Sympathy for the Devil

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.

Last Chance to Shine

This entry in my blog details the most aggravating day of the fall, followed by the most extravagant.

Saturday:

First of all, I ought to be shot.

Saturday very well could have been the last beautiful day we'll have in Southern Wisconsin for six months for all I knew, and certainly the most beautiful day we've had in almost a month. Villain that I am, I took a young man in his prime and made him spend the body of it sitting in a closet lined with blankets, with all sound from the outside world drowned out in headphones as he stared at a small screen that showed him snippets of the same video clips over and over and over and over.

Had I been Eric Plantenberg on Saturday, I would have shot me. As it was, I wanted to shoot me anyway for keeping myself inside all day, and I wasn't the one stuck in a closet. But this guy troopered it out, and he deserves mad respect.

Eric's the leading man in The Big Film We've Been Working On, and with a fine cut pieced together, it's my job to fix the dialogue that didn't take the first time around. For that, there's the highly repetitive process known as ADR, which we sort of managed to pull off at my house.

Basically, lacking any budget at all, I took a little utility closet in my one bedroom flat and lined it with blankets to reduce noise bleed and echo. I ran a microphone from the closet into my digital recorder, and a computer monitor in from my laptop. Somehow, I managed to find room in the closet for Eric and a chair, set up some speakers to output from the digital recorder, and we were able to roll tape.

I was really happy with the final product we had. The audio is as clean as if we'd recorded in a full-fledged recording studio...so clean, in fact, we'll probably have to muddy it up some so it doesn't stand out from the rest of the audio when we dump it into the mix.

But I must have counted down, "3-2-1," I estimate, somewhere on the order of a thousand times. We bagged 138 lines, at an average of 7-8 takes a line, and it took us a good six or seven hours to finish it. I was happy with how productive we were, but nursing a hangover and sleep deprived as I was, I was mostly just a crotchety bastard by the end of the day.

Sunday:

Contrast Saturday, cooped up inside with a grudge against the world, against Sunday, and it's like I had a bipolar weekend. As a rule, I'm convinced there's something magical about the last day before winter sets in, and I'll usually go out of my way to spend it outdoors if I have a hunch the end is near.

My buddy Kyle and I gassed up the bikes (read: motorcycles) Sunday and headed southwest into Green, Iowa and Lafayette Counties. If you've never been into this part of the state before, know this: there's nothing there, save a few small towns and the rolling hills and valleys of the driftless region, marred only by the snaking ribbon of Highway 151.

View Larger Map

For the sake of scenery, we avoided main roads like 151, choosing instead to improvise a route along the more rural roads. Let's face it: they're more peaceful, they're prettier and they're a lot more fun to ride. Leaning into turns, climbing, banking, falling, weaving, it's probably the closest I can ever get to being a fighter pilot with my political views, my conscience and our nation's political climate.

We chose Darlington because Kyle said he had a friend, Silas, whose family had a farm down there. He said we were invited to drop in, take a look around and maybe grab a bite to eat. I have some rural roots myself, and I never shy away from the chance to get a bit of shit on my boots.

Turns out, the family had a "farm" there, and a gorgeous one at that. Silas's parents are very well-established in the Darlington community. His mother is the Lafayette County District Attorney, and his father is part owner of Lafayette County's Memorial Hospital. While the "farm" did have livestock and crops, this was no plant-the-proceeds operation struggling to get by. It was an estate, a rural paradise, and we were welcomed with open arms and a healthy dollop of small town hospitality.

Silas's mother greeted us in the kitchen, clad in denim bib overalls and a red bandana. As she cooked (we offered to help prepare the meal, but she said everything we could have helped with had already been done), she told us the household had been living off its own produce for the past couple of months. For the basics, they still had to rely on the grocery store in town, but the only thing in the meal we ate that hadn't been raised on their land was the rice and the spices.

The meal itself was divine. Silas fried up a hamsteak the size of a boogey board, then divied it up on a serving plate. Another friend of his, an Indian grad student, whipped up some authentic curry that I could have eaten by the pound had it not been for the polite company. Some rice, fresh greens and home-bottled sparkling water topped off the setting.

As we were carrying plates out to the picnic table, the phone rang. With a glance at the caller ID, Silas's mom shrugged off the phone call. "It's about the campaign," she said nonchalantly, referring to her own bid for re-election as DA. Clearly, this was a family that feels the way I do about the last day before winter sets in.

Silas's Dad, an MD, "came in from the fields" for dinner as well. He had been out working doing some trenching on the land. After dinner, the young twenty-something contingent of our troupe walked the back pasture, looked at the cattle, hiked down along a crick and scoped out a four-ton oak that had blown down in a wind storm and needs to be removed. When I left, I was heartily able to say I was pleased to have made their acquaintance.

The day began with next to no expectations. By the time I put the bike in the shed for the night, I had ridden 150 miles through gorgeous autumn countryside, met some good honest hard-working people and fallen in love, again, with the state I've grown up in.

Now, as winter closes in, I'll find new reasons to despise it, but I'll never really be able to hate living in Wisconsin. I think that's part of the beauty that is life here. The lows are pretty damn miserable, as last winter's record snowfall will exhibit, but they only serve to elevate the already dizzying highs... higher.

I miss summer already.

Peace and Quiet

*Taken from my old fashioned, reliable composition notebook*

8-24-2008 10:15 PM
Lake Otatakan, Ontario, Canada

I took a walk out onto the pier after dinner tonight. It was a little bit chilly, but after I ran down to get water twice, I had to stop and take a closer look at what I had seen.

The sun was an hour below the horizon, but there was still a faint, barely perceivable glow to the northwest. The stars were out, and without the light pollution that plagues any place with a population denser than one person per square mile, they were abundant too.

But what was more striking was the stillness. The winds that have been confounding us in our boats this past two days had finally died out, COMPLETELY, leaving the lake calm and smooth enough to pick out the reflections of constellations in the sky.

As always, the beauty of an unmarred night sky struck me dumb -- two-fold, because of its mirror image in the lake. I stood stock still, then realized how quiet it really was. Living in the city... hell, even a town or a farm... there's always some noise or another shooshing in the background. I hadn't realized how much my brain regularly tuned out until just then. There were no waves breaking on shore, no wind in the trees and even the mosquitoes were silent, subdued by the late summer chill.

My heart caught in my chest, and I listened hard. Could this be absolute silence I was hearing, perhaps for the first time in my life?

I cocked my head, and the shift in my weight caused the floating dock to creak at each successive hinge, moving from me to the shore. A door shut within our cabin, the only building for ten miles, which was two hundred yards away from me. My own blood, feeling hot in the cold air, rushed through my ears.

I decided then I needed to experience real silence, even if just for a moment.

I lay down on my back and glanced again at the impressive display of stars, growing brighter by the moment, but I couldn't get distracted. It took a minute for the dock to stop moving, but the harder I listened, the more frustrated I got. It seemed like my stomach was sloshing and splashing as it digested dinner, and somewhere on my right arm, a bulging vein pulsed, pounding the rhythm of my heartbeat against the sleeve of my fleece.

I cursed my own body for being so loud and began taking slow, deep breaths to soften my heartrate and slow my metabolism. After a minute, I switched to shallower breathing, after a tiny rattle deep in my chest, the remnant of a summer cold I thought I had kicked, became the loudest sound I could hear.

I don't know how long I lay there like that. As my pulse slowed and my blood pressure fell, I had only the tick of my wrist watch at twenty second intervals to tell time.

And then, between one of those intervals, it happened. Silence! I allowed myself a flicker of self-recognition to celebrate, then closed my eyes to block out the noisy stars and sample the sensation in its purest form.

No light. No sound. My other three senses fell away like crutches, and I was left in a maddening, howling, lonely vacuum that was really quite pleasant at first, if overwhelmingly awe-inspiring. I strained to draw out the experience so I could come to terms with it, but that was about as easy as accepting eternity.

The thought crossed my mind, "This is what the universe was like before the Big Bang happened 16 billion years ago." It's no wonder a god would set things off into motion, he or she couldn't take it. Even if god is more of a force, a balance, than a sentient being, the Big Bang must have happened just because a whole lot of something was needed just to spite the nothing.

A water pump grumbled to life near the lake's edge, and I opened my eyes. Half a mile across the water, some creature (presumably a moose) grunted in a hooting, plaintive bark three times.

Each time, it echoed from the trees at each bank, caroming from shore to shore and traversing the entire lake. Then, it was quiet again. The silence didn't bother me, but I coughed, experimentally, three times in response. As I listened to it echo around me, I realized for the first time that for me, god and that moose, when presented with all that nothingness, it just felt good to fill it with something.

Moving, Sans the Shaking

There are few things I detest more than moving, because it's like a hybrid of some of my least favorite things in existence. It combines all the heavy lifting and elevated heartrates of exercise with the forced anal retentiveness of getting organized. Scrubbing toilets down with bleach when you've got an open drummer blister (thumb side of the index finger...it's how you pick drummers out of a hand line-up) is at once more painful and possibly more dangerous than regular cleaning, which is bad enough on its own. And then there's all that dust that gets kicked up into the air, which is enough to have anyone wheezing like an asthmatic pack-a-day smoker.

Oh, and it takes up all of one's time as well, which is why I've been light on posts lately. I've got some good ones in queue, so you'll just have to take my word for it that they're golden.

I will share a couple of anecdotes about this move, however. When I started my packing over the weekend, I discovered, buried deep beneath my stairwell, about a box and a half a stuff that I had NEVER UNPACKED from my previous move. It was maybe the most depressing moment of the summer. I think the general rule of thumb is that's the stuff you're supposed to throw away before making the next move, but A) I only lived in this last house for a year, and B) it was stuff I'd been looking for that entire damn year...some of it anyway, and I did throw the rest of it out.

So that was frustrating, but I also had the occasion to do a little gleeful dance as I packed as well. Dork that I am, I have a very large bookshelf I keep stacked from top to bottom with my collection of reading material. The only time of the year I regret having that bookshelf is when the time comes to move, because packing books is a real damn chore.

As I muttered and grumbled my way through that chore last weekend, a few leafs of paper fell out of an old textbook and fluttered to the ground. I gaped for a minute, then siezed them up. It was the letter my Dad had written to me the night before I left home for college, which I had been convinced got lost when I moved out of the dorms freshman year. Packing and cleaning dropped from my mind as I plunked down on the hardwood to read the words of wisdom my Dad had written to me five years ago.

Some of them don't apply any more - I've outgrown them. Some of them will always shape my life. And some of them are probably partly responsible for getting me where I am today.

At any rate, I'm glad to have that letter back...if only I can remember where I bloody packed it.

Posts will be hit or miss for the next couple days. Between the unpacking and getting the internet set up at my new place, I'll try and sneak a few in where I can steal wireless.

I'll Give You a Diatribe!

I won't lie, my original post tonight was going to be about text messages, and how they may very well spell the end of society as we know it, and how THOROUGHLY creeped out I am by the fact that I finally agree with Wisconsin State Senator Alan Lasee on ANYTHING. But when I sat down to write, I took a look at the comments posted on my last piece, and I found this *gem*.

I take exception to your quote:

"But if the city strips him of the livelihood he's made for himself since 1992..."

written near the end of this diatribe of yours against the City of Madison, along with the basic premise of your story.

Madison existed before this guy came to town. To quote the old Tammany Ward Boss George Washington Plunkett, "he saw his opportunities and he took 'em."

Well, Jin took his opportunities and also took parking spaces away from Langdon Street area residents that badly need them. Not bad, if you think you can get away with it.

We don't exist in a vacuum, yet you make it seem that Jin is the David in a classic "You can't fight City Hall" battle against Goliath.

Jin wouldn't have his business if Madison didn't exist, so it is proper for the city to set down rules and regulations when one wants to operate in the city.

If Jin can't play by the rules, maybe he should set up shop some where else where the residents don't mind him taking up a parking space or two. I doubt that will happen when presented the facts.

Parking enforcement exists to give all of us a fair shake at finding a parking spot. If Jin wants something permanent, maybe he should do what most other business people do in Madison and the rest of the Western world: Rent a space.

It's so easy to complain about getting a parking ticket and getting a sympathetic following.
This feeble attempt to generate outrage as if you were Upton Sinclair won't win a giraffe award (for sticking your neck out, get it?) from me.

Keep in mind that Jin has no right to "own" a parking spot, and I for
one am glad the city is throwing the book at this piker.

Sincerely yours,

Adam Young

P.S. Alderman Verveer is a very good friend of mine.

Try as I might, I couldn't overcome the urge to hurl some invective back at the guy. The end result ended up being postworthy, so I'll talk about Lasee some other time. The remainder of this post is my response to Young's comment.

... ... ... ... ...
Mr. Young, it seems you won't be joining us on the fence, which is unfortunate. Perhaps a second perusal of my "diatribe" is in order, for a trifecta of reasons.

Firstly, as well read as you seem, you failed to take away from the piece that there is no such person as "Jin." There is a very colorful story behind that name, and I'm sure Jeff Okafo would be happy to tell it to you if you were to so much as attempt to engage him in conversation. Then again, if you're the type that doesn't associate with "pikers," "rule-breakers" or "black people," google up an article I saw by the Badger Herald about his business, and you can get all the information you need without associating with any "undesirables."

Secondly, I too consider myself a friend of Mike Verveer's, which is why I felt comfortable consulting with him before I wrote this story. I'm sure I don't know him as well as you do, nor have I known him as long, but I went so far as to note the respect I hold for Mike, undermining the very "argument" you seem to think I was making. I weighed his opinion heavily while I crafted this piece, but in the end, I decided Mike's perspective is conveyed everywhere else you look: in city policy, in the minutes from the Vending Oversight Committee meetings and in people like you.

Which brings me to my third point. A "diatribe?" Seriously, is that what passes for a diatribe nowadays? No, Mr. Young, I was telling a story that I thought people might be interested to read. I gauge this based on the fact that I was personally interested to hear Mr. Okafo's perspective, and as a "people" myself, I can generally figure out what they would like to read about.

A teacher and inspiration of mine, Steven Walters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, once told me, "Everybody's got a story they're just waiting to tell. They're just looking for someone to tell it to." Jeff Okafo was happy to impart his story to me, relieved even. Then, as a story-teller, I had to ask myself, "Is there a value to this story?" I sure think so, if as nothing more than a cautionary tale, but also to outline the inherent dangers any kind of institution can pose to individuality.

I'm not personally waving the flag of anarchy, and I'm not condemning anyone here. From my honest, common-sense perspective, while a six month suspension may be a little steep, Jeff Okafo ought to come under some kind of scrutiny to ensure that he finds a way to make his living without breaking city laws.

But, for the sake of conscience, I simply chose to outline a perspective many people may not have considered in this story, and the fact that you perceived it as a diatribe and reacted in such a kneejerk fashion tells me you have firmly entrenched yourself on one side of the proverbial, aforementioned fence. As such, humanizing someone like "Jin" kind of turns your whole worldview upside down, doesn't it? It makes you uncomfortable. I get the feeling you're still struggling to figure out if the whole "walk a mile in someone else's shoes" cliche isn't just some kind of play on words.

In closing, let it be known that when I write a goddamn diatribe, you will know it as such. I hope I have made clear what my intentions were with this piece. I hope that I have not offended you to the point where, when we meet in person (because this town's not that big), we can't order a round and argue it out further in person. And I don't really think you're a racist, an elitist or a simpleton, but it sure was easy to perceive you as such based on the 321 words of florid prose you posted...to vilify you and dehumanize you, as it were.

But mostly, I hope I've conveyed a broader message. The hardest skill I've had to learn in my line of work is the suspension of judgement for someone I may think clearly deserves it. I'm still learning it. There are days I'm sure I've utterly failed at learning it.

So, simply put...lighten up, dude.

The Crazies Come Out

Okay, I resent being right about that heat making people crazy thing within 15 hours of writing it. Right now the forecast calls for the temperature to peak out on Sunday, but we've already got nutters like David Floyd coming out of the woodwork trying to blow things up on Capitol Square or scare the bajesus out of people or whatever he was trying to accomplish. I hate to think what this weekend will bring.

But as busy as the alleged bomberman kept us today, I would still rather touch on the meeting between the Madison press corps and the Madison Police that took place this morning. Given the mood of late, I was expecting something akin to a Conference of the Five Families. Eerily, 911 Center Director Joe Norwick could easily have gassed the studio the gathering took place in and eliminated a hearty majority of his critics among the police and press.

Instead, I was reminded more of a massive, gloves off counselling session between a married couple that hasn't spoken in months. Even though there was a neatly-typed agenda outlining a variety of topics, both sides leapt straight for the throat and spent the entire two hour session griping on the crux of the relationship problem: communication.

There were certainly some heated exchanges between the press and the police that would have made any marriage counsellor wince. Overall, I felt just facilitating the face to face communication was a huge positive step toward bridging the gulf that's developed between this side and that side of the thin blue line. But we're certainly a long way away from the crazy make-up sex that follows the resolution of any serious conflict.

Uh... that last part was purely in keeping with the metaphor...

There was little consensus reached, but at least we're talking. The press still maintains the police are playing their hands too close to the vest. The police maintain the constraints of convicting the perpetrators of these crimes are such that the fact lockdown is appropriate. The old tug-of-war between full disclosure and utter information blackout will probably go on forever, when the optimum solution always lies somewhere elusive in the middle.

It's gone all the way up to this point, but the problem now is it's become too impersonal. Until today, I could only put faces to a few of the names on the force I read and write about every day. In today's Modern American Mediascape (***see footnote***), being competitive means every passing minute is another deadline, and that doesn't leave a lot of time to sit down over a coffee or a brew and catch up. That doesn't leave time for personal understanding. That doesn't leave time for trust.

So the police don't trust the press enough to share more details about these sensitive crimes, and the press don't trust the police when they say the information they're squelching is for the good of the investigation.

And as I pointed out during the meeting today, that negativity is bad for all of us. Being a police detective, a reporter or any kind of public servant is a thankless job. 95% of the time, if you're in the spotlight, it's because you screwed up in a major way.

And yes, I lump reporters in with public servants. Trust me when I tell you I could be making a lot more money in another, less stressful line of work.

The due credit, the kind the public owes the police for their hard work solving the Joel Marino homicide, gets lost in the darkness. And for every time some loose-lipped jackass of a reporter violates someone's trust -- police officer, victim or otherwise -- there are a thousand instances when a journalist's conscience outweighed the potential for self-gain.

I don't have the answers, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to try and figure them out with the Madison Police. Everybody involved probably needs to adjust their expectations and learn to communicate a little better, but that's needed in any dysfunctional relationship. And that's what I hope to see happen if we're able to meet regularly with the police.



(***I would just like to make it known that I am claiming the term "Modern American Mediascape" as my own. I coined it, and I'm staking my claim, damnit. I used the term extensively on "Slightly Off Kilter," the radio show I hosted from 2005 to 2007 on Madison's Student Radio Station, 91.7 FM WSUM, as a means of describing the increasingly convoluted and polluted excuse for discourse bred by sweeping media deregulation and the massive corporate ownership it spawned, as well as the growth of the 24-hour news cycle and the decline of the American attention span. I consulted the Google Gods, and it looks like I was the first. Having dibs on the term may seem petty now, but it'll come in handy some day when I'm publishing a book on what the hell happened to our country... if we still have books, that is.***)

Canoeing While Intoxicated

I have solved Wisconsin's drunk driving problem...or at least the problem as we know it in Madison and other cities with abundant bodies of water and canals between them.

Forget drunk busses. Balls to taxis. Keep your safe rides, your designated drivers and your red bicycles. From now on, whenever I head downtown, there's only one vehicle I'll take. And when bartime rolls around and my BAC is comparable to the flammable content of jet fuel, I'll climb back into my canoe and happily paddle my drunk ass home.

My buddy Cam and I made the discovery this weekend that canoeing presents a safe and remarkably enjoyable alternative to driving drunk. As I mentioned, we competed in the 2008 Paddle and Portage on Saturday, our first, and we were actually pretty pleased with the results. Not only did we finish in fifty-two minutes, nine seconds -- 93rd out of the close to 350 boats in the standard class -- but we trounced all the people we knew or recognized in the race.

UW Men's Hockey coach Mike Eaves, a tough guy to be sure, finished 176th. UW Dean of Students Lori Berquam locked in at 196th. A guy we know from high school came in 314th, and we were none too sorry to see it. And in my favorite result of the day, Channel 27 reporter Carl Agnelly and his team "Making a Difference" came in 327th place, two slots away from where they stopped timing and 11 from dead last.

Then again, it's got to be tough competing in a race that grueling when you're only 13, and I should cut Agnelly some slack.

For my own part, I finished the race and went down HARD on a park bench. I am no athlete, and trying to keep up with the D3 national track champion on my team wore me down to nothing. Cam kept trying to convince me to abandon the fake water beverage I was inhaling and join him at the free beer tent, but I was convinced I needed to rehydrate. When he responded that the best way to rehydrate after a race was with copious amounts of beer, I had my doubts.

Those doubts were washed away after two plastic cups full of Goose Island. I don't know if the beer rehydrated me or not, but I felt a whole lot better. From then on, our mission became seeing how many free glasses of beer we could each consume before the Finish Line Party ended and how many of our fellow "athletes" we could befriend or alienate before the sunburn got the better of us.

The answers ended up being close to a dozen and more of the former than the latter. I think at one point I offered to buy a canoe some guy was selling, but I got neither his name nor his number.

At any rate, eventually the hour came when the kegs were cashed and Cam and I had both crisped to a nice, glowing crimson. It was time to get to our respective Vilas neighborhood homes and get horizontal for a quick nap before a long night worth of other plans. The only problem was that, in nautical terms, we were a full three sheets to the wind with no one at the rudder. Neither of us was in any condition to drive.

Enter, stroke of brilliance.

Instead of wrestling a canoe onto the top of Cam's Cavalier, strapping it unsteadily on, fighting traffic, dodging cops and trying to keep it all between the lines, we came to the hazy, dawning realization that if we just paddled the canoe up Wingra Creek to Lake Wingra, it was simply a matter of portaging the boat another five blocks from the zoo to my house. Compared to what we had done earlier when we carried it a mile across the isthmus during the race, the trip home would be a cakewalk...AND at a more liesurely pace!

So we announced our intentions to canoe home drunk to the dozen or so competitors within immediate earshot and put in.

In my five years living in Madison, four of them as a UW student, I have amassed a number of stories about zany, intoxicated trips home, many of which strain the limits of plausability. But it's been a long time since I had as much fun on my beer scooter as I did boating down Wingra Creek on Saturday.

It was like being an explorer, a voyageur, in my own city. My previous knowledge of Wingra Creek was confined to the parallel facts that it was, A) a creek that connects Lake Wingra to Lake Monona, and, B) that trickle of water that runs underneath Fish Hatchery Road down by the newspaper offices. Travelling down that stagnant canal and waving at the people that rode past on bicycles was a chance to get to know the city of Madison as I had never known her before, the "Pina Colada Song" of romances with a city, if you will.

So yes, I know we already have our share of "green" transportation advocates in Madison. Some folks are keen on busses, others are bonkers for bike racks. Well, damnit, where are the champions of Madison's canoe cause? Where are the public canoe parking racks at the Union and paddle locks along the isthmus and life jacket hangers at the bars and restaurants?

Because I've found the best way to get to the bars and back without digging up a designated driver. In downtown Madison, you're never more than a half mile from one of the lakes or rivers or creeks that make it so impossible to navigate this city on the roads. And as long as I can't get arrested for Canoeing While Intoxicated, this is the best idea I've ever had.

Note: I'm not actually certain whether or not there's a law against canoeing drunk. But if there is, let the bastards try and catch us.

the Person vs. the Policy

I received a response to a recent piece I wrote about the Madison Police Department's planned response to the Mifflin Street Block Party, and even if it's not legit, with all the ragging I've been doing on the PD lately, I have some 'splainin' to do.

In the aforementioned post, I called Police Lt. Joe Balles "Buzzkill Balles." He (or someone writing under his name, but there are a few clues in context that convinced me this is legit) responded, at God's-Ass-O'clock this morning, with this note.

"Hi Dustin, Just an FYI... if you really knew me you would know I'm not a total "buzz kill"... and I enjoy a beer w/ friends just as much as anyone... stop by the Echo Tap sometime and I'll buy you one. I also do not enjoy seeing "force" (handcuffs and whatever else) used to control an unsponsored college drinking party. If you ever want to do a ride a long on the MPD side of the fence...let me know... I think the experience will change your perspective a bit... it has changed many others'...Lt Joe"

I had two distinct reactions on reading this. The first was, "Holy crap, someone reads my blog!" After recovering from the near stroke I had, the second one set in, and it's that second feeling I hope to explain in this piece.

It's an easy mistake to make, in any line of work, when you make assumptions about a person based on contact you have in a professional capacity. There have been plenty of times in my line of work where I've had to place a phone call to someone in a difficult or tragic spot and ask questions that are hard or painful to answer. It's not because I like to make people suffer, and then show it to the world. It's what the job...and my supervisors...demand.

In our conversation about the cameras on Mifflin Street, Balles presented himself in a very hardline manner. That may or may not be how he feels personally about the block party, but it IS the stance the Police Department's administration has taken, and as such, it's a line he's expected to toe. When you think your boss is being a douche-rocket, you may vent about it to friends or family, but you don't advertise it to strangers on the phone.

I do think the feelings of malaise he expressed with regards to the unsponsored nature of the block party are sincere. He shares that with the department's administration, I know. But let's face it, even though it would lose some of its mystique, the block party would do well with a sponsor to put forward a definite timetable and action plan for emergencies.

But I have had the pleasure to get to know a number of law enforcement officers beyond just the Blue and the Badge. Portage police officer Gary Peterson, Portage Assistant Police Chief Kevin O'Neill, Columbia County Deputy Scott Oelke and Columbia County Sheriff Dennis Richards are just a few of the people I've gotten to know as more than just "cops." They're good guys with a job to do, and they do it to the best of their abilities.

Knowing them certainly hasn't kept me from disagreeing with a position they take. In Sheriff Richards's case, I was pretty frank that his department was way out of line in its handling of the 2006 Sheriff's race open records request the paper filed. They were wrong to surpress the information the way they did, and the State Supreme Court eventually agreed with us.

But my issue was with the Policy, not the Person. And while that disagreement took a good deal of time to overcome, we still managed to see eye-to-eye eventually.

In Lt. Balles's case, he doesn't even set the policy, and I was mistaken to "shoot the messenger," as it were. I have a lot of respect for the fact that he approached it directly as he did, because it took... well... Balles... And he subtley called ME out for being a jerk, which, let's face it, I can be sometimes . What's more, someone seems to have told him that my mortal weakness is an offer of beer and an open bar stool. I accept your invitation to the Echo Tap, sir, and the second round is on me. Email me, dcweis@gmail.com, and let's set it up.

What's more, if it's not clear, most of the issue I've taken to date with the police department has been with the administration. I do think that in the lead up to the block party, they have presented too unbending a front on the Mifflin Street issue. How that works out in practice...we'll find out tomorrow. And I certainly think that the veil the administration has wrapped around the ongoing murder investigations is far more opaque than it needs to be. In the most recent case, I understand that making mistakes is acceptable and human. Covering them up, if that's indeed what this is, is neither. I certainly don't want to know every gory detail of the crimes, but a little transparency would go a long way toward dispelling the appearance of a cover up, at least.

Guys like Joe Balles are out there, doing their part to get the job done. It's at the higher levels where my buzz is getting killed.

We'll see you on the block tomorrow.

This week's BAMFs

It's been one of those weeks that runs high on inspiration and low on free time.

However, I couldn't stay away from one piece of information I got for long. It was actually funny, because I was sitting at the Mifflin Street Block Party informational meeting when I heard about it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, when confronted with the choice between sitting at a table with strangers and plopping down with a couple of competing reporters, I will often plop down with the other newshounds. We delight in taunting each other with tantalizing leads we're working on and swapping stories of our favorite and least favoite public officials.

Anyway, the meeting was getting long, a student asked a particularly asinine question of an already badgered Madison cop and I was sharing a knowing glance with State Journal writer Brittany Schoepp and WIBA reporter Jason Fischer. Mike Verveer, in the midst of a sentence that likely defused the eighth potential police / student clash of the evening, mentioned this noteble tidbit. Immediately, the three of us siezed notebooks and began shorthanding furiously.

Apparently, Brittany Zimmermann's family will be at the Mifflin Street Block Party this weekend operating a food stand. That's right, the people whose daughter was stabbed by some psycho who's nowhere near being brought to justice will be selling hot dogs to drunk college kids a few short blocks from where the body was found in order to raise money to establish a college scholarship in their daughter's name. I hope you'll pause just a moment to reflect on the colossal hearts beating in these people's chests...

...because I, quite frankly, am in awe. And don't for a moment think that it's numbness or insensitivity at play in her parents. This is love. It's bravery, it's philanthropy, it's every good and decent thing most of us don't even have the gall to imagine we would be capable of in their position. Instead of wallowing in self pity and hiding from the cold reality of the situation, they're immersing themselves in it. Saturday will, in all likelihood, be the second most painful day of their lives, as they watch kids their dead daughter's age enjoying everything Madison has to offer. Every reveler they see will be a reminder that Brittany should be there, among them.

They know this, yet they'll be there Saturday, tears streaming down their faces, lips pressed tight in brave smiles, hearts broken. They will come because it's a chance, they think, to raise a few hundred bucks to keep their daughter's memory alive.

I spoke to Brittany's father, Kevin Zimmermann, a couple of weeks after the killing. He told me he never went to college, but his family loved the Univerity of Wisconsin. They went to football games for years, and it was his daughter's goal to attend school here. She made it in, and even though they were a family barely scraping by, they worked hard, together, and raised the money for her to attend. He told me he and his wife agreed founding a scholarship in her name is something Brittany would have liked a lot.

On Saturday, I hope our students show the Zimmermanns not only that we know how to party at the UW. Everyone knows that. I hope we show them how we take care of our own, and how the block party is more than just a "drunk fest." It's a celebration of life in general, and foremost this year, one life in particular.

In the worst years, through sleet and rain, I've seen 10,000 people turn out to the block party. In good years, authorities have estimated the number between 25,000 and 30,000. At any rate, if half those people visit the Zimmermanns' food stand and buy something for five bucks, they'll have enough money to start a fund that will guarantee their daughter's name will outlive them both, which Kevin told me was his goal. I will personally be disappointed if they leave Miffland with less than $100,000, and long after the last hot dog has been sold, I expect to see Badgers lined up to pay their respects and drop a tenner in the bucket.

After all, it's how we roll.

In closing, I just caught wind there was a shooting on West Washington Avenue, and crews are going to begin setting up to shoot scenes for the new Depp movie at the state capitol tomorrow. There's a whole lot of shooting going on. May 1st is indeed going to be a damn long day.

The old beat...

Switching markets is as common as getting a new suit in the field I work in. Quite frankly, that's one of my least favorite parts of being a journalist, and I think most reporters would agree. But if one ever wants to make enough to support a family, they're faced with the options of marrying someone with money, turning to the dark side and working for public relations or getting bumped up the market ladder several times. I would be perfectly content to work in Madison for the rest of my life, but by then, inflation will likely have outpaced my annual raises by so much, I'll be a ward of the state. We'll see, I guess.

But it's not all about money. Before I worked in Madison, I was a newspaper reporter for the Portage Daily Register for two years. I was lucky enough to slide into a broadcast job that overlapped this market, so I still still have a number of good connections -- good friends -- in the area.

The thing is, the longer you stay in a market, the higher the likelihood that the person trapped in that burning car, pinned under the flattened house or mauled by a ravenous pack of rabid racoons is going to be someone you know and care about.

In today's case, it was almost the house scenario, and it was a close call. Columbia County Sheriff's Deputy Scott Oelke was always among my favorites to encounter when responding to a call. He's middle-aged, unapologetically a country boy at heart, and he's got a contagious grin that I'd wager has helped hundreds of accident victims pull through a difficult situation.

Scott tells me he was hanging around, monitoring the radio calls about this evening's tornado warnings, when he heard a rumbling to the south of his home, which is south of Wyocena. He jogged out into his backyard just in time to watch a tornado drop from the clouds at the edge of his treeline. He only had seconds to act, but he grabbed his two boys and their friend, who were rocking the game cube at the time, and pelted down to the basement, where he used his body to shield to the two youngest boys. His son told me that.

Fortunately, it was a heroic, but moot, gesture. The tornado levelled two barns within thirty feet of his house, but did nothing more than blow the windows out of the dwelling itself. And in the midst of all this, lightning struck the house and started a small fire that smoldered out within a few minutes...as if the tornado wasn't enough. Scott and the boys were unharmed, though his squad car was flattened by the barn as it blew apart.

When I talked to him, he was all grins. "I've been after the sheriff to get me a new car," he laughed. "That one had 125,000 miles on it."

And I enjoyed seeing him, as I enjoyed bumping into Chief Deputy Mike Babcock, Sheriff Dennis Richards and Daily Register reporters Matt Call and Shannon Green on the scene. It was a stunted homecoming to a place I only ever commuted to, but came to think of as a home anyway. But it was also a sobering reminder that the people in the headlines I read every day have friends and loved ones, too.

Daily... DFWW

I got a call from my hometown newspaper today. I submitted my posting from Monday, and they want to run it as a letter to the editor. That makes me happy, as it's been a while since I've been published in print. Ask anyone who's ever written for a paper. You get that ink in your blood and it never really disappears. And quite honestly, if the opportunity arose to write professionally again, I would be torn. I think my ideal job is one where I could gracefully straddle the chasm between broadcast and print, but until I find that job, I'm happy as a radio reproter who occasionally writes... Or a newspaper writer who occasionally moonlights in radio.

Screw it, I'm just happy to be working.