nauseous. Without the murder on Doty Street, Mistele's campaign platform would be bereft of all but one knotty plank -- some rural residents' regressive, irrational fear of bringing commuter rail to Dane County, but that's another issue entirely and couldn't win her 30 percent of the vote.

No one has managed to wring more personal benefit from this innocent young girl's death than Mistele. If there weren't laws against such a thing, she would probably try to dig up Brittany Zimmermann's body and ride it straight into the county executive's office like a sled.

Yet there she was atop Bascom Hill, surrounded by her posse of county officials which included, I was sad to note, Supervisor Ronn Ferrell, who's always struck me as a decent guy otherwise.

I bit my tongue until it went numb and walked the other way when the bell stopped tolling. Had I been a little more in control, I'd have stuck a live mic in her face and asked, "Seriously? What the hell? Have you just foresworn decency in your pursuit of this office or what?" I really wish I had now.

I heard later from another reporter that he did meander over to her and, without rolling tape, asked what brought her out. My source tells me she gave him a calculated lip quiver and sniffled, "I'm just out here for Brittany."

Every decent person on top of that hill today spent half an hour in the place they least wanted to be at that particular moment. Brittany's family was suffering the most visibly, but rest assured Lori Berquam and her crew had nice warm offices within a hundred paces, the police officials present would have traded their badges to have a killer off the streets, and most of the media were so busy hating themselves they'd just as soon have been working for the Rocky Mountain News.

But it was a red-letter day for Nancy Mistele, for whom the afternoon's biggest tragedy was that none of Brittany's family wanted to have their picture taken with her for campaign literature.

Police and Thieves

2009-03-28T18:04:00.003-05:00

Note: I just "graduated" from Madison's nine-week Citizen's Police Academy. In a nutshell, it's a series of three-hour classes where the cops bring in someone from each division to talk about different aspects of the Madison Police Department. It's strictly an educational thing -- there's no authority or badge or firearm you get for participating. But I learned a lot, and I would recommend the class to anyone who's interested in the way the department works.

At any rate, Public Information Officer Joel Despain asked me to pen a piece about my experience in the class for the MPD newsletter.

The evening after leaders from the Madison Police Department and the city press corps sat down last summer to talk over the increasingly frustrating communications gap surrounding the stranger homicides the department has been investigating, I half-jokingly wrote, on my blog, that the whole thing reminded me of, "a massive, gloves-off counseling session between a married couple that hasn't spoken in months."

There were certainly more than a few uncomfortable moments as, one by one, the sides aired their grievances. There are likely a few issues we’ll never come to a complete consensus on. But at the end of the day, we were able to agree on a few crucial points.

While our methods may differ, the media and the police share a set of common goals—we strive to keep the public informed, and in keeping them informed, we strive to keep them safe.

But more importantly, furthering those ends requires keeping an open line of communication and maintaining a sense of trust between all parties. Like any other relationship, the link between cops and reporters can’t be taken for granted, or else it will fall apart entirely. It’s something we have to work on together, constantly.

That kind of effort doesn’t come easy when a tight city budget scales back the overtime that’s available or waning ad revenues lead to yet another round of layoffs in the news room. It’s certainly more efficient in terms of man-hours to deal with each other as faceless voices on a phone line, but that kind of nuts-and-bolts approach does a disservice to the hardworking parties on either end, as well as the people we’re supposed to serve.

So when I heard about the opportunity to enlist in the Madison Citizen’s Police Academy, I seized on it eagerly. If nothing else, I figured it would be a chance to get to know a few more of the faces that work beyond the public’s realm of perception and learn how they do their jobs.

And I certainly got that chance, but more importantly, the citizen’s academy leant me a deeper understanding and appreciation of the depth at which our police department operates. Granted, my perspective on the department’s goings-on is still limited, but I was awed by the competence, dedication and attention to detail the public servants our class met bring to their jobs.

Viewed from the outside, the police department appears to move like some sort of autonomous, headless beast (much how the media appears to operate, from an outsider’s perspective). But on a closer approach, one begins to grasp the number of levels that have to mesh in order for the department to work, from the beat cops that show up at a crime scene to the investigators that figure out what happened to the Crime Response Program that comes in and helps the victims start to pick up the pieces.

Again and again throughout the citizen’s academy, I had these kinds of Eureka moments. It certainly makes sense that Madison has a need for a group that helps crime victims cope with the turmoil they’ve been through, or a gang task force that knows more about how gangs operate than the gang members themselves, or a unit that focuses on the well-being of the officers themselves as they cope daily with stressful situations everyday civilians go out of their way to avoid.

But these vital programs go unnoticed and unappreciated by most civilians, until recently myself included among them.

So it was, in going to these weekly classes, I came to expect to be surprised by what the various presenters had to offer, and I was never disappointed. I also had the chance to surprise a few of them as well, as those who came to know me as something of a deadeye with a 9-mil can attest to.

But while the evening at the MATC training range was certainly the most exciting of the classes, it was informative as well. I was more than a little alarmed to learn I had honed my skills with a firearm on video games at bars that are more technologically advanced than the simulators we train our own police force on.

The understanding and respect I took away from the nine-week course will do more than just help me as a journalist. While the Madison Citizen’s Police Academy should probably serve as a prerequisite for any reporter in this city, the benefits I took away as a civilian are universal to any citizen of our city.

I owe my thanks to Lt. Melissa Schiferl for organizing the class, to the various presenters for their candor and taking the time to share their world with us and to the Madison Common Council for having the wisdom to resist one city leader’s attempts to gut this gem of a program during last fall’s budget process.

As police and media, we will have our inevitable misunderstandings, arguments and even occasions where we have to call each other out for being out-of-line. But if we can continue to build the relationship between cop and reporter, we’ll be able to settle those disagreements with a heated discussion over a brew instead of a cold war.

And We're Back!

2009-03-24T22:03:00.004-05:00

An old pop-punk band once sang, "It's good to be bad if it's better than bored." I think that's a fair assessment of the situation, but as I've grown up, I often find myself substituting "busy" for "bad." Either way, it's better than boredom, a condition I have not suffered from since moving to Madison.

Misbehavior and activity both are easy to overindulge in, but this past week, activity took a clear first place in my list of priorities. I can tell by the bags under my eyes, the week-old pile of unfolded clean clothes in the living room and the dirty dishes stacked next to the sink. And, far from being bored, I was red-lining like an overstrained engine for much of the week, but it didn't feel half bad.

And I got to get back into the filmmaking groove for a weekend!

Come to think of it, I was reminded a lot of college, and a little surprised at how easily I fell back into the ol' triple-the-caffeine-regimen-and-grind-on-through mentality. But buzzing around like a hummingbird of some kind took its toll on my blog entry total for the month, and I apologize for that. I assure you there's plenty to talk about, and I'll try and catch up as best as I can.

For starters, my buddy Griff just got back from serving his country for 15 months in Iraq (and not his first tour either) and I was stuck in a city council meeting the night of Saint Patrick's Day. Sure, they're two seemingly unrelated factoids, but the chance to welcome an old buddy home in style and a need to do something Irish prompted us to road trip it down to Chicago to see Flogging Molly at the House of Blues.

It was my third or fourth time seeing the band live, but I was still blown away by their energy and talent. And it was damn good to have Griff home.

Tuesday's city council meeting went off without a hitch, even if I was a bit tired out from staying out until four in the morning, and then some of the best people in Madison treated me to a fantastic Wednesday night on the town in celebration of the earth's 24th trip around the sun since the day of my birth. I tried (and failed at) sleeping off my hangover before work on Thursday, then braved a County Board meeting with a wicked headache. And then there was Friday.

I've always been a distant admirer of Wis-Kino. It's a local collaborative of Madison film makers, and I went to a few screenings in its heyday, but never really dug in with any gusto. My mistake, but following an unpleasant taste left in our mouths by a brush with the Wisconsin Film Festival, some colleagues and I were aching for a means of cleansing our palates. Lucky for us, Wis-Kino's 48-hour film Kabaret was right around the corner.

The idea? Assemble a team, report for duty, receive the "secret ingredient" and build a film around it in less than 48 hours. There are no trophies, no best actor awards, no flowery speeches -- just those who run themselves into the ground trying to make their five minute film and those who don't. Anyone who knows Tim, Aaron and I knows we don't do projects halfway, so the weeked rapidly turned into an exhaustion race to see who could kill themselves the fastest.

We put together a good crew of people and got our assigned secret ingredient -- "bailout" -- and then we got right to work. Here's a timeline of the weekend from my perspective, and because it's getting late and I need to catch up on a little more sleep.

7:00 PM -- The primer screening begins at Hilldale. 48 hours from now, our final project will be due. Aaron drinks a lot of whiskey.

9:00 PM -- The crew rallies at a handy nearby location where we finalize our assignments for the weekend. Then we begin one of my favorite processes, writing by committee. In two hours we have a concept tied together by a string of potential gags.

11:00 PM -- A few crew members head home as we get into the nitty-gritty of script-writing. Half a dozen of us sit down at computers and begin writing individual scripts.

11:30 PM -- Draft deadline: We get back together, none of us with a complete script, and take turns reading what we have. Kilgore insists on placing a joke about fatties in the film. The rest of the committee insists it would be wasted air in a five minute film.

2:00 AM -- We have outlined a script. Tim carries two pages of scribbled notes and six different scripts covered in cross-outs and circled text back to his apartment and sits down to hash out the final draft. The rest of us hit the sack by 3 AM.

4:21 AM -- An email arrives in my and Aaron's inboxes. The subject header is "script." There is no text in the email and no attachment. I am fast asleep and don't notice. Tim may be so tired he can't properly send an email attachment, but he has nonetheless completed the final draft of our script.

8:15 AM -- I am up and consuming coffee at a prodigious rate. I call Tim to make sure he's bringing extra copies of the script, as we will not be able to print any.

9:00 AM -- Cast and crew rendezvous at the Lindsay, Stone and Briggs ad agency, our primary locale. We set up base camp and start work on the costumes and props we will need. Our prop, costume and grip master Ellie quickly becomes my new hero.

9:30 AM -- I meet Steffen, our cinematographer, for the first time. He also becomes my hero. I take him through the script, then walk with him through each of the areas we will be shooting in and discuss shots.

10:30 AM -- Scene by scene, I start pulling our cast to run lines. For a five minute film, there's a lot of damn memorization in this flick.

11:30 AM -- I remember that I, too, have lines I need to memorize. This comes as a great shock to me, as I have not acted in some time and worse, we're supposed to start shooting at noon.

1:00 PM -- We start shooting. It wasn't learning my lines that slowed us down, but obtaining a makeshift camera dolly that had disappeared somewhere in Madison.

3:00 PM -- We begin rolling film on the fire escape scene. This is somewhat treacherous, and I am alternately convinced that Jeff is going to fall to his death or Erica is going to keel over from heart palpitations. None of this influences me when we push through the entire scene without pausing for a break. We are chasing daylight, goddamnit.

3:05 PM -- Crowds alternately gather and then break up below us, watching the drama unfolding high above them over and over again. Jeff's lunatic giggling and Tim's attempts as a "police officer" to talk him down are apparently fairly convincing. One high schooler shouts up to us between takes she almost dialed 911. I was two steps ahead of her and called Lt. David McCaw at the Madison Police Department at 2:30 to let him know what we were up to.

5:30 PM -- We wrap the treacherous fire escape scene after Aaron nearly kills Erica by reaching out to grab a flying piece of bailout check and Erica thinks he's going to jump. I decide I'm never going hiking with Erica.

6:00 PM -- We wrap the last of our outdoor shots on the ground. The cast and crew are getting crabby -- low blood sugar. We take 60 and get some good eats nearby. It's the first non-bagel food I have had all day.

7:30 PM -- Aaron puts on a fresh pot of coffee, we shake off the exhaustion and get back to cracking. We shoot the last group scene and dismiss some extras, then shoot the one-on-ones. Cast members start dropping like flies as they're dismissed.

12:00 AM -- We start rolling on our last scene at a different locale, the vending machines at Midwest Family Broadcasting. The infamous line, "Salsitas, NICE!" is born in a moment of divine improvisation. We wrap and roll.

2:30 AM -- Sleep.

8:30 AM -- Consciousness hits like a baseball bat... Coffee, shower, Lindsay Stone and Briggs.

9:30 AM -- Aaron and I get cutting at his office after he picks up the captured video from Steffen. We don't quite have the coverage we want for the conference room, but we can make it work.

10:00 AM -- Strutt shows up, and we have a 15 minute sit-down as I take him through the script and explain what we will need for a score.

10:15 AM -- Strutt leaves LSB for his house on the south side, where he will compose the film's score.

12:23 PM -- Somehow, there's an email from Strutt with a link to eight distinctive pieces of scoring for moments in the film... I am in awe of this man for about the twenty-third time in my life.

1:36 PM -- Timmy calls, then joins us in the editing studio. It seems surreal to be editing frantically with them on something that's not "Your Signs." I deal with it.

3:04 PM -- Erica calls... I tell her it's going to be tight. We're worried.

3:40 PM -- Kilgore texts me for the third or fourth time that afternoon, antsy to see progress. He tries to bribe me with ice cream. I cave in.

4:00 PM -- Kilgore shows up without ice cream. We let him see our progress, then send him off for ice cream.

4:30 PM -- A lot more non-editors have started hanging around the studio, which has some nerves on edge, but it seems like we're going to make it now.

5:00 PM -- We have a rough cut that runs 5:20. We need to get it under 5:00.

5:20 PM -- Our cut now runs 5:04. I say it's close e-damn-nough. Timmy throws a line back at me from a year and a half ago when we were working on the Christmas Special sequel: "We've gotten it this close, let's cut it all the way down."

5:30 PM -- We start our rendering process. A power outage or hard drive failure now will ruin our lives, but none seem forthcoming.

6:00 PM -- I am laying on the hard floor breathing deeply, listening to the computer click. I hate rendering.

6:05 PM -- Our render is complete. Aaron starts burning the project to a DVD.

6:20 PM -- We have two DVDs with the screening-cut of Monsieur Maintenance on them. I tell Aaron he is to submit the second copy if I am killed in a fiery accident en route to Hilldale.

6:45 PM -- I am not killed en route to Hilldale, but submit the film to the guy at the door, count the number of entrants above me on the list, then pump my fists into the air and proudly declare, "Third Place!" He looks at me like I don't get it. I look at him like he doesn't get it. We were probably both right.

So all in all, a trying but rewarding experience. My favorites of the night were Rob Matsushita's "Extremed," starring the fabulous Emily Mills, and Josh Klessig's Ethology. The Decider did a write-up on the Kabaret which is definitely worth a read. Those itching to see the final cut of Monsieur Maintenance can check back here in a week. Tim, Aaron and I agreed we want to tack about ten seconds back onto the film and clean it up, and then we'll be posting it on Youtube.

And it sounds like we'll be rallying the same crew to participate in the July Kabaret. Steffen, Ellie, Jeff, Kilgore, Erica, Katie, Adam and Branton were just too good not to work with again.

Now I'm going to sleep, damnit!

Art of the Moniker

2009-03-10T00:40:00.006-05:00

Maybe it's a goofy thing to get excited about, but when I saw the Cap Times headline today that read, "Parka Bandit Hits Again," I let out a whoop, then nearly fell out of my chair in a fit of maniacal chuckling.

No, I was not delighted at the news that some low life had held up his sixth, seventh or even eighth convenience store in a week. And no, I am not in fact, as some have suggested, moonlighting on the side as the Parka Bandit myself, though in my darker, broker hours... Well, we'll just leave it at that.

But I was excited to see the Parka Bandit in the headlines because I coined the term "Parka Bandit" on-air in the middle of last week when I first found out some goon was knocking over gas stations with a black coat's hood cinched down tight over his face. Police spokesman Joel Despain heard it and loved it and ran with it in one of his press releases, and Channel 3 and the Cap Times took it from there.

I had no idea the term would end up being this persistent, but with every store the Parka Bandit hits, it becomes more clear a term is needed to refer to this thug, and I'm pleased mine made the cut.

Again, it seems like a silly thing to get excited over, but I feel like I've achieved some legitimate accomplishment, some rite of passage.

Before I go on, it sounds like this slimeball hit a convenience store again tonight, though a little earlier than he usually strikes. It's the same MO all up and down, though. The suspect walks into a gas station in a black coat, his face covered by the hood, and makes to order a pack of smokes. When he has the clerk's attention, he flashes his piece, they throw money on the counter and he walks away.

It isn't brain surgery. It isn't rocket science. In fact, it's so simple-minded and myopic that this guy has all but guaranteed he's going to be caught eventually. Let's face it. All it would take is an enterprising bystander who realizes that hood cinched down so tight really limits this guy's peripheral vision to bash him over the head with a heavy jar of salsa, and the Parka Bandit's reign of terror would be over.

I've talked to a few police officials about the case, and they all say the same thing: he's not the brightest crayon in the box, and he's probably trying to feed some kind of drug habit.

That's part of the reason I felt coining a moniker for the Parka Bandit was appropriate. Right now, this guy thinks he's walking away with easy money, night in and night out, and he thinks he's pretty tough getting it with a handgun. Others could see his example, and in their own simple, short-sighted ways think they've found a great way to earn a few bucks themselves.

In the long-term, the Parka Bandit will be caught, and he will be locked up in jail for a very long time. But until that happens, we as a society need to make it clear that the bandit's behavior is simply unacceptable. It will not be tolerated. While jail time will make an example of the Parka Bandit eventually, until then he deserves every ounce of our collective derision, accumulated disdain and outright mockery.

Potential copycats need to see that there is nothing glamorous about being a two-bit thug with a handgun, a goofy disguise and delusions of grandeur. Who knows? The Parka Bandit may be a victim of his own circumstances, stealing money to pay off a dangerous debtor or fund his own sick mom's cancer treatment, but he lost any claim for sympathy when he carried a firearm into public and used it to endanger the lives of his fellow Madisonians.

Because as easy as he is to mock, the Parka Bandit and his ilk are two things above all else: dangerous menaces and timebombs waiting to go off. Every time I see a press release come down the pipe about this guy, I hold my breath and hope this wasn't the time the clerk wasn't quick enough with the cash for his liking.

While 95 percent of this sleeze only carries a weapon for show and would never actually use it on an innocent, there's always that dangerous element that's too drugged up or too disconnected from reality or just too nasty to let something like decency stop them from crossing that final line.

LERN TOO RIGHT!!!

2009-02-27T10:55:00.005-06:00

I don't know who writes the web copy for Madison's Channel 27, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's someone's third-grade kid, because most people I know had a better grasp of the English language starting at age eight than this alleged "writer."

It's well-documented that the abuses inflicted upon grammar as we know it by wkowtv.com have rankled me for some time, and while I don't know what it was about today's story on the Allied neighborhood that pushed me over the edge, I may have finally reached my breaking point.

A wise man once said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," so I won't be throwing any rocks at Channel 27's news studio any time soon. I will, however, right these grammatical sins to the best of my ability and be completely merciless in terms of leveling criticism until the culprit either attains his or her GED or is re-assigned to a more appropriate duty at the television station -- say, for instance, pushing a broom.

From wkowtv.com, as of 1 PM Friday, February 27.

" MADISON (WKOW) -- A Madison neighborhood task force is working on making sure people living in the allied drive (1) area can get to the grocery store.

The communities (2) only grocery store, Cub Foods on Verona Road, closed down, and because of the tough economy, it could be a while before another store takes it's (3) place.

The closest stores now are Copps on Whitney Way and Super Target off PD. Both are a two mile trip.

"Even when Cub was here, that was walking distance, they (4) can bring their grocery's (5) back in buggies to their houses...Bus fares will go up to $2.00 in April and I can't see how people are going to survive without a grocery store in their community," says Allied Area Task Force member Robert Artis. "

The corrections, as you see, are simple. These are not nitpicky details, which I could spend even more time whingeing about. These are basic grammatical rules that are being flagrantly ignored -- or, the writer is flagrantly ignorant of them.

(1) Used: "allied drive." Needed: "Allied Drive." The name of a street in Madison is a proper noun, warranting capitalization.

(2) Used: plural form, "communities." Needed: possessive form, "community's." As you'll see, the possessive versus plural forms are really this writer's Achilles' Heel. I can't read a damn story, or in this case, a damn paragraph without choking on one of these errors.

(3) Used: contraction of it is, "it's." Needed: possessive form of it, "its." Some people call this one a curve ball. They're just idiots. You wouldn't say "another store takes it is place," so don't write "another store takes it's place." I learned this when I was seven.

(4) Used: Run-on sentence. Needed: A period and a new sentence. I realize it can be tricky to take spoken sentence fragments and turn them into something that looks good on paper -- I did it for two years. But for the love of everything that's decent in the world, you have to at least TRY! And while you're at it, you can add something in paratheses to make it a little more clear what this goober was talking about, a la "Even when Cub was here, that was (within) walking distance. They (could) bring their groceries back in buggies to their houses..."

(5) Used: possessive form, "grocery's." Needed: plural form, "groceries." This could not BE any more simple. In most cases, if there are more than one of a thing, there's no need for an apostrophe. If a thing belongs to a person or people, use an apostrophe. You just damn well better make sure you place that apostrophe correctly, or we'll really have a beef.

So there you have it: four grafs, and none of them very meaty, five obvious grammatical errors my 10-year-old cousin could have picked out in 30 seconds.

This kind of writing on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter, is brain pollution. It's as dangerous as the C02 and particulate matter being belched into the air by massive factories in our nation. I fully support creating a cap and trade system for carbon emissions in the United States, but there is no excuse for this kind of grammar. It needs to be stamped out, and the most egregious violators need to be publicly flayed in order to keep our children from being exposed to this vile filth.

Its four you're one good.

Nip it in the Bud

2009-02-23T23:35:00.009-06:00

The last thing I wanted to do after a long Monday was sit down and write a double post, but it seems like the State Journal has forced my hand tonight.

Read this, and then ask yourself why any publication posing as a credible news source would choose to run with such drivel. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait...

...Okay, while you were doing that, I sat here and got progressively more fed up with what's clearly a half-assed hatchet job character assassination carried out against one of the most dedicated, selfless, hard-working, amicable and admirable civil servants our city has ever known. State Journal -- No. Inappropriate. Uncalled for. Go back to your sagging ad revenues and think about what you've done.

I'm not attacking Sandy Cullen or Dean Mosiman for their work on this story. I know Sandy personally, and Dean's reputation proceeds him wherever you go in city hall. Many of the same adjectives I used to describe Mike Verveer can be applied in their cases too, and as sure as I know anything, I know writing this piece left an awfully bitter taste in their mouths.

I would lay good money the orders to write this piece came from up top, somewhere. Again, I pose the question: why would a newspaper choose to run this story? What about this story makes it newsworthy? What service does it provide me as a citizen and as a reader?

If I were to try and peel back all the layers of *wrong* heaped into creating this hit piece, I would start by trying to trim away the multiple levels of conjecture used to build a false link from "marijuana" to "Mike Verveer." If you take away the narrative of this piece, clean it up and set it in its proper order, a police officer went into a bar, thought she might have smelled marijuana, decided to leave and saw Mike Verveer on her way out.

Upon the patrolwoman's return, the officer in charge noted the incident and said she ought to file a report. Trying to keep things in order, the police department is reviewing the case to make sure there were no improprieties. Good for them.

It could be there was no weed at all, and the officer was smelling something else. After all, for some godforsaken reason, they make incense that smells like marijuana. If could be the odor was on someone's clothes. It could be someone in an apartment above or an alley behind the restaurant was toking up and a bad HVAC system pumped it in. It could be a few "bad seeds" in a notably dark establishment were enjoying a few puffs.

If simply being in a room that smells of pot is a news story, the entire city of Madison would have had their turn on the front page by now.

The possibilities are so endless, this can't even be called a case of "guilt by association." Nor was Alder Tim Bruer's assertion in the WSJ article that Verveer was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," accurate. This is the condemnation of a man with a political bullseye on his back by enemies striving to draw the remotest connection from him to anything resembling dirt.

Of course, none of that speaks to the fact that there isn't a damn thing wrong with it if a person chooses for him- or herself to rock the occasional bit of ganj. Verveer certainly wouldn't be the first official elected to office that enjoys a puff here or there, but if any of them do, it's none of the press's damn business.

Yes, that's me, a reporter, saying the press ought to go sit and spin on this one. What stinks about this story isn't anything herbal, it's the reek of "gotcha" tabloid grubbing that falls nowhere within the realm of respectable journalism as it was taught to me by the professionals at the University of Wisconsin.

That much said, watch for every single media outlet in town to sieze upon this story. I myself am liable to have to read it on-air tomorrow, and if you listen closely, you'll be able to pick out the sound of grinding teeth.

It doesn't take Rainman to get the math to add up on this one. Word of the investigation worked its way through the ranks at the police department, and eventually one of Verveer's enemies got wind of it. As an assistant district attorney, an outspoken city resident and a longtime member of the Progressive Dane party, he's made plenty of enemies, and there are factions trying to take advantage of a recent momentum swing in local politics that will use any edge they can get.

The news made its way through some of the seedier elements of local government, and eventually one of them walked into a senior editor's office at the right-leaning State Journal and said, "Boy, have I got a scoop for you."

Alder Michael Schumacher calling into question Verveer's suitability to serve on the Alcohol License Review Committee smacks of the worst kind of political gamesmanship. It's no secret he butts heads with Verveer on a number of issues. Frankly, I take it as a comfort on the occasions I see Verveer out at a downtown bar. It's nice to know that the people who regulate the city's drinking establishments, some of them at least, aren't out-of-touch curmudgeonly old squares.

And you'd better believe Alders Tim Bruer and Mark Clear weren't crying when they saw this story make headlines either.

I find nothing so disturbing as the notion that these sorts of political dramas are playing out, but I'm not so naive as to pretend they aren't. I already have it from good sources exactly which alders dug up the dirt, and which of them delivered it. You're on notice. If this sort of chicanery persists in my city's government, I will confirm who among you are perpetuating it, and you will be outed.

After that, I will apply a microscope to every facet of your life and flay you open for the world to see. The blade you wield is double-edged, and if you get too caught up in swinging it, you're liable to trip and fall on it.

All that violent imagery is strictly figurative, of course. But this really cooks my damn bacon.

As to what ought to happen in the next few days, the answer should be nothing. Zilch. Nada. Give the story its fair play, and then let it die a quiet, lonely death. Do not revisit it. Do not follow up on it. In perhaps the most awful pun I've made in months, it ought to be nipped in the bud, and if one person mentions it in passing come Mike Verveer's next run for office, the city council ought to pass legislation making it legal to shoot them.

But, in other news, someone out there had a worse day today than Mike Verveer, and that person is Fitchburg's Marc Jones. Up until this afternoon, Jones thought he was going to be competing with Mayoral candidate Jay Allen in the April election after placing second in last week's primary election by a single vote.

As common sense procedure would dictate in a race so close, the Fitchburg Clerk's office decided to stage a recount. In the course of counting the absentee ballots, they noticed one of the witness signatures on an envelope was invalid, meaning one of the absentee ballots cast was as well. Following state protocols, they picked one of the absentee ballots at random to discard, as the ballots and their envelopes had already been seperated.

The ballot randomly selected to be cast off carried a Marc Jones vote, knocking him into a tie with third place contender Mark Vivian and knocking the race into yet another uncharted facet of state law. In keeping with procedure, they placed the two candidates' names in a hat and drew one at random.

That's how Mark Vivian went from planning a nice, quiet spring break (presumably) to laying plans for an assault against Jay Allen's sizeable lead in the primaries. Witnesses at the drawing tell me Jones took the news with marked calm, meaning if someone bombs Fitchburg City Hall in the next couple of weeks, I know who's going at the top of my suspects list.

Helluva Bender

2009-02-22T12:42:00.002-06:00

When an official with the Middleton Police Department told me it was going to be a while before they knew more details about a string of arsons because the suspects were "still sobering up" at ten in the morning, I knew it was going to be a good story.

Of course, that was more than a week ago on February 13, and as the tale of 23-year-old Christopher Ripp and 19-year-old Collin Tubbs's (alleged) bender has emerged since, I've been proved more right with each detail.

A wise, albeit fictional, man once said, "If you can't do something smart, do something right." While there's certainly nothing intelligent (or admirable, for that matter) about what these two braniacs did, when it comes to history's great nights of mayhem, their (alleged) actions in the wee hours of February 13, 2009 certainly deserve a page in the book.

Of course, Ripp and Tubbs are presumed innocent until they stand trial for their actions, but here's the story as I've been able to piece it together, mostly through conversations with the Middleton Police Department.

It was Thirsty Thursday, and Ripp and Tubbs were throwing a few back at a house party in Middleton. We may never know what started it, and frankly it doesn't matter, but in the course of their carousing, a brawl erupted with some other partiers, words were exchanged, fists were thrown, and feelings were hurt.

After a brief breather, the fighters decided to "take it outside," where the perceived insult became so egregious as to necessitate the introduction of knifeplay into the fray. But stabbing one of the other brawling parties in the hand was only the beginning for Ripp and Tubbs, who then jumped into their car and went tearing through the sleepy, residential streets of Middleton exchanging gunfire with other cars full of window-lickers.

It's no small miracle an innocent bystander wasn't wounded in the ensuing firefight, although I'm sure a few of Middleton's citizenry found perforated mailboxes, garage doors and lawn ornaments the next morning.

After some time, cops say the chase ended without blood, and Ripp and Tubbs returned to their home. That's where a normal night of mayhem might have ended, as they staggered into the living room and passed out cold, only to awake the next morning with Jaeger on their breath, bulletholes in their car and no idea what connection there was between the two.

But what set Ripp and Tubbs apart from your average drunken losers was the decision they made next. Apparently none-too-thrilled with the new "speed holes" in their automobile, they took to the streets again with a gas can, delusions of revenge and not a thread of common sense or decency.

They threw a burning propane cylinder through the window of a house in Middleton, where a guy who had spent the night trying to mediate between the warring parties resides with his wife, who's eight months pregnant. To get back at one of the guys they were fighting, they set fire to a five-unit apartment building in Madison, where four other people with no involvement whatsoever lived. For their coup de grace, they tried to get back at another one of the brawlers by torching the outside of a house in Cross Plains.

Right block, wrong house. I don't envy the family that woke up in the dead of night with no idea why their house was on fire.

All tuckered out, Ripp and Tubbs returned home to sleep the sleep of angels... that is, until they awoke at 7:30 in the morning to find Middleton Police poking around the bullet-riddled car they'd left parked in plain view on the street.

Still drunk, they went charging out the front door yelling at the police, who were in the process of impounding the vehicle as evidence. You have to credit the officers on scene for being able to catch the scent of gasoline on Tubbs and Ripp over the booze they must have reeked of.

If anything, we should be grateful these two menaces made themselves so easy to catch. They've been banged up in the Dane County jail since the thirteenth, and the DA's office is weighing a laundry list of 32 charges against them that include arson and attempted murder.

Personally, I hope they're charged too with Mayhem, which actually is an imprisonable, if vague, offense in Wisconsin, for no other reason than the morning of the thirteenth is a definition of the term worthy of Webster's.

I've also got some healthy respect for Tubbs's dad, Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs, for leaving his no-good kid to rot in jail this long. Bail was set at 40-grand in cash, and while I'm sure posting it or making other arrangements to get the punk out of lockup are not outside Chief Tubbs's means, it doesn't sound like he's made any effort.

The scope of this little crime spree goes well beyond the realm of poor choices and crosses the line of recklessly endangering innocent lives. If Christopher Ripp and Collin Tubbs are ever to become productive members of society, it's tough love that's going to do the job -- the kind of tough love that drops like a hammer.

Theirs is the behavior of dangerous children with no connection to the reality they live in, only a simplistic perception of themselves as the stars in their own private television crime drama.

Open Letter to WSUM

2009-02-20T13:25:00.004-06:00

In response to today's seventh Anniversary of Madison's Snake on the Lake going live on-air, and a dedication by former UW Chancellor John Wiley of their brand-spanking new, state-of-the-art broadcasting facility in the new student services tower, I sent this letter (well, email) to General Manager Dave Black and Tech Director Matt Rockwell today. They are, simply put, the best there are.

"Gentlemen,

I know the WSUM move-in is an ongoing process, and I certainly hate to get the cart and the horse in the wrong order, but in light of tonight's events, I just wanted to offer my heartfelt congratulations to both of you on seeing what some would have called a blissful pipe dream all the way through to an operating reality. I'm a little irked I won't be able to be there early enough for the ex-Chancellor's presentation. As much as I tried to weasle out of work early, it just couldn't happen today, but I will be stopping out briefly a little later this evening.

I worked on the WSUM facilities visioning committee, sketching out the initial concepts for the new studios, knowing that I would be long gone by the time they were actually implemented. It was still one of the most exciting and fulfilling processes of my career at the UW, as we bounced ideas off of each other and, of course, Matt Rockwell, who has worked on this project with all the tenacity of a mother eagle defending her nest. Without his guidance, his technical know-how, his creativity, his drive and his dedication to the project, WSUM's new studio would be a shadow of what it stands to be today: the best student broadcasting facility in the nation. His fingerprints will remain on everything in the station for generations to come. If it's not too dramatic to say so, I think it's his opus.

While Matt's nuts and bolts knowledge of this project is unparalleled, it is matched in intensity only by the depth of Dave Black's vision for WSUM, which spans decades to a time when just having a radio station on the UW campus was more unlikely than the prospect of opening a state of the art facility was in 2006. Every accomplishment that's been made by WSUM's students and staff since its inception has stood on the shoulders of this giant. When he embarked on founding the program, he might have known this day would come, but it's a likely chance nobody else would have given it a shot, and it's his confidence, leadership and attention to detail that has guided WSUM to this point.

Coming up through the years in a ramshackle, second-floor, gerry-rigged, sometimes smelly and sometimes sweltering studio was never easy, but for the students that have built WSUM to what it is today, it was never about the equipment or the building. It was about WSUM's mission, and it was about putting together a unique on-air product we could all be proud of. I don't expect that will ever change, but that hard work is paying out today. It's only right that WSUM will finally have a studio worthy of the dedication exhibited by the dozens, the hundreds of students and staff that pour themselves into making the station the best that it can be. While I'm sorry I won't personally be able to capitalize on it, this new facility will provide opportunities for learning and expression that the towers building never could, and if anything, it will raise the bar even further for the next generation of SUMers.

Congratulations again,
Dusty Weis"

Then There Were Deuce Pt. 2

2009-02-17T22:35:00.002-06:00

Tonight's results in the District Two city council primary:
Brenda Konkel (incumbent): 40%
Bridget Maniaci: 27%
Adam Walsh: 24%
Sherman Hackbarth: 7%
Dennis deNure: 29/50% (no I was not one of the five people who voted for deNure!)

So while Konkel was predictably the top vote-earner of the night, the big victory goes to Maniaci, who snuck away with what could turn out to be a huge win over Walsh. I happened to be at Maniaci's headquarters at Supreme Pizza on East Johnson Street, in a stroke of what was more fortuitous laziness than blind luck (it's a block from my house), when her runners brought back the returns from the final ward of the Deuce. The excitement among her small group of supporters was honestly a little contagious.

Prying herself away from a hug, Maniaci ripped out her cell phone shortly after the news came down and punched in a number from memory. "Hello Dad?" she began. "I won!"

Then she paused for a moment, before finishing, "Well, not WON-won, but I have enough votes!"

Twenty votes, in fact, were what propelled Maniaci ahead of Walsh. Indeed, it seems Maniaci had a serious turnout dropoff working in her favor in Ward 37, compared to the last (mayoral) primary. The area around Tenney Park has the highest number of homeowners in District Two, and Walsh could have hoped for a high margin of victory after targeting his campaign specifically at that subset. But by Maniaci's numbers, there were more than 100 fewer voters who showed up in Ward 37 today than during the 2007 race, and they tied there for votes.

The rest of the math is simple. Maniaci snuck away with a four-vote lead in Ward 39, Walsh took back 13 votes in Ward 38, and then Maniaci absolutely ran away with the Langdon Street-centered, heavily-student 40th Ward. With 37 as an exception, her support grew stronger the closer to campus the voters cast ballots from.

In light of these results, a lot now rides on which way the losing candidates and their supporters break, but I'm willing to say the race between Konkel and Maniaci on April 7 will be a close one no matter what. The turnout will undoubtedly be higher, and seeing as Konkel didn't run away with the race but likely DID draw a high percentage of her fervent supporters out during today's election, she may be near her high-water mark.

Maniaci, on the other hand, has proved she's a viable candidate capable of mounting an effective campaign against four opponents. Her shot at unseating one of Madison's most well-known, passion-inflaming alders now rides on her ability to bring her firepower to bear on one target, siphon support from her vanquished opponents and create an upswell of new interest in residents of the Deuce.

And for his part, THIS blind squirrel is going to enjoy the nut he got away with in last night's post: "It seems likely enough Deucers will want to give Konkel a chance to defend her seat through April that she will be one of the top vote-earners Tuesday. In terms of vocal and visible support throughout the community, Walsh and Maniaci have both run hard, effective campaigns, and now need to hope for an upswell of support to boost them into competition against the incumbent. Maniaci may have a slight edge, but Hackbarth is a wildcard with little shot at a berth in the general election and the ability to spoil it for either Walsh or Maniaci."

Then There Were Deuce

2009-02-16T23:03:00.007-06:00

Three of the candidates pursuing the second district seat on the Madison Common Council are going to sleep very well Tuesday night. One of them will dream of miles upon miles of museums stretching off into the sunset, and the other two will sleep the dreamless sleep of near exhaustion mixed with a few conciliatory drinks.

But knowing the people who are engaged in the race, the two winners of Tuesday's primary won't be going to sleep once the votes are tallied. Secure in the knowledge they'll be appearing on the April ballot, whichever pair of candidates emerges from the dogfight victorious will likely begin laying individual battle plans for the run up to the knock-down, drag-out mano a mano match-up.

Okay, I promise, that's the last of the boxing cliches I'll use today.

But in all seriousness, this has been an intense campaign, with each candidate logging untold hours of spare time trudging through Wisconsin's worst weather and banging down doors. The amount of campaign literature I've seen accumulated inside my front door and littering the gutters is staggering, and I've heard through the grapevine from a number of people who have met personally with one or more office-seeker on their own front stoop.

Though in hindsight, I ought to have pledged my support to whichever candidate could have cornered me on my own front porch, as it's become nearly impossible to find me at home during a reasonable hour of the day. Not a candidate came a-calling to my hobbit hole on Castle Place when I was around, and I'm a little disappointed.

With election day upon us, most of the measily six to ten percent of the voting populace who will turn out have a pretty good idea who they'll be voting for. There's not much left for the candidates to do that could sway their opinion, but I know of at least one who's planning a 4 AM wakeup call to distribute one last round of door hangers anyway.

So for the most part, there's not much left for any of the candidates to do but wait and hope. In terms of what they ought to be hoping for, other than enough people to turn out at election headquarters to help finish the cake and cash the keg (interesting sidenote, I personally excel in both areas), I've taken the time to compile a few suggestions.

Though there's no such thing as a sure thing, incumbent Brenda Konkel need only really hope that her supporters are as numerous as they are vocal, both in the community and on the madison.com forums. While it's no news that the four-term city council member has plenty of people, both in the community and the city government, who would like to see her figuratively offed in the primary, in all likelihood it ain't gonna happen.

Konkel could just as easily begin focusing on the next stage of her re-election bid, setting herself up for some kind of tortoise and hare scenario, but she's far too classy for that. She even told me that should the unthinkable happen and two of her opponents best her in the primary, "I'm not going anywhere. I would still be just as active in the community," and that's something of a comforting thought.

That much said, while four individual candidates don't pose much of a obstacle to her reaching the April election, one strong competitor backed by the other three (and their supporters) could create serious problems in the general election. Konkel ought to be paying keen attention to the other candidates in her race and rooting for a narrow defeat to beset the candidate(s) most likely to support her then in April.

As such, she's probably hoping to see attorney Adam Walsh fail in his bid to get that second slot on the ballot. He's been the least vocal critic of Konkel's performance as alder, and held up against Bridget Maniaci with her ties to the mayor's office that sought to have Konkel ousted and Sherman Hackbarth with his no-nonsense distain for Konkel's idealogical stands, Walsh seems the most likely to jump aboard a Konkel bandwagon.

But as one of the two candidates with a shot at challenging Konkel, Walsh has got his own plans. By centering his campaign heavily on homeowners and the Lapham Elementary School, he's taken a gamble in attempting to ignite his own unique base of support rather than siphon it off Konkel. Come Tuesday evening, Walsh will be hoping to have stoked those flames hot enough to drive unprecedented turnout among the district's non-rental denizens, pushing him over the top.

Maniaci, for her part, will be hoping for her own groundswell of voter turnout from the district's west end, where the concentration of the student population is heaviest. She's won endorsements from both student newspapers, with a blurb in the Daily Cardinal and an in-depth write-up in the Badger Herald, and at 25-years-old, is able to level with students on issues like alcohol density and nightlife concerns where other candidates come off as stuffy.

But it's well-known to anyone who's been a student at the UW that the papers' editorial boards represent the student body as well as the State Journal editorial board represents the city of Madison's populace. What's more discouraging for her is that students have a notriously low voter turnout rate for elections where there's no "George Bush" to vote against.

On the gripping hand, candidate Sherman Hackbarth is probably hoping for a particularly low turnout from newspaper readers, something on the order of the effect a plague of locusts. Hackbarth has caught more than a little heat from the press, not only for personally saying the least with the most words in the race, but also for his admitted lack of familiarity with one of District Two's most looming issues, the proposed demolition and redevelopment of a row of houses on East Johnson Street by Renaissance Property Group.

Maybe it was simple bad luck again that lead to his being picked first to answer the question at the neighborhood association debate, or maybe the question was a little poorly-worded, but the other candidates quickly jumped on his missing his chance to take a stand on the project, one way or the other. Maniaci was called on next by the moderator, noting, "I'm actually a little disappointed in Sherman," before proceeding to lambast the project.

Hackbarth's mantra of "I'll weigh each issue individually" is a position more properly staked out by a candidate for judgeship than a city leader, and Deucers likewise feel a little unsure of a candidate who doesn't come down strongly for or against the city's bus fare hike, the Alcohol Density Plan or proposals like RPG's.

So headed into the primary, it seems likely enough Deucers will want to give Konkel a chance to defend her seat through April that she will be one of the top vote-earners Tuesday. In terms of vocal and visible support throughout the community, Walsh and Maniaci have both run hard, effective campaigns, and now need to hope for an upswell of support to boost them into competition against the incumbent. Maniaci may have a slight edge, but Hackbarth is a wildcard with little shot at a berth in the general election and the ability to spoil it for either Walsh or Maniaci.

And for those bound and determined to vote outside the norm, there is, of course, a fifth option. Dennis deNure, who fell unfortunately from the radar screen after a critically-acclaimed appearance on the League of Women Voters' candidates forum, will still be appearing on the ballot, in spite of his campaign slogan, "Don't vote for me."

On a side note, I actually have one of deNure's buttons affixed to my backpack now, because I support the message, not the candidate. But it's the closest I've come in this race to making a political statement, other than saying I think Konkel deserves to be in the April race.

But as long as we're outlining what each candidate will be hoping for Tuesday, let's say deNure is pulling for...... cupcakes.

No Commercials, No Mercy!

2009-02-06T01:23:00.009-06:00

While I was able to take my own sweet time with my first two write-ups on the race for Madison's District Two City Council race, interest in the "Rumble in the Deuce" has in fact grown, and I already know I'm not going to have the first scoop on tonight's debate at Lapham Elementary. Kristin Czubkowski from the Cap Times live-blogged it.

I have been one-upped.

And as I was covering it for my real job, my attentions were on my recorder and not my laptop, so my blog coverage of the event won't be out until later this weekend. I guess, seeing as it's going to be late, we'll call it "analysis."

But I was very pleased at the turnout tonight, both among spectators (some thirty neighborhood residents made the trip out, which is pretty impressive for a city council race) and among press. In addition to Kristin and me, Jason Smathers and a crew from the Badger Herald were there, the Daily Cardinal was also representing, and David Douglas and a shooter from Channel 3 put in an appearance as well.

Three newspapers, a TV station and a radio station -- this race has really grabbed some attention, and the primary is still more than a week away! Thankfully, the organizers of the debate had put out plenty of seating, or the rumble would have been between reporters for a place to sit down.

I know I could totally take David Douglas.

Anyway, it's late. I really think tonight's was a telling debate, and I'll explain why eventually. The papers and TV station can do their own things, then look for me to wrap it all up in the next edition of "Rumble in the Deuce" Sunday night. Have a great weekend.

Deuce Coup?

2009-01-29T20:51:00.007-06:00

More than a crowded field of candidates with similar platforms, more than a seasoned incumbent unafraid to mince words and more than being arguably the most conservative candidate in an overwhelmingly liberal district of Madison, Sherman Hackbarth had one thing really working against him at the League of Women Voters "Know Your Candidates" taping Friday night: alphabetical order.

On a list of candidates for the second city council district that reads Dennis deNure, Sherman Hackbarth, Brenda Konkel, Bridget Maniaci and Adam Walsh, Hackbarth had the challenge of having to follow up the comments from fan favorite frequent flyer Dennis deNure, who stole the show in terms of entertainment value to say the least.

Asked what he thought needed to be done to tweak the city's Metro bus system, deNure launched into an explanation of his plans to renovate State Street's Peace Park into a carousel park or a ferris wheel park or a cow-petting zoo and the America's Dairyland Museum. At deNure's conclusion and a nod from the moderator, the camera panned to Hackbarth, who paused for a moment, blinked, then managed a noble "...okay..." before getting his legs back under him and continuing with the segment.

It seemed a cruel trick of his birthname that Hackbarth should have to repeatedly follow a man whose opening statement began, "Do not vote for me. Vote for one of the others. Button man here even has a button that says 'Don't vote for me!' My goal is to create a forum for the best downtown plan imaginable, the museum mile program."

Then, he proceeded to list off a sleugh of museum concepts he would like to see settled along State Street. The notes I took from my seat in the audience read verbatim as follows: "Plans for a whole lot of different museums... Seriously, presented like 60 different museum ideas... The guy really likes his museums..."

But for all his oddities, the other three challengers to Brenda Konkel's four-term seat on the city council could take notes on two of the features of deNure's presentation: the formulation of a palpable plan and an ability to make it stick out in an observer's memory. I guarantee there will be people tuning into the city channel's broadcasts and webcasts of the segment just to view and re-view deNure's response to a question about working with neighborhood associations, "At my blog you'll find pictures of Josh Groban. I'm a big fan. I can't wait 'til he plays at Overture Hall."

I'm not saying that Hackbarth, Maniaci and Walsh should all act insane. I'm saying they're up against an established, recognizable, respected firebrand of a candidate with a long record of achievements with the city, and whichever one of them stands out the most will likely survive the primary to face off against Konkel in the general election.

In all likelihood, Konkel is going to carry the most votes in the February 17 primary. While the criticism often levelled at her is she alienates too many people, she has a solid base of support in and outside the district. While I haven't personally made up my mind in terms of who to vote for, I admire her passion and dedication and would like to see her make it through the primary.

She certainly didn't try to play down her record of butting heads, which her opponents have criticized. "I think I've worked hard, I've been strong-willed and strongly opinionated from time to time," she said during the taping. "But I think a strong, passionate experienced (alder) is what we need right now."

It seems likely a lot of uncommitted voters will justify voting for her in the primary just to ensure she has a chance to defend her seat mano-a-mano.

This leaves three very similar, qualified candidates vying for one slot on the April ticket.

I half-joked earlier that Hackbarth is the most conservative on the ticket, but truth be told it would take a microscope to determine who falls further to the right or left on the spectrum. Maniaci and Walsh seem to fly their "lefty creds" higher and louder than Hackbarth, but the latter does live in a co-op. You can't exactly slap a "Ronald Reagan" label on that.

Not that this (or any) race should be about left versus right anyway. What the candidates need are their own "museum miles," a handful of issues and the specific plans to back them up the candidates can hang their hats on.

Walsh has captured some attention by championing the cause of declining enrollment at Lapham Elementary School, saying the neighborhood needs to draw in more young families to fill the school. It sounds great in principle, unless it means driving UW students, young professionals (like myself) and other renters out of Tenney-Lapham like Alder Julia Kerr has tried to do in the Vilas neighborhood.

Likewise, a lot of people admire Maniaci's pledge to rejuvinate businesses along East Johnson Street, turning it into a thriving economic pocket like Monroe Street. But if increasing foot traffic to the businesses entails decreasing speed limits, switching to two-way traffic (as Konkel has suggested) and generally obstructing East Johnson and East Gorham, she could lose a lot of support real fast from people who live in the neighborhood, enjoy what the neighborhood has to offer, but also like being able to get out of the neighborhood in a hurry when they have to for work or other reasons.

Hackbarth, for his part, has shied away the least from criticizing Konkel's combative style, but otherwise has staked his campaign more in vague promises of "effective, efficient public services." It's understandably tough to lay out a point-by-point action plan when one is pledging to act as a conduit of the people's will, but unless a candidate defines which people and what will he's channeling, the electorate is liable to be mistrustful.

Nobody is going to argue with any of these three causes on principle -- they're good ideas for the neighborhood. Rather, where the questions come up is on how to best execute them and which causes to prioritize.

Of course, all these questions would be most easily answered by a substantive debate. Coincidentally, the Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Association is holding a two-hour candidate forum Thursday, February 5th, 7:00 PM at the Lapham School, 1045 East Dayton Street. While not as specific in answering some of the questions voters might have as would be desirable, the Know Your Candidates forum provides a good primer for the neighborhood forum, as well as some grand entertainment from deNure.

As the candidates and their platforms continue to evolve, the answers to Deucers' questions will most assuredly become more specific. While Maniaci, Walsh and Hackbarth each hold similar views, the candidate best able to connect the dots from where district two is to where district two could be will have the biggest leg up in the race to challenge Konkel.

Special thanks to Emily Mills at the Lost Albatross for developing a Rumble in the Deuce graphic that doesn't suck.

Habitual Drunkards

2009-01-25T14:57:00.004-06:00

In America's Kegerator, defining the term "habitual drunkards" is something of a Herculean feat. Yet that's just what the Madison Mayor's office and other city officials hope to do to utilize an ancient state law that prohibits selling booze to problem alcoholics in the city.

Most cities and officials are completely unaware the provision even exists. But Katherine Plominski, Madison's Alcohol Policy Coordinator, says the framework to allow the city to deny boozehounds their booze, something Madison has long sought to do, has been contained in a state law all along.

The statute itself appears to be gleaned from Part I, Title XV, Chapter 66, Section 1558 of the Revised Statutes of the State of Wisconsin, passed by the state legislature in 1883. It notes a number of conditions that liquor license holders must meet, lest they be summoned before city officials to show cause why their liquor license should not be revoked.

Plominski didn't say precisely how her office came across the statute, but the image from the Simpsons episode where the town re-enacts prohibition springs to mind. I imagine the city of Madison has a little old man with a visor and a great, dusty volume spread open in front of him, reading, "And he who shall violate this law shall be punished by catapult."

Plominski told me Friday she doesn't watch the Simpsons, so I don't think she quite levelled with me on the humor in the situation. She does, however, have a serious problem with regular drunks on her hands, which is why the idea is so appealing to her.

"We were having a lot of meetings where we were talking about this list of chronic alcoholics," she told me. "The police know them by name, they have contact with them reguarly... And these people are raking up all sorts of citations."

She even mentioned one individual who has been sent to the detox center more than 50 times in less than a year. If it were illegal to serve this person, she contends, he could be forced to dry up, he could choose to go elsewhere or he would at least have a harder time of getting his hands on his poison of choice.

The city of Green Bay, Plominski noted, has been using the same provision in state law for nearly a decade. There, the police decide whose name winds up on the "problem drunk" list, and they distribute it to all the liquor license holders in town.

But Madison's administration would like the process to be more formalized than that, Plominski explained. There would be a series of standards, including a set number of detox trips or police citations, to determine what constitutes a "habitual drunkard." There would also be an appeals process put in place to make sure no one is unfairly denied their right to booze.

In order to establish these criteria, Plominski would like to see an ordinance put before the city council. Her hope is to get the criteria passed, a list developed and names and photos distributed to all liquor venders by springtime: "before we start to see these issues in our parks," she said.

"A lot of these (retailers) don't want to sell to these people," Plominski said, "but they don't have an excuse not to. They're looking for a reason to tell them no."

While a proposal has yet to be introduced before the common council, Plominski says the city's legal staff has already given it the go-ahead nod, saying the city has statutory ground to stand on in pursuing such an ordinance.

This issue has not yet gotten any media play in Madison. We'll be officially "breaking" the story on AM 1670 WTDY Monday morning (I don't get to break a lot of stories as a radio reporter, so it feels good to get one every once in a while), and I assume the papers and TV stations will take it and run with it in a day or two.

I personally haven't had a lot of time to mull it over yet. I do think it's an interesting, kind of sideways approach to a tricky problem, but I would certainly like to see the criteria of what defines a "habitual drunkard" on paper before I weigh in either for or against the proposal.

I just can't escape the feeling we'll need to call in Rex Banner to enforce the ordinance, if it goes through.

Sympathy for the Devil

2009-01-24T15:08:00.005-06:00

I think it's fair to call me a self-hating journalist. For two years, I hosted a radio show that made a weekly routine of satirically pointing out the shortcomings of the Modern American Mediascape, in spite of the fact that I was working professionally as a newspaper reporter for half that time. Even now, I stay very well aware of the media's shortcomings, and my own. There are plenty of both to go around, and the only way I know to fix them involves, first, being very cognizant of them.

We're still trying to figure out that second step though.

Yet in spite of everything the Modern American Mediascape lacks right now, and the endless democratic potential a mass medium like the internet presents, I can't help but be increasingly alarmed by the precipitous decline in advertising and subscription revenues being felt across the board by the traditional media and the resulting staffing cuts and business failures. I'm not just saying this because my already meager paycheck is threatened, either.

One of the criticisms myself and others have levelled since Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz started keeping a blog is that his entries have often seemed little more than press releases about city policy written in the first person. I stopped reading after a couple posts, but when we were chatting about the sweeping layoffs in the media lately at a press conference Friday, Channel 3's Jessica Arp told me to check out Mayor Cieslewicz's most recent entry.

I'll post it here, as the city is not yet archiving the mayor's blog. I do think, though, he makes some very poignant and heartfelt points about the danger this systematic dismantling of the media poses to our society.

"Criticize Me, Please

Vikki Kratz once wrote that, "(Madison) has never experienced such a surge in national popularity - and it clearly has Dave Cieslewicz to thank." That line appeared in a longer column all of which took a similar tone. I thought it was so great that I had it framed, and it sits in a place of prominence in my office. Of course, the only problem with that column was that it was a satire. She wrote it and presented it to me with much fanfare after I said that all I wanted in the new year was a single kind word in her column.

Vikki, Isthmus' city beat columnist, has left the revered weekly to be a teacher. Isthmus has said that it will fill in with stringers and staff writers, but apparently no regular city beat writer like Vikki or the incomparable Melanie Conklin before her. Meanwhile, down Fish Hatchery Road, Madison Newspapers is laying off something like a dozen staff, and we're starting to see the blurring of bylines between the State Journal and the Capital Times. And television news reporting is hurting too as ad sales decline.

None of this is a good thing for anybody. Overall, I think I'm treated pretty fairly by the press. But when I do have a complaint I can call reporters and editors with whom I have a common language. I can challenge their sources or question if a quote was in context. I can argue with them about the placement of a story or the emphasis placed in a headline. The job of professional journalists is not to treat me well but to treat me fairly. The job of the press is to challenge people in positions like mine, to ask them difficult questions when necessary and to keep after them until they get answers. It's my responsibility to keep government transparent and it's in part their job to keep after me to do mine.

So, from my point of view the press can be a pain, they can even be infuriating some times, but they're also a vital part of democracy. So, when I see the news media bleed profits and people, there's plenty of cause for concern. A big part of the problem is the web. Media outlets haven't quite figured out the business model that makes web advertising pay enough to support the same staffs they had when most people read news on actual paper.

Of course, the new world isn't all bad. It used to be that you needed a big printing press, tons of paper and barrels of ink to deliver the news. That favored a handful of people with the capital to produce newspapers or, later, to own radio and television stations. The number of people who could afford media voices was pretty limited. But now the entry bar for providing information is so low that just about anybody can do it. So there are more voices then ever. That's a good thing. But professional news gatherers and the standards they bring to their craft are getting fewer. That's a bad thing.

It could be that when all of this sorts itself out the marketplace will work. Maybe there is enough of a market for professionally gathered, professionally edited news that news outlets will thrive again. After all, a lot of us rely on reporters to provide us with accurate information, and we rely on editors to help us sift through what's important and what's just chatter. With all the clamor out there now, that could become more important then ever. Maybe. Or we could just see professional journalism continue to diminish and be drowned out by a kind of Wikipedia world where anything gets tossed out there and we all just hope that a cacophony of voices will self-correct misinformation.

In the meantime, Vikki Kratz probably made the right career choice for herself. (Dealing with third graders might in fact be easier than dealing with me and the Madison City Council.) But that's too bad. I was hoping someday I'd get this job right and that maybe she'd write that I really did deserve credit for a surge in national popularity for our city. It wasn't likely to happen, but a guy could dream. Good luck, Vikki."

I can think of few people in the city of Madison who could have bigger beefs with the media than Mayor Cieslewicz right now, and while I may criticize, I give him all the props in the world for these sentiments. While his job could conceivably be a whole lot easier if the media were to simply vanish into the vacuum, he's big enough to recognize that with it would go democracy as we know it.

And if more people shared the mayor's sentiments on this topic, "fixing" the Modern American Mediascape would be a whole lot easier. Thank you, Mayor Cieslewicz, for finally letting a bit of the man behind the tie shine through.

I Was Wrong

2009-01-22T22:22:00.004-06:00

Nobody had to tell me I could expect to see and experience strange things while I was in California. I may be a smalltown rube, but I watch the TV, damnit!

But there's the kind of strange you expect to see, there's the kind of strange that catches you across the jaw like a left hook, and then there are things that just don't make any damn sense. And I'll admit, for the first twenty seconds after we pulled up at this stoplight in downtown San Francisco, I was so dumbfounded, the notion of taking a picture escaped me. I only managed to quickdraw my camera and snap a photo after the light turned green.

Now I spend a good amount of time shooting my mouth off, and as such, I expect to spend some time with my foot occupying space in said orifice. But, damnit, I should never have had to take back these words, taken from a rant I posted last summer decrying what I perceived as an abuse by Madison's parking enforcement division.

"...another glorious thing about being on a (motor)bike is that, if someone isn't using the entirety of a parallel parking spot, you can pull into the unused portion and park there.

So when I arrived at the Dane County Board of Supervisors meeting this evening, I was thrilled to spy an open sliver of a spot directly across the street from the City-County building the meeting was at. There was a gray van parked there, but I pulled in behind it. I didn't notice the handicapped tags on the van. I didn't notice the handicapped parking sign..."

"...And if I had in some way inconvenienced someone who had a deserved right to that spot, I would take a deep breath, clutch my manhood in one hand and my wallet in the other and pay the fine without complaining.

But WHO in HELL was I inconveniencing by using up the remaining three feet of that parallel parking spot? When I emerged from that horrid meeting three and a half hours later, the same gray van was parked in front of me, so it's not like any passing disabled motorist even got the impression the spot was claimed. And what other use was there for the remaining space I took up?"

And in this perplexing photo, I suppose we have found the answer to my rhetorical question. Somewhere out there on the coast, there is a rider on a green dirt bike with a disabled sticker on his M-Class vehicle. I don't understand how it might possibly work, but I will admit that this person had a legitimate claim to the space I took up.

I apologize, black-clad mystery rider. Now if you would kindly explain to me how it was you qualified for that little blue tag when you're clearly able to control and support a 200-pound piece of machinery between your legs, I would be much obliged.

Power Tripping

2009-01-20T22:30:00.010-06:00

Happy Obama Day, all. As we've all been historical significance-ed nearly to death, I'll let the event pass simply by noting how pleased I was to refer to "Former President George W. Bush" on the air today. It has a nice ring to it.

But it's official: I'm exhausted from relaxing so hard.

My last-minute power vacation to northern California was a raging success, don't get me wrong. I found out the other week I had some vacation time to burn before the end of the month, so I called up my buddy Bryan in San Jose and asked "pretty please" if he was still up for hosting me for a long weekend as we'd been discussing.

He was. In fact, he should probably go into business giving tours, because the man had a plan, we stuck to the plan, and we cram-a-lammed a whole lot more fun into four nights than we had any right to.

I flew out of Madison early Thursday morning, cussing under my breath the whole way until the negative-45-degree windchills and snowy fields fell away under a blanket of clouds. On the way out, I plowed through local writer Emily Mills's first (published) novel, The Fix Up, which was a fantastic, quick read. Mills flaunts a dark sense of humor she seldom gets to exhibit in her regular blog posts, trots out an intriguing, likeable character in Chapel, then spends 136 pages making the reader wonder what Chapel ever did to Mills. Watching as the character responds to the increasingly sordid circumstances that seem to stalk her, never triumphing but certainly never beaten, leaves me wanting a lot more of Chapel than 136 pages.

As such, it's become my mission to get my eyeballs on the short film the novel serves as a backstory to. If I catch up with Mills at a bar sometime, I will have a sharpie in hand so as to get my copy of The Fix Up autographed before, not too long from now, people are standing in lines at bookstores to do the same.

It's a good read, and they're selling it at A Room of One's Own on Johnson Street. I also plan to work the phrase "drinking totally ironic forties" into my regular vocabulary.

I got down in San Jose, met Bryan and then promptly knocked one item from near the top of my lifelong to-do list: I ate at an In-and-Out Burger. It was everything I'd hoped and more.

Then, we trucked it out to a golf course in the hills to the east of the Silicon Valley for what was arguably the worst 17-and-a-half holes of golf I've played since my first round out. It didn't help matters that I hadn't swung a club since July. Nor was it of any assistance that the course was on a mountainside -- thus, on the rare occasion I placed a shot in the fairway, it would unfailingly roll off.

But after notching four above par on my first hole, a relatively straightforward 400-yard par four, I informed Bryan I was only going to be scoring the holes I was happy with.

By the time it got too dark to spot a ball (hence the 17-and-a-half holes of golf), my scorecard read like War and Peace written in the Wing-Dings font. Aside from two bogeys and a hard-fought par, I instructed Bryan to score me two parallel exclamation points, a question mark, an infinity symbol, a null set sign, a radioactive symbol, a hammer and sickle, a frownie face, and a snowman complete with arms and a corncob pipe, among others, on varying holes. Turns out, Bryan is very good at detail work with a golf pencil.

We set out early on Friday for San Francisco and spent the day drinking in the city (Post-post writer's note -- this is not to mean "imbibing" in the city, but rather experiencing it... the imbibing came later). I honestly haven't walked so much since I was a student. We made our way into Chinatown for lunch, then marched up to Union Square, where we satisfied my pathological need to view cities from a tall place by walking into a hotel we were clearly not staying at and abusing their 32-story glass elevator (see previous blog post).

Then, we meandered back to Washington Square, where we watched some people throw frisbees for dogs and chatted with a guy named "Irish Pete" who, as far as we could tell, made his living hanging out in the park and sketching. After declining his generous offer to smoke us up, we popped down to Fisherman's Wharf, where the stench of tons and tons of fish was curiously absent. Disappointed by the lack of wharfishness, we boarded our ferry to Alcatraz Island and took the night tour there, then came back to the waterfront for dinner, which was NOT disappointing.

We crashed with a friend's sister (I spent the night calling Anna the "West Coast Mary Beth") a block off historic Haight Street and sampled the night life. After staying out until bar time, we were up again early on Saturday to drive somewhere we could continue drinking: Sonoma!

Now, I had never really considered myself much of a wine person -- more a beer-whiskey-brandy-rum-and-so-help-me-god-tequila kind of person. But then again, I had never been to the Sonoma Valley before.

We started the afternoon with a tour of the Benzinger Family Winery, which was phenomenal and speech-sluringly educational. Through the tour, we also received a pass for a free tasting at the sister winery, Imagery Wines, a mile up the road. As that was where the bartenders were most generous with the samples, that is where we spent most of our time. I even invested a tidy sum in having a few bottles of whatever-it-was-I-really liked shipped back to Madison. Being unfamiliar with wine terms and a little schnookered at the time of purchase, I don't quite remember what it was I bought, just that I'm going to be really happy when it arrives.

The countryside was gorgeous, and the land, people and rural atmosphere reminded me a lot of Wisconsin. We topped off the afternoon with a stop at the Mayo Family winery and, fully hammered, drove back into Sonoma proper to sober up some, have dinner and then trek back to San Jose to go to the bars, where I spent the night hassling the bartender about the fact that there were only TWO varieties of beer on tap. My Wisconsin sensibilities were deeply offended.

Sunday, verging on exhaustion, we opted to ignore common sense and spent another long day road-tripping to Santa Cruz, where Bryan tried like hell to teach me to surf. It wasn't so much his failure as mine that resulted in a number of salty-tasting faceplants, but I had fun anyway learning that surfing is indeed not as easy as it looks. After lunch at a little Mexican restaurant a block from the beach, we took the long way back and cruised Highway 1 along the Pacific Coast, stopping at a beach along the way to gawk at the ocean.

Bryan's co-worker Preethi joined us for the day, and invited her friend Sharon out to the bars with us that night. Chaos and hilarity ensued, and we'll just say it was a damn miracle I was able to get to the airport in time to catch my 12:10 back to Wisconsin.

All in all, a great trip, but I'm already feeling hard-pressed to readjust to the work grind. It's a busy week, with city council tonight, the first session of the Madison Citizen's Police Academy tomorrow, a basketball game I have to do commentary for on Thursday and some kind of city council election information taping Friday night. I'll certainly be posting updates on the academy and another segment of "Rumble in the Deuce" about the taping, so as Paul Harvey says, "Stand By For NEWS!"

Vacation Update

2009-01-17T12:55:00.000-06:00

Hello from San Francisco!

Allegedly "Progressive" Talk

2009-01-12T20:21:00.009-06:00

Are you ready for some biased media commentary? I didn't shed a tear, didn't furrow my brow, didn't even blink today at the news of major upcoming format changes at Madison's "Progessive" Talk, the Mic 92.1.

I know, right? Stop the presses, we've got a story for page one! "Local News Anchor Not Sad to See Competition Start to Fold." Somebody's sure to notch a Pulitzer on their belt for this one.

Well, before you write me off as completely irrelevent, dripping with bias, let me fill you in on some background here.

On February 1st, I'll have worked at AM 1670 WTDY for a whole year. Prior to that, I worked at the newspaper in Portage, which entailed a 45 minute commute to and from work every day. This left me plenty of time to listen to talk radio, and after switching back and forth from WTDY to the Mic for months, I finally settled on WTDY as my go-to station. The reason is as much a matter of principle as it is a matter of preference.

WTDY and a handful of other stations in Madison are owned by Midwest Family Broadcasting, a Madison-based company that has operated in the city for half a century and also owns stations in La Crosse, Springfield Illinois, Springfield Missourri and Benton Harbor Michigan.

As a company, our small locally-based operation competes primarily with Madison's Clear Channel Communications-owned stations, which include the Mic. For those unfamiliar with Clear Channel or its notoriety, try and imagine the business practices of McDonalds, Wal-Mart and the entire oil industry wrapped into one package and focused on radio and billboard advertising.

It was Clear Channel that lobbied for the massive ownership deregulations passed under the guise of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, then dropped a cool $30 billion to increase its nationwide radio station ownership to 1,200 -- the single largest conglomerate of AM and FM stations in the country.

Then, it was Clear Channel that began firing the on-air staff at smalltown radio stations across the country, and piping in voicetracked disk-jockeys that have never even been to the cities where their voices were heard. This practice, in addition to hamstringing local radio as a business and putting thousands out of work, also endangered dozens of lives in the 2002 Minot, North Dakota ammonia spill when no one was at the local radio stations to warn the populace to stay indoors.

It was Clear Channel that put together a list of songs following September 11, 2001 that were not to be played on the radio for fear that they might offend the populace or stir up dissent -- among the banned songs, Rage Against the Machine's entire body of work. It was Clear Channel that refused to display anti-war billboards or air paid commercials featuring anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan.

I barely acknowledge the Dixie Chicks as musicians, but when Clear Channel stations stopped airing their music following the band's public criticism of George W. Bush, I was pissed off as all hell.

Even before I worked for the competition, I couldn't ignore the flagrant hypocrisy of Clear Channel operating what they call "Madison's Progressive Talk." The progressive movement is one that's supposed to be rooted in the ideal of a locally-focused, uncensored public discourse.

Clearly, non-censorship is not one of Clear Channel's strong suits, but the Mic fails to meet the other tenets as well. Calling all-left, all-the-time talk radio a "discourse" does as much disservice to the term as Fox News has done to the concept of 24-hour news. I consider myself a moderate-to-left-leaning skeptical progressive when I don't have my reporter's hat on, but if I can listen to an hour of talk radio and not be upset by one thing I hear, I know I'm being pandered to.

It's not hard to see Clear Channel's original right-wing agenda behind left-wing talk. Sure, giving Al Franken a national pulpit eventually backfired when he was elected to the Senate, but for years, Republicans were able to dismiss his arguments as the irrelevent ramblings of a comedian-turned pundit when Air America could just as easily have filled his slot with someone with some real cred.

You can see the same in the Mic's morning lineup. Stephanie Miller isn't much more than a chattering, vacant floozy, discussing little of substance and spending half her program bubbling about the irrelevent goings-on in Hollywood. Ed Schultz has the potential to present a delectible conondrum as a "gun-totin', red meat-eatin' electric car-drivin' lefty," until you realize his corporate handlers keep too tight a leash on him to allow for any issue of legitimate depth to be discussed.

The closest thing the Mic had to a saving grace was their morning host, Lee Rayburn, who recently quit his post in Madison, as noted in the newspaper story above. He provided an interesting forum for local debate, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover he was driven out of his job. But with Rayburn the possible lone exception, every other piece of daily programming on the Mic is syndicated from elsewhere in the nation, sterile, safe and noncontroversial.

That's what has always perplexed me about the Mic's local following -- that a self-purported progressive city like Madison could rally around the obvious machinations of an evil empire like Clear Channel and turn its back on the locally-owned alternative. Up until budget concerns forced some massive cuts in November, WTDY was staffed by a set of live bodies at the microphone 13 hours a day, bringing a slew of differing, sometimes opposing, viewpoints on local and national issues to the airwaves. Management has assured me that as soon as we pull out of the slump, we'll be live and local all day again.

Having a radio station in town that broadcasts left wing views exclusively does little to combat the image of Madison as eighty square miles surrounded by reality. As a progressive, I welcome a challenge to my viewpoints almost as much as I welcome a substantive discussion, and the Mic rarely provided either.

I can't feel bad for the Mic's listeners as the corporate keepers in San Antonio, Texas retool what some Madisonians thought was "their" radio station. Given Clear Channel's record, it was a predetermined inevitability, and I like to think that this will serve as a wake-up call that a truly progressive radio station is one staffed by people you can bump into at a protest, on a barstool or in line at the grocery store.

Vigilante Parking Enforcement

2009-01-11T21:31:00.006-06:00

Madison parking scofflaws on the isthmus -- you're on notice. I'm a hair's breadth from taking the law into my own hands, and while I'm generally pretty mild-mannered, I'm as restrained as Adam "PacMan" Jones in a strip club with a bad case of the Mondays when it comes to meting out vilgilante justice.

I don't live on a main thoroughfare -- far from it, in fact. That the city chooses to clear the snow off our little half-block of a side street at all should be cause for the residents to celebrate, but the plow drivers are not exactly being greeted by a ticker tape parade.

When the city's workers make the right turn onto Castle Place, they're finding cars parked willy-nilly, with no regard for the snow emergency parking regulations designed to allow plow drivers to clear each road curb to curb over the course of two nights. And now, I'm worried the city is a few snowfalls away from writing off our street altogether.

Once again this winter, owning an automobile in the heart of Madison has not been a piece of cake. Digging out occasionally and braving the winter parking regulations is par for the course, a part of the price drivers pay for the privilege of being independently mobile in a city that offers decent public transit options anyway.

Except it seems our city is plagued with a bunch of clueless deadbeats content to let their automobiles accumulate enough snow around their bases to build a good-sized fort. It begs the question whether people who only use their cars once every couple of weeks should be allowed to keep them on the street.

Do I begrudge your owning an automobile in the heart of the city? Absolutely not. But do I take serious issue if you're not willing to invest the time and effort to get your two-ton hulk of rust and rubber out of the damn way so our city crews can do their job and make driving easier for everyone?

Let me put it this way: leaving your car buried up to the quarterpanels in week old snow where I can see it with two parking tickets stuck under the wiper blade is inviting me to huck a molotov cocktail through the window.

My case in point is the bucket of bolts, rust-on-gray mini-van some probable child molester left parked right in front of my house for two weeks in December. Never mind that the owner left it parked in the same spot through the heaviest periods of snowfall we've gotten so far in this outrageous winter... and two declared snow emergencies! Never mind that the piece of trash was taking up prime parking real estate right off my front door step. Never mind that I was re-infuriated at the owner's lack on decency every time I walked past, or even looked out my front window.

What irks me the most is that, whether the van was eventually moved or towed, the amassed snow around its base remains, melted down by the brief warm spell, then re-frozen into foot-and-a-half crags of ice that make parking there a virtual impossibility for every vehicle known to man save an Abrams tank.

I wish I could say what I just described is a rare scenario, but a drive through downtown Madison will turn up an identical case every thirty to forty feet. What's worse, if too many cars are parked on one side of the street when a plow rumbles through, oftentimes the driver will have no choice but to simply clear the middle of the street, leaving the snow to accumulate on the side where people should be able to park.

This results in drivers having to park closer to the middle of the road, and when a few of THEM don't move their cars to allow the plow drivers through, the problem compounds itself and the roads begin to continuously get narrower. It's only mid-January, but it's already so bad on my street that I watched a plow squeak a single narrow lane between the rows of cars parked on each side of the road this weekend, with mere inches to spare on either side of the blade.

If my road gets any narrower, it's going to be unplowable, and then I'll really be in a car-torching mood.

It's winter. This is Wisconsin. Checking up on the vehicle every couple of days and moving it if necessary is the owner's responsibilty, no exceptions. While digging a car out after a snowstorm is no fun, if we're to be able to drive on our damn roads, we need to work together with the streets department to ensure they can do their job. If the threat of a sixty dollar parking ticket isn't enough to motivate one to do so, being able to move an ambulance or a fire truck down the street should be.

So this is my call to arms. You're either with me or against me, and those who shun our cause of passable streets hold their own personal property forefeit.

From here on out, the rules are as such. Those who fail to comply with the snow emergency alternate side parking rules are subject to have their finish keyed and their windows egged. Failure to comply with the city's 48-hour street storage rule when there's a fresh layer of snow on the ground not only risks a ticket, but also broken sideview mirrors.

After the third day of abandonment, a heavy boot to the quarter panel becomes acceptable. If a car has been buried to its lugnuts in snow for four days, the radio antenna may be pried off -- likewise for the windshield wipers on day five, and the gas hatch or any spoilers and other such adornments on day six.

If a car is still buried in snow that's a week old, the use of heavy throwing or bludgeoning implements is strongly encouraged. I recommend beginning with smaller rocks, hurled at the side of the car at close range. If this doesn't drive the point home after several days, more drastic measures may be needed, including the use of a baseball bat to remove the sideview mirrors entirely and perform some major body work.

Eventually, you may find it cathartic to resort to lobbing bricks or even cinder blocks at the hood or through the side windows. Care should be taken not to damage the windshield, however, and there's a good reason.

You'll note that all the recommended methods of vigilante parking enforcement thus far do nothing to inhibit the violating auto's owner from clearing the snow off their car, firing it up and moving it to a more appropriate parking spot. Indeed, that's what we're trying to encourage here. A broken windshield, for instance, slashed tires or a sugared gas tank would only delay the process of clearing the parking spot for use.

But upon reaching the two-week mark following a snowstorm, if the car still has not been moved, it's fair to assume it's really and truly abandoned -- a public nuissance, a pile of refuse taking up space in the public right of way -- and it's every decency-conscious citizen's duty to blow it up.

As I mentioned earlier, a hurled molotov cocktail presents a simple-yet-dramatic way to torch an errant automobile without much risk of personal injury or exposure to police attention. Given the cover of darkness and a little time to work, it's also possible to pry the cover off the gas tank and use the reservoir itself as a source of fuel, given the ability to rig up some sort of improvised fuse like an oily rag.

Torching a car that's preventing city employees from clearing the road presents a trifecta of advantages. Once the flaming hulk of metal has smoldered and gone out, a city crew will inevitably arrive to tow it out of the street. Likewise, a burning car sets a noticeable, iconic example to other potential scofflaws on your street, and they'll think twice before violating the city's snow parking laws themselves.

Finally, the heat thrown off in the hour or two the car burns will quickly melt away the accumulated snow and ice that would otherwise render the parking space unusable. It's basically win-win-win... and a lose for the deadbeat that didn't think enough of their neighbors to just move their damn car.

Lay of the Land

2009-01-08T22:05:00.004-06:00

Why? 'Cuz I basically figured, "What good is in-depth coverage without a really lame graphic to go with it?"

And please, don't ask me how long it took me. My photo-shopping skills are not what they ought to be.

I have every intention of updating this feature at least on a weekly basis, or as the story warrants. District two has all the elements needed to make it the most interesting city council race in the upcoming spring election, and I'm thrilled to get to cover it as a reporter and vote in it as a constituent.

And the Deucers will certainly get to do their share of voting. Only two of the five candidates for the second city council district will get to appear on the April 7 spring election ballot, meaning the February 17 primary election will be when the real "rumble" happens.

With the primary just more than a month away, that means there's precious little time to get informed on each of the candidates and their stands on the issues. Fortunately, most of them have already posted websites, and I was able to get in touch with all of them in the span of one day, resulting in an A+ in accessability for each one.

The deadline to declare candidacy is barely two days past, but the race is already steeped in some degree of controversy. Word around city hall had been for several weeks that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz was actively seeking someone to run against four-term incumbent Brenda Konkel, and he confirmed it on the record in a newspaper story this week.

There's no love lost between Cieslewicz and Konkel as a result. Anyone who's ever been to a city council meeting has likely seen them butt heads at least once. Konkel has certainly made herself a thorn in the administration's side, and while the Mayor denies he was successful in recruiting anyone to carry out his political hit, he's made it clear he's not displeased to see competition coming out of the woodwork.

Part of the reason Konkel has aroused the ire of the Mayor (and a number of her fellow council members to boot) is the same reason a number of her constituents, including myself, admire her. While I find myself disagreeing with her on some issues, the passion and fire with which she defends the issues she does is unmatched on the council.

Likewise, Konkel wears her dedication to the job of alder and the ideals of democracy on her sleeve. Like a number of alders I could note, she works a job for a living but lives her elected office, spending free time pouring over meeting notes and minute details. Somehow she finds time to constantly update the blog she keeps on city affairs, which has become a resource, not just for her constituents, but for Madison's citizens in general.

As a reporter, her blog sits near the top of my daily reading list (though I do harbor a *little* resentment stemming from the comment about "biased media" in the header).

Most admirably, she welcomes the four candidates that have materialized to try and swipe the seat from under her. "I think it's fantastic for democracy," she told me yesterday, "to see so much interest in a district... and so much youth. I just wish there was this good a turnout in every other district."

In meetings, unfortunately, Konkel's passion is easily construed as combativeness. Her reputation as being obstinate is well-deserved, as much a black mark as a badge of honor. Her attention to detail can be alternately useful and infuriating for her fellow alders. Some constituents, particularly business- and home-owners, accuse her of paying more attention to renters and the homeless than their own middle-class plights.

It's those traits her opponents Adam Walsh, Bridget Maniaci and Sherman Hackbarth are taking aim at now, each in their own way.

"I'm not running the anti-Konkel campaign," Walsh told me. "I respect many of the things she's done. But I think we could do a better job of making sure everybody feels their needs and concerns are addressed -- not just a select minority."

Walsh was the first to declare his candidacy in the second district, and is not, in fact, the missing son of "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh. I asked. He actually joked with me that the shared name was going to "make it hell for anybody Googling my web page."

Adam Walsh is relatively fresh out of UW law school, recently married and is a new homeowner on the isthmus. While he works as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, he paints himself as a concerned neighbor settling into life as a grown-up, as it were. Walsh and his wife plan to have children in the near future, which he says has instilled in him a desire to see more stop signs, brighter night streets and safer parks in the neighborhood.

Raised in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Walsh says he's enthralled with the idea of sending his kids to a "neighborhood school" like Lapham Elementary. But the school isn't the only unique feature of District Two he has an interest in preserving.

"We need to pay more attention to those businesses (in the East Johnson Street corridor)," Walsh said. "I want to foster them so they, hopefully, don't leave. There aren't any chain businesses in the entire district, and if one of them leaves, that opens it up for a chain to come in."

Walsh isn't alone in that fear either. Supreme Pizza, Madison Food Mart, Pinkus McBride, Burnie's Rock Shop, Cork and Bottle Liquor Store -- 25-year-old candidate Bridget Maniaci identified them all as unique businesses struggling to get by in a city that normally lauds local commerce. In fact, she says she'll be offering free advertising space to any takers on her campaign literature.

It's just one example of the kinds of outside-the-box ideas she says she would like to bring to city hall. While she may be the youngest candidate in the race, as a former intern to Mayor Cieslewicz, she has plenty of familiarity with city hall, and her experiences working on Wisconsin's Capitol Hill and on the Fair Wisconsin campaign lend her a legitimate grounding in politics.

In light of the mayor's grudge against Konkel, assuming Maniaci was Cieslewicz's's pick to run for the seat is an easy leap to make, but she assured me that was not the case. "I had to wait two weeks to get a meeting with Dave to tell him I was going to throw my hat in the ring," she told me. "He was actually pretty surprised."

Likewise, Maniaci insists that just because she's a former mayoral staff member doesn't mean she'll end up as a rubber stamp for the mayor, if elected. As a staffer in the early phases of planning the revamped Halloween on State Street (editor's note: don't say Freakfest, ever!) celebration, Maniaci says putting her foot down became a regular priority.

A fourth-generation Madison native, Maniaci and her family have watched the isthmus evolve for decades. But recently, she's become more concerned by the mass exodus of the student population from her west end of the district, trickling into the growing highrises near University Avenue. While she says the district two area is one she thinks "families would like to live in," the housing stock is old, and some homes are run down from years of neglect by landlords and tenants alike.

The push-pull of development and preservation is clearly a delicate one, and she says a plan is needed. "I'm very keen on trying to rehab the houses we do have," Maniaci said, "but if they really are as bad as some of the owners are saying they are from previous landlords, I don’t have a problem with them coming down. I would, however, really like to see something of a similar size and scale go up."

The need to differentiate between the areas where massive development is appropriate and forbidden weighs heavily on the second district, and candidate Sherman Hackbarth, a real estate lawyer, says there's room for both. The 31-year-old graduate of both the UW-Whitewater business program and the UW-Madison law school has been long active in campaigning for updates to Madison's decades-old zoning code as a member of the Capitol Neighborhoods Association.

Hackbarth says he fretted over whether or not to run for weeks leading up to the deadline, and chose to file as District Two's fifth candidate the day of. He stakes his campaign on a measured mantra: "planning we can look back on and be proud of, public safety and effective services with an efficient price."

While part of his solution to the verging-on-decrepit homes in district two is to attract more homeowners to the area, Hackbarth also insists the relationship between renters and landlords has become too combative to provide productive solutions to many problems. He says the city should work to encourage more cooperation.

"Landlords should feel great pride in getting a rent check front their tenants," Hackbarth told me. "They should take utmost care complying with all fair housing issues, and they should be held to a high standard. But tenants should also be pleased to give their landlords a rent check, to be provided with a place they can call home."

While injustices move both ways, it's the plight of landlords Hackbarth says goes unnoticed in district two, where the current alder admittedly makes her living fighting against landlords. If elected, Hackbarth says he'll make policy based primarily on the needs and wants of all his constituents.

He paints himself as a man without a party affiliation, and he's certainly not one to mince words regarding his perceptions of the current seat-holder's performance. "I think Brenda Konkel needs to go," he said. "I want to thank her for her service. She's dedicated, but we need to reviltalize this district, to stop the political fighting and take it in a new direction. I see myself as a voice for the district, not a one-sided political agenda."

Thankfully, the race for the second district city council seat is not without a little comic relief. I was unable to reach Dennis deNure as I researched this story, but rest assured I will do an entire feature on him when the time is appropriate. He's a well-known frequent flyer in local elections, with unsuccessful bids for mayor and the state senate under his belt. A brief perusal of his website provides a fair enough assessment of the man to convince some to vote for him.

With the mix of candidates pounding the pavement, it's going to be an interesting race -- far more interesting than any city council race has any right to be. All four candidates I spoke with seemed amenable to the idea of a debate, which I would eagerly attend, and I hope I'm not the only one.

The Deucers should consider themselves lucky to have the palette of candidates they do to chose from this year. I certainly won't be making up my mind until election day.

Coverage Plan

2009-01-07T18:44:00.002-06:00

Now that the city of Madison has survived a historical election and two months worth of aftermath, I have to breathe a sigh of a relief. We're verging on my favorite time of year...

Election time!

Now, I don't expect everyone to share the diabolical pleasure I derive from local elections. There are plenty of folks who would be hard-pressed to note the last time Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson ran for office, who their school board or city council representatives are, or what the county executive even does.

But the upcoming February primary and the April general election to follow are shaping up to be pretty inetresting in the Madison area, following yesterday's deadline to declare candidacy, and I feel it's my job to help everyone to see the drama that's unfolding right out their front door.

First of all, there are several city council races that are simply going to be steeped in titillation. Foremost among them is the knock-down, drag-out death match that's unfolding to claim the second district seat on the council, which is currently held by Alder Brenda Konkel.

Konkel has no plans to go anywhere, but two lawyers, a former mayor's aide and a crazy guy have their sights set on sneaking the north half of the isthmus out from under her. The intrigue tripled when word got out that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz was actively seeking out people to run against Konkel, with whom his working relationship could best be described as "shaky." It's by far the most hotly contested race in the city, and it's all unfolding right out MY own front door.

As a second district resident, I'll be taking special interest in this race. I already spent between 20 minutes and an hour each on the phone with Konkel, Adam Walsh, Bridget Maniaci and Sherman Hackbarth this afternoon, and I'll attempt to frame up their platforms in tomorrow's blog post. I'll also be writing weekly updates on the district two race, and eventually have to decide which of these people I'm going to vote for.

I'm not sure yet if I will be publicly announcing my pick in district two, but there is one race I'm ready to make a full-fledged endorsement in. I whole-heartedly urge all the east-side residents within district 15 to vote Alder Larry Palm into a third term with the city, as I have no doubt they will.

Palm is a dedicated civil servant, an activist within his community and a man that sticks to his ideals. By contrast, his challenger Will Sandstrom, while endlessly amusing, is far too intolerant, unstable and incapable-of-maintaining-his-focus-on-a-single-line-of-discussion to properly serve his community as alder.

That's not to say it wouldn't be hilarious to have Sandstrom on the council. His farcical 2007 campaign for mayor yielded more than its share of classic moments, but I honestly don't know if I could deal with moments like this (audio clip pulled from a public discussion of changes to the city's zoning code on November 6, 2008) on a bi-weekly basis.

So I suppose, in light of that rant, it's no surprise Sandstrom has chosen to run against Alder Palm in what we can only assume is a well-meaning attempt to make Madison a more straight-friendly community. God only knows there have been plenty times in my five years as a resident I've felt persecuted as a straight white male.

And seriously, there are people who think local politics are boring?

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed by the fact that 13 alders are running for their seats unopposed, and not because I have any particular issue with the way city government is being run, but because democracy is supposed to remain in a constant state of flux. It's clear what we have in Madison isn't the "series of smaller revolutions to prevent the big one" that would be ideal, but there are plenty more local races to dig into, and I'll bring a shovel. Stay tuned.

Adventures in 2008

2008-12-30T22:30:00.013-06:00

Everybody I talk to keeps telling me to have a happy new year. I was half kidding, but I think I alarmed a Madison Police Sergeant on the phone today when I shot back, "New year?!? Why?What's wrong with the old one? What's the hurry?"

The truth is, while it's had its share of ups and downs, and barely a stolen couple of seconds to catch my breath, 2008 has been a fantastic year. I realize how lucky I am in this -- that things have gone to hell for a lot of folks, and that's certainly not something I've been immune to or isolated from. But looking back on it all, I'm able to view each month and pick at least one thing new or exciting from each one, and that's a damn good feeling.

It's weird, too, how mired I'm becoming in adulthood. This is the conclusion of my first full calendar year beyond a university setting, and I'm happy to report my head is still above water. 2008 saw me stand up at a wedding for the first time, move on to my second "real job" and purchase my third set of motorized wheels. But even though I'll be 24 in March, a glance back at the past 12 months proves I'm not yet allowing adulthood to consume me, and I like it that way.

January

When 2008 began, I was covering government, courts and cops for the Portage Daily Register, which I maintain is one of the finest small market papers in the state. I'm all too familiar with some of the dregs of the newspaper world that get published, but the company and management behind the PDR go out of their way to keep fresh, talented blood pumping through their offices, and it shows.

I began at the Register first as a summer intern, then continued as a part-time reporter and fulltime student, then finally became a fulltime reporter upon my graduation in May of 2007. But by the end of that year, the 45-minute commute from Madison to the office was starting to wear on me, and I heard about a chance to get back into broadcasting, so I started looking into it.

That didn't keep me from enjoying my final month at the paper. In fact, the day in January when U.S. Senator and penultimate role model Russ Feingold paid a visit to our office may be among my favorites of all time.

My admiration for Wisconsin's junior senator is well-documented, so I'll skip the fanboy noise and stick to the issue. As an editorial board, we got to spend two hours grilling Feingold on topic after topic, ranging from the upcoming presidential election to government wiretaps to NAFTA. After the session, he hung around and we chatted a little. The Senator and I discovered that one of his Washington staffers used to babysit me when I was eight, and I tried one last time to get him to run for President.

I'm still holding out hope for that last part.

February

It was 2:30 in the morning on a January Friday night, and I had just gotten back from the bars when that little tickle started in the back of my neck. That little tickle told me I ought to check my email.

I logged on, and at the top of my inbox was an email from WTDY's news director Tara Arnold, telling me they had decided to hire me on as a reporter and news anchor. I sat for a moment in stunned silence, then started whooping and hollering and tearing up and down the hallway of the two-bedroom flat I shared with my buddy Clinton (pictured on left) at the time.

Then I composed myself, rapped on his door and informed him we needed to go on a vacation.

I booked us on the Carnival cruise liner Sensation sailing a short route from Orlando to the Bahamas. We actually paid more for airfare than the cruise itself, sneaking in under the wire by booking it with about a week and a half to spare. That's the beauty of last-minute cruising -- if they're just trying to fill rooms on the boat, you'll pay less than you would to stay in a Motel 6, and all your food is included.

Our buddy Dan (pictured on right) snagged a room on the same cruise ship, and through some alignment of the planets, we survived serious flight delays and an extra layover in Atlanta, literally the last people to board the ship seconds before they pulled the ganplank up. But the vacation was great and amazingly cathartic. When we arrived at ports of call, our routine was simple and standard -- hail a cab and state, "beach, please."

It was a much-needed escape from the icy hell that Wisconsin became in 2008, breaking snowfall records left and right.

March

Of course, no vacation lasts forever, and I certainly didn't want ours to. I was damn excited to start at WTDY, and I jumped in head first.

With the presidential primaries a hot contest in Wisconsin, February was a busy month to start work in... then again, I haven't had a boring month yet. March rolled around, and I started covering regular shifts as an on-air news anchor. It felt good to be back on the air.

I also had the dubious honor of meeting the King of Sleaze himself, Jerry Springer. I interviewed him before he gave a presentation at the Orpheum, and to this day, I'm not sure how I feel about the man. Does he have some interesting political ideas? Certainly. But can that forgive the 10 points he knocked off America's collective IQ as the host of the trashiest show on television? The jury's out.

April

The snow hadn't even completely melted when I first dragged my old 1982 Yamaha Virago 920 ("Shiela," I called her) out of my garage on Chandler Street, but I didn't care. After the worst winter ever on Wisconsin's books, I was officially stir crazy, and I needed to ride...perhaps a little too much.

Hindsight is always 20-20, and I learned a valuable, albeit expensive, lesson that April afternoon. When a motorcycle sits out through a cold winter, it can be tough to get it to turn over that first warm afternoon. I sat pretty heavy on the starter and produced a couple loud backfires before I had sucked all the juice out of my fresh battery. But rather than put the battery back on the charger and wait for a warmer day when the engine would be more prone to turn, I opted for more desperate measures.

Jumper cables at the ready, I wired my running car to the bike and thumbed the starter, which whined impressively to life again. I swear, I was half a cycle of the pistons from having her running when a loud pop and a noticeable curl of blue smoke announced I'd fried the starter on the bike.

I sold the Virago to a gearhead who fixed her up and got a hell of a deal in the process. I used the proceeds and most of my tax return to buy a 1996 Suzuki Intruder. "Felicity" treated me well all summer long, and I'm already getting a little crazy just thinking about the open spring roads.

May

For everyone who knows Diana and Marcus, their marriage was a long time coming. Everybody was happy to hear it, but no one was surprised when they got engaged. I had the privilege of being one of several guys to stand at Marc's back when he took his vows, and it was a solemn honor we took almost as seriously as planning his last night as a bachelor.

In light of the five years' expectations leading up to the wedding itself, and the fact that Marc is almost unflappable as a human being, we decided the element of surprise had to factor heavily into our festivities for the evening. We set a date, and I informed Marc he was to arrive at my house at a set time to "report for duty." I wouldn't share any more information than that.

We allowed him to get the impression we had an early dinner followed by a round of local bars in store for him, and when he arrived that fateful Saturday afternoon, I told him the rest of the crew was waiting at an unnamed location within walking distance. We set out sauntering down the street, only to have our peaceful afternoon shattered by the squealing tires of a rented black SUV that came tearing down the street.

A couple of masked groomsmen jumped out, sporting a little weaponry as well, and informed Marc he was being kidnapped. A young family walking down the street stared in shock as we stuffed a winter hat over his head and face and loaded him into the vehicle, then tore off down the street.

We drove for about two hours before we let him take his blindfold off... and that's really about all I'm allowed to disclose about the events of Saturday, May the 24th. We had him back, safe and whole, almost 24 hours later, and the ceremony and reception in June were really quite lovely.

June

I'm still not exactly sure precisely when it was that Strutt, Alissa, Clinton, Jeff, Parker and my jam sessions in the basement on Chandler Street coalesced into something that could be defined as a "band." Looking back as a historian at the Facebook message board exchanges between us, I would say it really took shape sometime in the month of June when we started work on a few originals we now have in our lineup.

"Common Swift" has played a backyard, a coffee shop and a bar so far, and then we promptly recused ourselves from the public eye to piece together a demo disk to pass off to a few bars around the Madison area. We're also in the midst of doubling the number of original tunes we bring to the table, and hope to be back out performing for people instead of microphones again sometime later this winter.

But mostly it's a lot of damn fun.

July

If I take one lesson away from 2008, it will be what my good buddy Cam taught me in July: when it comes to rehydrating after heavy physical exertion, energy drinks and power waters are no substitute for a good, cold beer.

Counterintuitive, but true.

I've known Cameron since the sixth grade. We've canoed the boundary waters together, we've ridden the New Mexico highlands on horseback, but racing with my formidable D3 nationals steeplechase champion pal was one adventure I had never planned to undertake.

That all went out the window when we finally bit the bullet and signed up to race in Madison's 2008 Paddle and Portage. I've always wanted to run in a race, and this city is home to a number of strenuous competitions of note -- the Iron Man triathalon, the Crazylegs Classic -- but none but the P&P have ever really appealed to me.

I blogged about the experience at the time, but looking back, it is one of the year's prouder achievements. I'd like to do it again, if Cam doesn't find a partner in better shape than I. Weakest link though I may have been, we did relatively well for first timers, and a little extra training and a little better luck next time around ought to do us some good.

August

The most difficult part about transitioning into the working world for me has been the growing disconnect I feel with the natural world. While some people go to a church to get closer to God, there's nowhere I feel as spiritual than as far away as possible from the buildings and roads built by man.

Whereas I used to find time regularly to get out away from the city lights and revel in nature, staying abreast of the day-to-day activities of Madison's newsmakers leaves little time for quiet contemplation and solitude. Thankfully, my spiritual vaccuum hadn't quite peaked by August, when my Dad, my Grandpa and I fled the civilized world to the northwoods of Ontario.

Following an ugly dispute with my old management company and the move from the near west side to the near east side, and amid a hectic work schedule, that trip likely saved my sanity.

September

If the greatest week of August was one of quiet solitude, September peaked with a weekend of raucous revelry. After my hometown of Monroe's infamous "Cheese Days" festival, I've already marked my calendar for Cheese Days 2010 with a sense of wistful impatience.

In the span of two and a half days, I introduced a dozen friends to another dozen old friends, played a backyard rock show, caught up with my family, stayed up almost to sunrise two nights in a row, listened to live blues and traditional Swiss music in the same 15 minute span, purchased untold volumes of cheese and beer and regrounded myself in Wisconsin tradition.

One of the weekend's highlights was a visit to the Minhas Brewery (call it what they will though, I'll always know it as the Joseph Huber Brewery) to drink from the wellspring of one of my favorite beers. From left to right, Adam, Larry, Tim, Emily, Joe and Pete accompanied me on the tour of Berghoff's proud home, the oldest operating brewery in the state of Wisconsin.

I felt like Charlie in the chocolate factory, giddy as a kid on Christmas.

October

I don't want to say October was all business, but it was a near thing. Tim, Aaron and I really began to buckle down on our job putting together a submission cut of "Your Signs" for the Wisconsin Film Festival's "Wisconsin's Own" category. There were a number of gorgeous afternoons I would just as soon have been outside on the motorcycle enjoying a stunningly mild autumn, but instead, the lion's share were spent with a member of the cast stuffed in my makeshift recording booth, Tim curled up with a script and notebook in a chair or on the floor rocking back and forth, and me hunched over the controls, steadily intoning, "Take it in three, two, one" -- thousands of times.

I'm damn proud of the work we've done on this project in the waning months of 2008. By first converting my closet into a gerry-rigged ADR studio, and then utilizing my entire apartment as a foley studio for several weeks, I was able to contribute some valuable depth to the experience of watching the film. Aaron has worked miracles with his editing, and Tim's dedication to every aspect of the project continues to go beyond anything I've ever seen in a human being.

We turned in our submission cut on December 1. We're awaiting word on whether we'll be accepted, but in the meantime, we're now down to working on the nitty-gritty details of our final cut.

November

Like the morning of September 11, 2001, like the afternoon Brett Favre made his retirement speech, people discussing the night of November 4, 2008 will always preface the conversation with the question, "Where were you?"

No matter your political persuasion, you can't dispute the palpable electricity that ran through our country on election night. Almost everyone I talked to on New Year's Eve mentioned Barack Obama's election as one of the high points of their year. Branton (left), Ben (right) and I discussed it in particular as 2009 rolled in, as we met late that night on State Street in the midst of the gleeful pandemonium that ensued.

It's a night I hope to tell my kids and grandkids about someday.

December

Yes, I neglected my blog in the waning months of 2008. It was an emotionally draining year, and I needed some time to get back in touch with the concept of "me-time" before I went pelting headlong into another year. Please don't "dismantle the fan club," Jessica.

So what did I do with all that time I didn't spend writing? I mostly tried to get out and have fun, seeing a handful of dear friends I hadn't spent time with in ages. My buddy Dalto came back to Wisconsin from what's become a permanent stint teaching in inner-city Houston. BK made the journey back to Madison from California, where he's a software guru for Cisco. The parade of faces has been almost endless, in fact, and it's gotten easy to mix up who's told me which ridiculous new story of some fabulous, alien place.

There was a lot of digging out to be done in December, what with the extreme snowfall we're dealing with once again. But in order to keep from resenting the outdoors this winter, we've taken to the ice of Monona Bay for occasional broomball matches again this winter. Not a week after the ice spread across the lakes, we organized our first pickup game, and seeing as one person suffered a bloodied lip and another was rendered momentarily unconscious, we considered it a roaring success.

We're playing again this Saturday afternoon. Anyone with a winter jacket and a broom is welcome to attend.

I spent a good chunk of time with my family as well over the holidays: my parents, my 16 and 20-year-old sisters, both sets of grandparents, and my aunt. It's been a year of healing for the family, and spending the holidays together was as much fun as it was a blessing. I'm lucky to have them, and I really do cherish the time we spend together.

And I swear to god I'm doing to dynamite the singing holiday clock my mom hangs on the kitchen wall at Christmas time.

So what does 2009 hold? Well, it'll be hard-pressed to top 2008, but I'll take it in stride for what it's worth. I'm having way more fun than any gainfully employed adult ought to, and I hope it continues through my 24th year on this planet. I'm hoping to sneak in a trip to someplace warm in February, to keep from finally losing my patience with Wisconsin's climate and running off to the Cayman Islands. I'd also like to try a "motorcycle odyssey" to someplace remote this summer, with just a tent, a pair of jeans and a leather jacket to get me across the country, just for the stories I'd have to tell.

That, I think, is one of the biggest blessings of 2008 -- the health and happiness of the people I love, and the stories we now have to tell as a result.

Final Push

2008-11-25T13:02:00.004-06:00

I know this has not been the most interesting month in terms of my limited blog entries, but the month of November has been FAR too interesting for me. With the holiday this week and a December 1 deadline bearing down for our submission to the Wisconsin Film Fest, I just wanted to make it clear that I haven't abandoned this blog, I haven't stopped responding to emails and I haven't fallen off the face of the planet.

I'm just concentrating every fiber of my being on an amped up work schedule, the final push to polish this project we've been working on for three (or four, I can't even remember any more) years and keeping myself in semi-healthy, functional non-homicidal order.

I've pushed a lot of side projects... well... even further to the side this past month to concentrate on Your Signs. Tim, the project's mastermind, and Aaron, our editor, have let it consume their lives, but it's looking and sounding better than I could ever have imagined it would prior to the editing process. We're all looking forward to having them back in the real world.

So I'm going to disappear from the blogosphere for the next week. There's no hope I as a producer and sound designer can match the effort they've put in at this point, but I'm going to do everything I can to support them in this, their hour of need. You can follow sporadic progress updates from Tim on his Myspace page. The blog posts are clearly a little harried and caffeine fueled, but then again, so is Tim these days.

Also, I'll leave you with an exerpt from the column I wrote when I worked for the paper. Know that it would make my life about eighteen times simpler to skip Thanksgiving with the family this year, but it's time that I value too much. I'll skimp on sleep instead.

From: http://portagedailyregister.com/news/local/25ed7637-11b7-55bb-8638-b224477c4d20.html

Giving Thanks For Great Cooks in the Family

A lot of my peers, both college undergraduates and recent graduates, dread this time of year.

For students, Thanksgiving serves as that lonely island of complacency shining hopefully between the pre-turkey midterm rush and the last push toward finals in December. Many recent graduates, on the other hand, approach the family-oriented holiday apprehensive of the uncomfortable questioning they surely will have to face at the dinner table: "Who do you like in the presidential race?" and "When are you going to get a job?" and "What, exactly, did you major in?"

That's not me, however, and not just because I'm already gainfully employed. I love Thanksgiving, and I love being with my family on Thanksgiving.

Now here's where your typical holiday newspaper column would delve into a hot chocolate-fueled tug-at-your-heartstrings soliloquy about how the holiday season brings out feelings of gratitude, puts life in perspective and helps people appreciate the good things they have. But I'm going to be perfectly frank.

I come for the food, and it just so happens that the family I give thanks with every Thanksgiving is comprised, largely, of kitchen prodigies.

My parents agreed to host my dad's side of the family for Thanksgiving this year, but I will be trekking up north to visit my mom's parents tonight and Sunday. Not only does that make me a good grandson, but it means I'll have sampled the culinary prowess of both sides of the family this Thanksgiving weekend.

Now my aptly-named Grandma Cook is 81 years old, and I told her when I asked to come visit this weekend that I did not want to be a bother and would be insisting on taking her and Grandpa out to eat at some point. But I have a feeling I could show up at their house completely unannounced and she would greet me with a plate of cookies.

I don't know how she does it, but it's like she's magic, and all I can do is bask in her wizardry. Luckily, the Weis side of the family is similarly gifted.

Thanksgiving with the Weises is a process that begins weeks in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday itself. My mom spearheads the whole project, working with all the organizational aptitude of a four-star general to coordinate the movement of vast quantities of mashed potatoes, string beans and gravy to arrive in a precise, timely formation on the dining room table.

Mom prepares a good deal of the oh-so-vital side dishes herself, including loaves of her infamous cranberry bread. The cranberry bread is so deeply and emotionally equated with the holidays in my mind that I check Mom's oven before I check the calendar to see if it's Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My dad and grandpa, on the other hand, lead the charge on Thanksgiving's most crucial front, the preparation of the bird. As a child, I watched them baste turkeys, I watched them grill turkeys, I watched them roast and glaze and fry turkeys, and the results have been stunning each time.

But the remarkable part is that they manage to prepare the turkey so masterfully solely in the intervals between quarters of Thanksgiving Day football. It's a skill I can only hope is inherently genetic.

And then there is Grandma Weis, my very own matron saint of flaky baked goods. This loving woman has, for 22 years, spoiled me and ruined me with her pies, to the point that someday, if I find a woman to marry, it will be with the caveat that I never will be able to say in all honesty her baking is "the best I've ever had."

Grandma Weis rolls out her full arsenal of pies for Thanksgiving Day, but the no-brainer response for which to choose has always been her apple pie. It is, in a word, "aaaawwwwgh."

"Aaaawwwwgh," by the way, is pronounced properly by letting your head loll, rolling your eyes back into your head and drooling copiously.

So yes, I went into Thanksgiving Day after a brief day-long fast with the express intent of gorging myself silly on platefuls of amazing food until I'm flat on my back in the dining room, groaning as the beagle licks food off my face. It's a plan that allows little time for rumination, and it's not until the day after Thanksgiving that I really have a chance to weigh what's important about the holiday.

Still giddy from the tryptophan, I can be honestly grateful for the good things in life. I really am blessed, in that I have a loving, supportive, healthy family I get to spend time with.

And every last one of them can cook up a storm.

Bloodbath

2008-11-19T13:41:00.006-06:00

I didn't need a reminder that the economy was fucked -- I've got friends who have been laid off over the past month, other friends with a degree from a World Class University that can't find decent work, if they can find anything at all. But I got a reminder this week anyway.

The past three weeks have been hell on me. Covering the Madison Halloween Celebration, the election and subsequent pandemonium, the sixteen-hour city budget sessions and the more streamlined county process, it's all been really exciting, and my brain hurts from having learned so much.

But adjusting my sleep schedule by eight hours on a bi-weekly basis has left me with a permanent case of jet lag, the approximate jet lag of travelling from Paris to Chicago, and I haven't even left the Dane County area. So when I got the call to get into work three hours earlier than I'd been assigned yesterday for a staffing meeting, I was a little too punchy to fully comprehend what was happening around me.

It's sinking in now.

Midwest Family Broadcasting announced a big staffing shake-down yesterday, a good chunk of it on our radio station. Of course, "it's the economy, stupid," and these kinds of layoffs have been particularly prevalent across all the media in the past year, but that does nothing to prevent the shell-shock and survivor's guilt that follow a bloodbath like this.

I'm going to take the departure of two of our news staff, Tim Morrissey and Erik Greenfield, pretty hard. I know the standard broadcasting procedure for dealing with layoffs on air is to omit any mention of the departed personalities and pretend like they never existed for at least a year, at which point it becomes acceptable to occasionally mention them nostalgically. But this is my space, and it's grounded in the reality of my life and what these guys meant to me.

When I joined MWF, Erik was the first person in the building I connected with. We're both relatively young for broadcasters, and we both got our starts at small-town radio stations in Wisconsin. We're also both capable of carrying on a conversation composed entirely of quotations from "The Simpsons," which generally left the other newsies utterly lost when they tried to join in our conversations.

I even look up to Erik quite a bit. He's got an amazing steel trap of a mind, and can spout off trivia like names and statistics as if he's reading them off Google, which is what most of us do.

And then there's Morrissey, who's been in broadcasting since the days when it entailed standing at the top of a tall hill and yelling. He's logged decades with MWF alone, and has worked in cities all over the country.

As the penultimate grizzled veteran news anchor, it would have been easy for Tim to kick back, enjoy his bountiful vacation time, log his hours in what we all assumed was a secure gig and let the rest of the station tear itself to pieces around him. But Tim was a mentor to everyone in that news room, to me in particular. He told me very early on he was "going to take a serious interest" in bettering me as a broadcaster, and he wasn't kidding.

Guidance, suggestions, verbal (and deserved) slaps upside the head, wry realism... Morrissey is good for all of that, and I know few people who are as adept at delivering a kernel of truth picked from a heap of bullshit as Tim Morrissey. If this is indeed the career I'll be spending my life at, he had a hand in shaping it, and if not, it was a pleasure to work with him anyway.

Both Erik and Tim are friends that I respect the hell out of, and I have no idea what I'm doing still in the news room while they've been cut loose. It boggles the mind. Another broadcasting veteran told me this morning, "You're the future of this operation."

Okay. Now what the fuck does that mean? They could have canned me and I would have been moved into a storage unit with a backpack on my shoulder and a ticket to Europe in my hand inside a week. Morrissey's got retirement to think of. E's got a house payment.

These are tough damn times.

County Budget: Hour 4

2008-11-17T23:26:00.002-06:00

As the meeting winds down, there have not been very many more surprises. There has, however, been a sense of deja vus to some of the debates that have taken place.

A bloq of half a dozen supervisors have put forward about as many amendments looking to cut out proposed borrowing for environmental initiatives. This includes funding for geothermal heating systems, $2.3 million for a communal manure digester and right now, millions to be put toward county land purchases.

"I expect the vote on this to be similar to the last one," chairman Scott McDonell said, "if not identical."

Supervisor Kyle Richmond accused that bloq of supervisors of going after environmental projects specifically. Supervisor Eileen Bruskewitz defended their actions, saying they weren't "targeting any one group of programs, we're targeting borrowing."

The last vote on an amendment to the Dane County Conservation Fund, the one targeting $4 million in land acquisition funding, failed on an 8-27 vote.

County Budget: Hour 3

2008-11-17T22:03:00.003-06:00

Following the conclusion of the two crowd-pleasers, the county board chambers have emptied out considerably. Two people remain seated in the galleries.

County executive Kathleen Falk's spokesman Josh Wescott commented offhand to me earlier that, ironically, the heavy firefighter presence in the room earlier may have violated the building's fire code.

The county board completed and approved its operating budget without much contentious debate, and is now rolling through county government, department by department, and amending the 2009 capital budget. The issue of whether or not to hire more communicators for the Dane County 911 Center was not broached during this time, as it was addressed in a prior committee meeting. The county opted to get in line with a consultant's report and hire nine additional communicators, instead of the originally-proposed six.

Supervisor Bob Salov also just proposed the creation of an ad hoc committee to study the need for interoperable radios in the county.

County Budget: Hour 2

2008-11-17T20:43:00.005-06:00

Choosing to tackle both big issue votes in one fell swoop, the county board has now diverted from the operating budget to the capital budget for the sake of addressing the concerns of the firefighters and EMS personnel in attendance.

Supervisor Bob Salov introduced the motion, which would allocate $680,000 to purchase interoperable radios for fire and EMS departments throughout the county. This is on top of $12 million the county is looking to borrow in order to upgrade radio towers and other infrastructure to become interoperability-compliant.

The amendment would purchase aproximately 15 upgraded radios for every department in the county -- not enough to fully equip any of them. The county comptroller estimated the measure would increase the capital budget by 1.6 percent.

Departments nationwide are facing the same dilemma before those in Dane County following an FCC mandate issued several years ago that all emergency responders utilize interoperable radios by 2013, which are more technologically advanced and utilize a universal set of frequencies that allow different departments to work together and talk to each other in emergencies.

Small emergency departments are having trouble ponying up the cash for the upgrades however. On top of the millions it will cost the county to upgrade its infrastructure to become compliant, some county supervisors would like the county to contribute hundreds of thousands more to buy the radios in bulk and create a pool for city, village and town emergency responders to share.

"Let's let the county take that first step and then... let's get together and let's talk some more," Supervisor Ronn Ferrell said. "Here's some money, it's not all of it, but it's a portion of it. We're willing to go this far, now you have to come back to us and we have to work this out. That's the message we need to send."

Other supervisors argued beginning work on infrastructure upgrades should be the county's focus for the coming year. With the deadline to upgrade still several years off, they say there's time yet to look for other options.

"We don't need these radios at this time," Board Chair Scott McDonell said. "We need them before this shift to the new frequencies happens."

The amendment failed on a 14-22 vote.

County Budget: Hour 1

2008-11-17T20:32:00.007-06:00

This may be one of those most well-attended local government meetings I have ever covered. The galleries on both sides of the chambers are packed full, and attendees are standing in the wings and at the back of the meeting room.

All totalled, there are at least 150 people in attendance.

"What a beautiful display of democracy we have here tonight," noted Supervisor John Hendrick, who will be chairing the operating budget deliberations.

The county supervisors, for their part, appear to be a little taken aback by the overwhelming attendance at a meeting without a public hearing for attendees to sound off. The throngs of observers are primarily fire and EMS workers lobbying for the county to fund radio upgrades mandated by the federal government, and activists in support of an amendement that would re-route funding from the Sheriff's Department to a program to support immigrants.

The firefighters' presence was no surprise to me. In fact, as I was packing up to leave the office, I heard multiple pages go out over the scanner on various jurisdictions' frequencies to encourage attendance at the meeting.

But the activists' presence was more unexpected, as it was predicated on a previously unannounced amendment to the operating budget. Supervisor Al Matano introduced it as the board's first order of business, and called it a means to "express our concern to the sheriff in a way he would hear...Nothing speaks like dollars."

Matano and several other supervisors have previously expressed displeasure with Sheriff Dave Mahoney for cooperating with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement division in turning over the identifications of illegal immigrants sheriff's deputies encounter.

The motion failed on a 6-30 vote. There was then five minutes of commotion as the activists in support left the room. Several of them joined in a chant on their way out the door, prompting Hendrick to call on the Sergeant at Arms to "enforcement some order, hopefully without calling the police and certainly not the Sheriff's department."

Badger's Eye View

2008-11-15T15:15:00.006-06:00

Not much to say this afternoon, but thought I'd share the view from where I'm sitting.

The press box.

UPDATE: I know it's generally considered uncool for a reporter to get excited about things... there's that whole been there, seen that grizzled newshound archetype to live up to... but damnit, I was a Badger before I was a reporter, and I had fun filling in for our sports reporter today. Watching Bucky rally to beat Minnesota 35-32 and being on the field for the celebration put one helluvan exclamation point on a pretty long week.

Having met Tom Oates today, I'm pretty sure he would call me a rube if he read this...

Budget 15:41

2008-11-13T02:27:00.003-06:00

As of 2:07 AM, the city of Madison has a working budget for the year 2009 after 15 hours and 41 minutes of discussion.

Through the amendment process, the council added $465,000 to the levy tonight, for a grand total of $165.3 million. For the average Madison homeowner, the property taxes they pay will increase 3.3 percent.

The property tax levy will be 8.29 percent higher than it was last year, but Alder Judy Compton was still encouraged, in light of prior projections that the levy could increase between 12 and 15 percent. She called the council's efforts "heroic."

The budget passed 16-4, with Alders Brenda Konkel, Satya Rhodes-Conway, Marsha Rummel and Robbie Webber dissenting.

"It's going to have a big impact on people throughout the city," Konkel said, "and there's just no way I can vote for a budget that increases the bus fares."

Alder Brian Solomon, who co-sponsored the failed amendment to prevent the bus fare increase, was displeased, but voted for the budget. He said, ultimately, it's still up to the transit commission whether or not fares will actually increase.

"We did not pass a bus fare increase," Solomon said, "We just passed a $642,000 deficit to Metro."

Alder Tim Bruer spoke at length about the 2010 budget, and the challenges he expects the board to have to overcome next year. He maintains the city comptroller's office paints a more dire picture for what's to come.

Budget Meetings: Hour 15

2008-11-13T01:29:00.003-06:00

More nuts and bolts in what is definitely to be one of the final hours of the 2009 budgeting process. Most of the city staff and members of the public have packed it in and gone home, but the city council presses on.

The late hour is deifnitely beginning to show. The mayor stepped away from his seat during the bus debate, and has allowed Tim Bruer to fill the seat since then. But Cieslewicz has started eyeing it up again, now that Bruer's started to get on one of his topical pun rolls.

I always seem to enjoy those way more than most in attendance, but I'm a little alarmed myself at how funny I'm finding them right now. The punchiness is setting in.

Budget Meetings: Hour 14

2008-11-13T00:39:00.001-06:00

After almost two hours of debate, the City Council voted 12-8 to go ahead with Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's plan to raise Metro bus fares from $1.50 to $2.00, thus generating $240,000 dollars to put toward the Metro reserve fund.

Along with that plan, the council also voted to do away with the city's Clean Air Action days, which have in the past encouraged people to ride the busses whenever atmospheric conditions are such that dangerous amounts of particulate matter are present in the air. Alders and the Mayor agreed that the Clean Air Action days did not significantly increase bus ridership on those days, so the council opted to pocket the $40,000 dollars anually budgeted to fund free bus fares on those days.

Among the hours of heated debate, Mayor Cieslewicz took the stand himself in defense of his plan, which generated almost half of the public comment received at the first night's budget meeting.

Budget Meetings: Hour 12

2008-11-12T22:37:00.002-06:00

Brenda Konkel tells me she's been following along with my blog as the meeting has been proceeding. That has to be a little weird for her, if not kind of amusing... kind of like if Bret Bielema were to listen to the radio commentary in that headset he wears on Badger game days.

One of the money saving measures Mayor Dave Cieslewicz put forward in his proposed 2009 budget was to cut four positions from the streets division and, as a result, trim the city's large item trash pickup from weekly to bi-weekly.

However, members of the council voted to reinstate the $231,000 in funding, not necessarily to maintain large item trash pickup service, but to maintain the other services those staff members provide. Streets Superintendent Al Schumacher explained those staff are crucial to leaf pickup and snow cleanup, and any cuts to his department could lead to delays in snow removal in the midst of a big winter storm.

A fifteen minute recess will preceed, hands down, the hottest topic on the agenda -- the increase in bus fares from $1.50 to $2.00.

Budget Meetings: Hour 11

2008-11-12T21:36:00.002-06:00

During a brief recess, a couple alders and staff told me they think the mayor plans to run through the entire operating budget tonight. That would be impressive, but it would also mean a late night.

Right now, the council is sinking its teeth into Amendment 25, put forward by Alders Brenda Konkel, Julia Kerr, Marsha Rummel and Brian Solomon to implement a recycling program in city parks. The program would require $50,000 a year to hire a couple of seasonal employees to maintain the recycling containers and buy up some recycling carts to stock in city parks.

Most alders seem to view the amendment favorably, and city Parks Supervisor Kevin Briski and Streets Superintendent Al Schumacher have both spoken out strongly in favor of it. But alders like Joseph Clausius contend adding the program as a budget amendment is the wrong way to go about it, and think it ought to be addressed at a later date.

In response, Alder Brian Solomon at 9:21 amended the amendment to require the program to pass through the Parks Commission and come back before the City Council before being implemented.

But Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, with his strong record on environmentalism, surprised many in the council by speaking against the recycling program. He said, having spoken with Recycling Coordinator George Dreckman, there is a lot of concern that, too often, people in parks will dump regular trash in with the recycling, causing problems down the line for waste management.

"I think there ought to be a different ethic in our parks," Mayor Cieslewicz said. "I think it ought to be, 'Don't throw it away in our parks, pack it out of our parks.' That's the more environmental ethic."

In an 11-9 vote, the motion passed, meaning Madison will begin to take the steps needed to implement a parks recycling program, hingeing on a future council vote to approve it.

In the council chambers, there are a few eyelids beginning to visibly droop.

Budget Meetings: Hour 10

2008-11-12T20:08:00.002-06:00

Things have cooled down a little bit, and the city council is moving along through some nuts and bolts amendments to the operating budget.

The board passed an amendment to provide more $23,000 dollars in funding to the Madison Affordable Housing Trust, and overwhelmingly voted down an amendment to dissolve the Capital Revolving Fund, which makes grant money available to property owners looking to make facade improvements to certain buildings.

In spite of the mayor's enthusiastic support of the Madison sister city program, he asked the council NOT to overturn his decision to cut half its funding, and they agreed. Also, the council voted down an amendment that would have removed language from the budget warning of a massive funding cut for Madison's public access channel WYOU in the 2010 and 2011 budget years.

Perhaps most perplexingly, the council voted in favor of adding $60,000 to the budget to provide paid sick leave for hourly city employees. That they voted in favor of the funding is in itself not perplexing -- but Alder Brenda Konkel grilled a city human resources manager on the subject as part of the amendment discussions.

Apparently, the city has voted to provide similar funding for the past three or four years, but the human resources department has never actually made the money available to employees. City employees still get no paid sick time, and the money has just been replaced in the general fund.

It seems human resources directors have simply been unsure what specifications to use when administering paid sick leave to hourly employees, and rather than asking alders for guidance, have simply been avoiding the problem for at least three years.

Konkel expressed subdued outrage at this, and Alder Lauren Cnare and others pledged to take legislative action to make paid sick leave a reality for hourly city employees.

Budget Meetings: Hour 9

2008-11-12T19:01:00.000-06:00

Alder Mark Clear, hoping to speed the evening along, moved to lump eight amendments to miscellaneous appropriations into one and place them on file.

It backfired.

An hour later, the council is embroiled in a very heated, very personal debate that occasionally focuses on the appropriations themselves, but more often than not has turned to allegations of "wastefulness," "grandstanding" and "holding the city council hostage." The debate is taking place largely along the council's invisible party lines, ironically with more "conservative" alders accusing the more "liberal" council members of making unnecessary cuts for the sake of showboating.

Those same conservative alders spent a grand total of twenty minutes on the council floor telling other alders they were wasting time.

A number of council members in the middle already seem exasperated by the debate.

"I'm disappointed with the way this evening is starting out," Alder Julia Kerr said. "We're all equals here... I really hope we would refrain from chastising one another and focus on the job."

Amendments 4, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 34 and 36 were placed on file at 7:01.

Budget Meetings: Hour 8

2008-11-12T18:29:00.002-06:00

Late night last night -- the Council finally recessed at 12:34 in the AM. Things already look to be shaping up late again tonight, and it just seems like it's going to be a late night for me in particular. When I showed up, the seats in back -- the only ones near audio hookups, which we radio folks need and are usually reserved for press -- were all taken, mostly by city staffers. The mayor's spokeswoman suggested I use a folding chair as my workspace. I went out into the hallway and grabbed an eight foot table and set it up in a heavy traffic walkway instead. If I have to suffer, everybody has to suffer.

The city council dived back into its budgeting process a little late at 5:40 this evening, as a number of alders (and reporters) were delayed in their arrival by heavy fog. Immediately off the bat, the council acted on a substitute motion on Alder Brenda Konkel's proposed amendment 15, which would have deleted all funding for Madison's brand new Fire Station #12 on the west side.

Construction of the station actually began earlier this month, with an official groundbreaking ceremony held earlier this week. Konkel says she proposed the original amendment in response to a Wisconsin State Journal editorial criticizing the mayor's decision to include the station in the contentious 2009 budget, but made the motion to place it on file because she couldn't support the amendment herself.

Fire Chief Debra Amesqua, seemingly incensed by the suggestion of delaying work on the project, used the ensuing discussion to rail against the notion the city ought to delay opening the new fire station. She said the project has been years in the works, and the fire department has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars purchasing equipment and training the personnel to staff the station.

Westside Alder Paul Skidmore said waiting was not an option for a part of town where fire response times can range up to 20 minutes.

Following discussion, the board voted unanimously to "place on file" amendment 15, effectively guaranteeing the $1.3 million needed to run the new fire station in its first year. Fire officials expect to complete construction and open the new fire house next summer.

Budget Meetings: Hour 6

2008-11-11T23:40:00.003-06:00

This is becoming traumatic. One of my stalwart colleagues is clearly beginning to suffer, and I can't say I blame her. I feel the same, but it's clear the madman at the helm of this ship plans to ram her straight through the capital budget in its entirety before he yields.

Coming up on 11:30, the Council is now locked into an intense debate over whether or not to cut $1.2 million for a parking garage downtown until they reach a decision on where to place a possible hotel downtown.

Up until now, they were moving along rather briskly. The Council passed TIF-funded expansions to downtown road reconstructions that will have no impact on the overall budget. Then a spirited debate preceeded the rejection of a $250,000 cut of all the funding to be put toward the development of a Central Park. Overwhelmingly, alders wanted to continue to support the park project in its initial stages, in spite of Alder Jed Sanborn's insistence that it was a luxury that ought to be backburnered until a better budget year.

Budget Meetings: Hour 5

2008-11-11T22:16:00.002-06:00

After shooting down a proposal for a $50,000 Neighborhood Traffic Management plan and $50,000 in pedestrian improvements for major streets sponsored by Alders Robbie Webber and Brenda Konkel, the Council is on to the flip side of the coin: the proposals to delay road improvement projects on the city's periphery.

It's already gotten personal. Alder Paul Skidmore accused some members of the council for attacking his and other residents' decisions to live on the outskirts of town, rather than the central city.

Meanwhile, City Engineer Larry Nelson made it very clear he felt the option of delaying the road projects was foolish. He said that decision would jeopardize federal funding already secured for the projects and gum up the works of "environmentally vetting" each project.

Webber, for her part, vehemently defended delaying the projects, calling them a "freight train" the council never had a chance to stop early in the process. She says, in light of the budget circumstances, this is the year "it's appropriate to delay these plans."

The latest manifestation of the age-old battle between downtown and outer neighborhoods continues...

...and goes to the outskirts at 10:18. The motion to delay the road projects failed, 5-15.

Budget Meetings: Hour 4

2008-11-11T21:14:00.002-06:00

I can't believe this passed. For parking enforcement to have technology this advanced against us regular folks who try to park in the street... It's like they're bringing a nuke to a knife fight. Mark my words: I'm going to war with parking enforcement.

As of 8:30, public comment has ended. After a ten minute recess and pizza shared by the alders, they're on to the capital budget amendments, and the first item on the agenda is already piquing quite a great deal of interest.

Alders Mike Verveer and Robbie Webber co-sponsored an amendment that would allocate an extra $147,000 to a Vehicle Borne Photo Enforcement project that would equip two parking enforcement vehicles. They call them "auto-chalking" devices, but they're much more complicated than that.

It sounds like the system would automatically record the valve-stem position, license plate information and general car description of every vehicle on the street as the patrol moves through the city. Later, when the jeep moves down the same street, it will compare the information it gathered before to the current information, and automatically target vehicles in violation of parking laws.

Police Chief Noble Wray says the system can allow parking enforcers to issue tickets on scene or keep rolling and log the information away to issue a ticket by mail. Remarkably, he says it also recognizes and tags vehicles that have been reported stolen or had Amber Alerts issued for them.

In response to lagging ticket collection revenues, Alder Robbie Webber says it will help make parking enforcement more efficient in their jobs. She says it's easier and more accurate than manually leaning out of the jeeps and chalking tires to see how long cars are left on the street.

"This measure will absolutely pay for itself," Verveer said.

The amendment passed with only a handful of dissenters.

Budget Meetings: Hour 3

2008-11-11T20:06:00.003-06:00

Public comment continues as we move into the third hour of the budget hearings.

Looking ahead to the Capital Budget, it's evident that the weeks since the Mayor released his budget have been a time of drawing battle lines for Madison's alders. Most of the amendments come from two diametrically-opposed factions of Alders.

Alders Robbie Webber, Brenda Konkel and Marsha Rummel all alternately have a hand in a smattering of amendments that would delay seven major road projects by a year, for a combined savings of $3.7 million in 2009.

Meanwhile, Alders Jed Sanborn, Judy Compton and Thuy Pham-Remmele are behind an amendment that strikes $100,000 worth of funding from the Renewable Energy Project. Sanborn, Pham-Remmele and Alder Libby Monsonmade a bold move to remove $250,000 from the budget that was intended to jumpstart the Central Park project between 2009 and 2011. And it was Sanborn, Pham-Remmele, Monson and Alder Michael Schumacher who got together to quash $120,000 from the municipal art fund, which has already drawn protest from several members of the public tonight.

Budget Meetings: Hour 1

2008-11-11T20:00:00.006-06:00

Feel like an impromptu civics lesson? Feel free to follow along with my coverage of the City of Madison budget hearing process. Our radio station is launching a new project, but the material I create for it is not available to the general public yet. So I figure, why not share that coverage in a venue where it might get seen by one or two people instead of none... Enjoy!

Also, my friend Kristin Czubkowski from the Cap Times is keeping a minute by minute liveblog of the hearings, if you're die hard enough to follow along. But read MY blog first, because it will irk her somewhat if you do.

So it begins.

The city council led off its budget hearing innocuously enough this evening. Following the 22-hour, three night budget "marathon" of 2007, the council altered the rules governing the hearings a little bit. The game plan is to take all the comments from members of the public in one fell swoop tonight. Once that is out of the way, the board will make what progress it can on the capital budget, or one-time expenditures on items like equipment and facilities.

Right now, there are 28 proposed amendments to the capital budget as it was put forward by the Mayor. The council will go through those and vote them each up or down before proceeding to the operating budget, where there are 45 amendments on the table.

So far, nearly a dozen members of the public have sounded off on budget items; ranging through everything from funding for the arts to the Central Park plan to solar systems. The big topic, unsurprisingly, has been the plan to raise bus fares from $1.50 to $2.00, and the feedback has been exclusively negative.

By the look of the public seating area, we're in for plenty more speakers before the council gets their turn. Most of the alders have water bottles, coffee mugs and snacks at their stations along with the usual clutter of notes, binders and laptops. As I understand it, we'll be here until 10:30 or so, and likely the same time tomorrow night. The progress made between now and then determines how late the meeting goes Thursday night, when the board is slated to FINISH whatever is left of the 73 amendments.

Everyone's settling in for the long haul.

Turning the Corner

2008-11-05T10:51:00.005-06:00

I don't have enough time before I have to go to work to adequately describe the emotions I'm feeling this morning, and it would take me a lifetime... generations... to come to terms with the fervor and elation I encountered on State Street last night. All I can do is try to provide a snapshot.

On my way home from work, I swung by State to just kind of get a feel for the downtown and campus reactions to Barack Obama's winning the presidency. I'll be honest as well: after spending the evening in Republican headquarters, I was looking for a few celebratory high fives as well.

I was overwhelmed by what I found.

As I arrived, a spontaneous parade was rending its way down State Street. There were thousands of people, people marching toward the capitol for no reason other than they had no where else to go, but they couldn't go home. They were too elated.

People were standing on the sidewalks chanting. People were running up to strangers and hugging them. People were waving flags, wearing them like capes, wrapping up in them like they were warm, comfortable blankets. High fives were inescapable. Everybody was grinning and laughing. Black folks and white folks were standing arm in arm and just yelling for the hell of it. I'm pretty sure most of them were strangers prior to that night.

My buddies Ben and Branton showed up on the street, and Ben burst into tears immediately. He admitted the waterworks had been going all night.

It was an exciting night for me, and for anyone who takes their love of country and progressivism seriously. For Ben, Branton and me, it marked the end of eight long years of gritting our teeth at misguided foreign policy decisions, an economy fueled by rampant greed and some of the most Paleolithic social beliefs seen in the White House for decades.

Eight years, and we were pushed to the brink. I can only imagine how it felt for the black men and women on the street. They had been waiting for last night a lot longer than eight years.

"This is the first time that the American flag has meant something to me," one young black woman named Maya said. "Today, for the first time."

She was weeping openly.

"I can remember looking up to this as a little boy," a black man, Zack, said with tears shining in his eyes under the street lights, "as a little kid, thinking it was impossible. And this...and then it happens. And it happens!"

"This is our moment," another guy yelled, darting in through a small, growing crowd of people who wanted to tell me their stories and grabbing the proffered microphone. "This is our generation's moment right here!"

He then informed me, "I'm gonna hug you now," and wrestled me into a bear hug as the crowd started to chant, "Yes we did. Yes we did."

And yeah, I guess we did.

It's going to be very easy to be very giddy for the next couple of days, but I hope that the enthusiasm I saw on State Street last night NEVER wears off. One battle is won, and soundly, but the work is only just beginning.

Last night was the night we turned the Titanic, but righting her will take a wholly different struggle. There will be no overnight transition. Our nation is in bad shape, and it will take more than the enthusiastic supporters who rallied in the streets, in the bars, in their homes last night to restore our country to what it once was, and then better it further.

That... that belief that there is no end to the quest for self-betterment... That is the America we were raised to believe in, and that's what we have to remember as a nation striking out for these next four years, and, indeed, the future of our America.

My Favorite Holiday

2008-11-04T12:59:00.002-06:00

Honestly, it feels more like a party than election day.

Here in Madison, nobody's somber, nobody's out to just do their civic duty. Everybody's out with a purpose, and everybody feels good. On my way to work, there was a man on ten-foot stilts dancing at the corner of East Wash and Paterson holding a sign for Obama. Outside of Fitchburg city hall, there was an accordian and tuba duet set up playing oom-pa-pa music. Every other block on Fish Hatchery road are people waving signs and balloons.

Everybody is smiling.

Happy election day.

Back Off My Vote

2008-11-03T22:46:00.003-06:00

Honestly, I'm a little sad that I voted early. If I were going to the polls tomorrow, I would be just ITCHING to take a swing at the first overzealous votary, fascist thug or state Attorney General who tried to step into my way.

Four years ago was the first time I ever got to vote in a Presidential election. As we all know, that didn't turn out so well, but at the time I cast my vote, it was honestly the most excited I had ever been about anything political.

One of my favorite sayings is that, "If you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention." In November of 2004, I was paying attention and I was very, very pissed off. I was not pleased to be mired in a fledgling quagmire we had been told was a "Mission Accomplished," I was alarmed with rising corporate irresponsibility and I was deeply concerned about the declining state of the middle class.

Four years later, not much has changed -- certainly not our President. The heinous brew that was the state of our nation in 2004 has sat for four years, and it has stewed, it's fermented and ripened like a neglected trash can.

When I cast my vote in 2004, I did it with the giddy little thrill of a middle schooler flipping the bird at his least favorite science teacher. But when I turned over my absentee ballot this year, I was solemnly satisfied and calmly defiant. I won't say I was quite confident, but I felt pretty darn good.

Suffice it to say, had anyone tried to prevent me from doing the civic duty every American should take a maniacal pleasure in, violence would have ensued.

More than the reports of our esteemed Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen and his cronies hanging around polling places like the Hamburglar trying to steal people's votes, the fact that there are people who take their right to vote as seriously as I do makes me glad Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney is assigning some of his community deputies to stop in at polling places and make sure there is no undue interference being put before voters. I sincerely hope more sheriff's offices in the state are following Mahoney's lead, because the last thing we need after the past eight years is an election day marred by disenfranchisement and violence.

Mahoney told us at the radio station that the County Clerk, Bob Ohlsen, and a number of town and village clerks asked him to have deputies check in to make sure everything was going smoothly. He said, between the state Republican Party assigning intimidating poll watchers to stand guard and the Attorney General dispatching his goon squad to do the same, many clerks are worried help will be needed to chase away potential usurpers.

"We will not be precluding people's free speech," Mahoney told Sly, "but we will not allow people to disrupt the voting process and to stand in the way and intimidate those individuals who come out and exercise their right to vote."

Mahoney said he himself does not expect there to be any serious trouble in Dane County, but his deputies will be watching out for it if there is. Personally, I love the thought of dispatching the authorities to intimidate anyone who was thinking about trying to intimidate voters.

The mental image of J. B. Van Hollen getting dragged away from an inner city polling place in cuffs is just as sweet.

Take the Candy and Run

2008-10-29T19:52:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, I just long for the Halloweens of my youth.

This isn't to say I haven't thoroughly enjoyed each of the successive five Halloween celebrations since I moved to Madison. I've partied up and down State Street, as far West as Walnut Street and as far East as Butler Street, as far South as Vilas Avenue and as far north as...well, Lake Mendota, I guess.

Yes, we jumped in.

You see, each celebration has been unique in its own way, with wild, scarcely believable, individually unique stories to accompany them. Sure, I will refuse 'til my dying day to call Halloween on State that ridiculous term they coined for it, but I will attend, wear a costume and laugh myself stupid.

But in spite of all the fun there is to be had in this town on the closest Saturday to October 31, I will never accept Madison as the end-all-be-all of Halloween. That honor is reserved for Monroe, my hometown, and the carefree innocence of Halloween when I was young.

And by carefree innocence, I really mean unsupervised, unfettered, unbridled mayhem.

I believe I was 13 or 14 at the time of the tale I will now impart. I was at that stage in every boy's life when he begins to learn who he is as a man, and it was slowly dawning on me that I was somewhere between a hellion and a criminal mastermind.

I wasn't alone. Like every neighborhood in the Smalltown Midwest prior to the invention of the Playstation, ours was inhabited by a roving band of troublemakers. I won't name any names, because like me, a number of them have gone on to lead rather legitimate lives. But I will say, at my age now, I would have been terrified to live in the midst of the subdivision that was our adolescent playground.

Halloween rolled around that year, and half a dozen of us assembled in somebody's garage to lay our evening's plan for battle. We were at that age where, were we to ring a doorbell and exclaim, "Trick or treat," eyebrows would rise. All of us were too young to drive, but too old to play the cute card. Yet not a one of us was willing to let a favorite holiday pass by without "earning" "our share" of free candy from the neighbors.

So we schemed. And after we schemed, we went into the house and got on of the guys' kid brother, "Donny," who was all of 10 years old and dressed up in one of those big, plump pumpkin costumes. We told Mr. and Mrs. Donny we would take him trick-or-treating so they could stay in and sit by the fire, and they thanked us with a plate of brownies.

Then, after promising Donny an equal cut in the action, we waited.

By about eight o'clock, the neighborhood was primed for our scheme. It was dark, the number of legitimate trick-or-treaters was dwindling and neighborhood denizens were beginning to settle into their couches for a couple hours of primetime before bed. We struck out, a half dozen black-clad wraiths and one pumpkin, cute as a button, with a light-up trick-or-treat bag.

The first home must have had no idea what hit them.

"Mrs. Johnson" was a pleasant woman in her early fifties, and a teacher at the high school. I imagine she was just plopping a few marshmallows into her hot cocoa, because it was a chilly night, when the doorbell rang.

"Oh my," she likely called to her husband in the basement. "Must be one last trick-or-treater at the door."

On her way to the front entrance, she grabbed the large bowl of Halloween goodies perched on the bannister, only half depleted after an entire evening's worth of ghouls and goblins. Ours was a fairly middle class neighborhood, and a trick-or-treater could always count on the neighbors to have about ten times more candy on hand than they actually needed. And they always did.

Opening the door, Mrs. Johnson glowed down at the round, rosy-cheeked little pumpkin standing on her doorstep. "Trick or treat?" Donny bellowed, grinning up at her with an innocent 10-year-old's imperfect smile.

"Aren't you just adorable," she cooed automatically. "I'll tell you what. Just because it's getting so late, I'll give you two candy bars."

"Thank you!" Donny blurted, just as we had instructed him.

Mrs. Johnson furrowed her brow and glanced at her watch, then allowed her eyes to dart about the front yard. It was a dark, moonless night, and she could have sworn she had heard snickering in one of the hedges out front.

"It's getting kind of late," she cautioned Donny, eyes still narrowed. "You ought to go straight home."

"Thank you," Donny rapped out again, and turned to leave. With one last glance around the yard, she began to swing the heavy door closed, until she heard Donny cry out.

From the hedges, from the street and from the side of the house, black-clad figures swooped in on the bouncing little pumpkin, surrounding him and knocking him to the ground. His legs kicked impotently in the air from within his costume as the teenage hooligans pried at, then wrested the light-up candy bag from his arms.

Within moments it was over, leaving the 10-year-old laying in Mrs. Johnson's front yard, the faint echo of a sniffle emanating from within the Day-glo pumpkin costume.

"Are you all right," screeched Mrs. Johnson, tearing out across the front yard to Donny's aid. She helped him sit up and saw there were tears running down his face.

"Th-th-they t-t-took my c-c-candy," he stammered between sobs.

"Well, we'll just see about that," she said, leading him back to the front porch and disappearing through the front door. Mrs. Johnson reappeared at once with a plastic shopping bag, into which she unceremoniously dumped the remainder of the candy dish and three unopened bags of individually-wrapped chocolates.

"Now here you go," she said, patting him on the head, "and you walk home quickly and carefully, do you understand?"

"Yes ma'am," Donny said, his tears dried and the grin shining once more. "THANK YOU."

We met the kid halfway down the block, high-fiving him for his performance and dumping the loot into a pillow sack. That pillow sack, which we stashed in a nearby sewer grate, became our base of operations for the next hour and a half, as we terrorized neighbor after neighbor with what would forever after be known as the Pumpkin Con.

We must have run that bit on over a dozen people. By the time we headed home for the night, we had amassed enough loot for each of us to carry home our own full pillow sack, and Donny got a double share.

And it's true what they say: candy won is sweeter than candy earned.

The Car Did It

2008-10-28T23:04:00.004-05:00

Today, gentle reader, I would like to call your attention to a case study in Wisconsin being the weirdest state in the whole of the Union.

Attached to this blog post, you will find the image of a screen capture I took while doing some research on a story today. It is part of the rather lengthy RAP sheet of one Brian J Britz, which you can find using the state of Wisconsin's CCAP. Specifically, this screenshot refers to the Milwaukee County case numbered 2000CV009662, which just so happens to be something of a mystery.

Not only does this file list none of the details regarding the charges or sentences that were brought against Mr. Britz in 2000 (rather, this one specific case in 2000...Mr. Britz was in court multiple times in 2000), but it lists as his co-defendent a 1990 Oldsmobile Regal.

Whatever it was Mr. Britz was charged with, his accomplice was a car.

Now it's not that I don't find Mr. Britz's recent exploits interesting. While the original story (link above) credits him with achieving his 10th DUI, there was some speculation later in the day among various sources that it may have been his 11th, or even his 12th, and even in Wisconsin, most people get it figured out by their 5th or 6th.

But to have committed a crime and been aided or abetted by an automobile...that's something I just don't see in my usual day-to-day diggings. I must admit this story has captured my imagination and rivetted my curiosity, and I am vowing now to find more answers.

Also, there's the matter that Oldsmobile never manufactured the Regal line -- that was a Buick model. A quick run of the VIN on Carfax returns the car as a 1990 Oldsmobile Regency, another unfortunate line from that same time period. It's surprising the car was even still running when 2000 rolled around, but I guess it just adds to the enigma.

Until I can get my open records request into the Milwaukee County DA's office (and wait several months for a reply), however, there's nothing to stop me or anyone else from wildly, irresponsibly speculating what this absurdity of a CCAP case entry might mean. It certainly opens up a number of questions.

First and foremost, did the Milwaukee County District Attorney's office seriously charge an inanimate object with a crime, or is this more like something out of Stephen King, where the car was possessed by some kind of evil spirit and went on a killing rampage?

Was the Regency given a jury trial, or did it take a plea deal? What happened to it after its time in court? Was it locked up in a salvage yard until it paid its debt to society? Is it free now? Was it put to death in the smelting chamber?

I think it's likely from the Regal/Regency discrepency that this case involved some kind of identity fraud on the part of the car, Mr. Britz or both. Perhaps the Regency was an illegal immigrant... rrr, import... and Britz arranged to have it smuggled into the country via Great Lakes container ship, though how he would be clever enough to accomplish that in the midst of racking up ten (or more) DUIs goes beyond my comprehension.

I would certainly be interested in any other theories there might be as to what this is all about, as long as they're not boring and grounded in fact.

JB = pwned

2008-10-23T12:11:00.004-05:00

Far be it from me to partake of an internet meme, but... well...

Sometimes I just can't resist.

In case you didn't hear, Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi pulled the trigger and removed the judicial bowel obstruction that was J. B. Van Hollen's lawsuit. Read all about it in the Wisco State Journal.

The Good Ol' (McCarthy) Days

2008-10-21T22:28:00.006-05:00

In our country, there's a war that has been raging for centuries.

The stakes are high, the factions too numerous to count and the skirmishes frequent, but there are no visible casualties -- at least not recently. There likely will never be a final victor, yet the battle rages on to stake a claim on what it means to be "American."

Over the past decade, I've grown used to the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys and the Bill O'Reillys of the world. I have no time personally for these snake oil salesmen of freedom, who pay lip service to the "Ideals Our Country was Founded On" while using their views on what constitutes "American" as a cudgel to bludgeon the opposition into submission. I believe these men and women pose a danger to those very ideals through the damage their single-minded simplicity has done to what passes for a modern discourse in this country, but that damage is not irreparable, and I think their relevence is beginning to fade.

But more dangerous to those ideals than the talking heads are the American leaders who not only stake a claim on what it means to be "American," but seek to persecute those who don't follow in their views. Here in Wisconsin, our collective memory tends to glaze over half a decade's history when Senator Joseph McCarthy is mentioned. Let's face it: his reign of terror is about as much a point of pride as Hitler's rise to power is to Germany.

Well, there must be something in the Great Lakes water supply, because once again a Midwestern member of Congress wants to investigate those who aren't "American" enough for her tastes.

In an interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball, Republican Representative Michele Bachmann told Matthews the media ought to investigate members of Congress and out those with "Anti-American views." She repeatedly conflated being un-American with leftism and liberalism, inferring that Presidential candidate Barack Obama and other leaders in Congress subscribed to those "Anti-American views."

Anti-American? What the hell is that? Do they hate apple pie? Do they watch soccer instead of baseball? Or maybe they're anti-American like those pesky members of the media who eventually started asking questions after the nation went to war in Iraq.

Bachmann's ridiculous assertions -- firstly, that any one person is even qualified to define what it means to be American, and secondly, that holding a certain line of political views can make anyone un-American when the very principles our country was founded on necessitate a broad, free marketplace of diverse ideas -- are unfortunately not as extremist as they ought to be. Indeed, one of the candidates for the second highest office in the country has been parroting the same load of rubbish at rallies around the country.

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who ought never be allowed to run for any office more crucial than dog catcher, told a crowd, "Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists..."

So there you have the first two parts of what it means to be Anti-American. If you look at your country and see anything that's less than perfect, or if you've ever carried on a civilized conversation with someone that could be characterized as a left-wing extremist, you're Anti-American.

Following Palin and Bachmann's logic, the very framers of our constitution were Anti-American, in that they sought "to form a more perfect Union." "More perfect" denotes less than perfect, and no real American would ever go so far as to suggest America comes up anywhere short of infallible. And the framers certainly kept the company of some lefty radicals.

Maybe that explains the disdain Americans like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have had for our constitution in recent years. But by these standards, I'm anti-American as well, and that doesn't sit well with me.

You see, I love my country too much to let cretins like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh steal the notion of "love of country" out from under me. I'd wager they couldn't figure out how to properly fold the American flag between the three of them.

I have a number of ideas I think could help America become a better country. Yes, this means I think it has shortcomings. The beauty of America comes in surmounting those obstacles as we have in the past, with hard work and cooperation. Turning a blind eye to problems by being "wild about America," as Bachmann put it, does nothing to improve our condition.

Sometimes it takes radical thinking to solve problems, and sometimes it doesn't. I keep friends who could constitute radicals on either side of the political spectrum, and I feel I am a stronger American for it. Anyone who would spurn an idea or individual offhand is unfit to lead, and that makes the whole debate about the William Ayerses, the Reverend Wrights, completely irrelevent.

I don't know what constitutes being "American," but I know it requires a good deal more open-mindedness than Michele Bachmann exhibited when she told Chris Matthews, "On college campuses...you find people who hate America, and unfortunately these people have positions teaching in higher learning, but you'll find them in all walks of life."

The only people who have anything to fear in an open marketplace of ideas are those whose beliefs run skin deep. And nobody who seeks to better our country as they see it is Anti-American.

Depths Update

2008-10-16T16:13:00.002-05:00

In reference to my earlier post from today about the sleazy robo-call:

Wisconsin Republican Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told our radio station: "I guess I wouldn't call it an attack. I think that it's a responsibility for John McCain and Govenor Palin as well as the Republican Party to put the questions out there. Let the voters decide. But they can't decide for themselves if they don't have the information, and it is our job to get the information to the voters."

Spoken more like Fox News than a thinking, rational human being. Note the two exclude each other completely.

Next up: Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Alec Loftus, with a slam-dunk rebuttal that will finally get these mouthpieces to shut the hell up: "That's interesting. I don't think we have any comment at this time, but we'll call you if we do."

Loftus, get the hell off your lazy ass and shut these toolbags down. Obama ballsed it out and addressed the issue head-on in his debate last night, so you can too.

This is an opening. Use it.

Uncharted Depths

2008-10-16T14:19:00.006-05:00

Republican National Committee?!? I know I don't hold high expectations for you, but WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!? NO. BAD. INAPPROPRIATE. Do I have to rub your nose in this before you'll learn?

This is the latest robo-call going out to Wisconsin residents from the rightie camp. We got a couple of callers who told us about it before one intrepid listener called in with a recording off his answering machine. It first aired on (insert requisite plug) Sly's show on AM 1670 WTDY.

I'm tied up with a busy day at work. Hopefully I'll have time to post on this later. In the meantime, work this around the blogging community so somebody else can make the uproar it deserves.

Unacceptable.

***4:25 update, also posted above***

Wisconsin Republican Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told our radio station: "I guess I wouldn't call it an attack. I think that it's a responsibility for John McCain and Govenor Palin as well as the Republican Party to put the questions out there. Let the voters decide. But they can't decide for themselves if they don't have the information, and it is our job to get the information to the voters."

Spoken more like Fox News than a thinking, rational human being. Note the two exclude each other completely.

Next up: Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Alec Loftus, with a slam-dunk rebuttal that will finally get these mouthpieces to shut the hell up: "That's interesting. I don't think we have any comment at this time, but we'll call you if we do."

Loftus, get the hell off your lazy ass and shut these toolbags down. Obama ballsed it out and addressed the issue head-on in his debate last night, so you can too.

This is an opening. Use it.

Falling Off the Wagon

2008-10-14T21:02:00.005-05:00

Well, way to go Wisconsin, I hope you're happy. With the latest Quinnipiac University polls showing Wisconsin going to Barack Obama by a solid 17 point margin, and less than three weeks to go before election day, many of the pundits have officially taken Wisconsin out of the "undecided" category.

For shame. I thought you knew better.

You could have been more racist, like Missourri, West Virginia or North Carolina. You could have been more noncommital, like Ohio, Indiana or Nevada. You even could have been more clueless, like our neighbors in Minnesota, which is only leaning Blue. But no, you had to go and swing 17 points in Barack Obama's favor, slipping from battleground to conquered ground, and now you're just out of luck.

There's an old saying that holds particularly true in Wisco: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Barack Obama knows he's got Wisconsin's dairy in his hip pocket, so now, we get backburnered.

I'm being completely facetious, of course. The fact is I'm actually so excited about the new numbers, I'm actually allowing myself to get a good feeling about November's election. While it is by no means in the bag for Obama (I doubt neither the Democrats' collective abilities to bollox it up, nor the Republicans' willingness to sink to as-of-yet uncharted lows in the final weeks of election season), I took an as of yet unprecedented step in my life this evening.

Following dinner, I cautiously hung a Barack Obama cling on my front window, then allowed myself a moment to bask in... well, the audacity of my hope.

What I find so damn disappointing about Wisconsin's swing to the Obama camp is that it does knock us down a little ways in the order of importance among other contested states. In 2004, Wisconsin went to John Kerry by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point. As a critical state tottering on the precipice of common sense and mass delusion, we were treated to a massive rally that packed West Washington Avenue for blocks, featuring John Kerry himself and 80,000 supporters from all walks of life.

This afternoon, as a critical state that has stepped back from the edge of madness, assessed the drop and built a house in the valley instead, we were treated to a rousing pep talk that packed the capitol steps, featuring... John Kerry... and some college kids...

And I had high hopes, too, for the late October rally I had pictured in my head for this year. I'm sorry, but after the 2004 let-down that followed the single most exciting event of my adult life to date, I was thrilled by the idea of replacing that memory with one of Barack Obama, his preacher's voice booming across city blocks, whipping the crowd into a delirious frenzy and shaking off the icicles of despair that have accumulated these past eight years.

So if you get a phone call from a pollster in the next couple of weeks, you tell them you're undecided. Because Obama's speech at the Kohl Center in February was fantastic -- it's the kind of thing that will keep you talking until the November 4th election. But a Barack Obama speech in the 2008 election home stretch could be something to tell your Grandkids about someday.

We still have a lot of work to do to bring Wisconsin in for Barack Obama -- like Kerry said at his rally today, vote early, and then TALK TO PEOPLE about who they're voting for, or whether they're voting at all -- but we've covered a lot of ground as well. And damnit, we deserve to be in on the celebration in the final days before what will hopefully be a long-sought turning point for our country.