First I should mention that I hate that song. But I've used it as my title today to preface some things that I've had a chance to see this past week.
I wish our world wasn't nearly this disturbing, it's really very terrible.
Here's a clip about a man charged with sexual battery against a SIX MONTH OLD LITTLE GIRL.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29165667/
I don't understand why people do this, and how you could resort to hurting another person, an infant, because he or she was bothering you. Why would you leave your daughter with a person like that? I don't know if he was the father, brother, cousin, neighbor, or whatever. You don't do things like that.
Second, two Florida teens were arrested for FAKING A RAPE on another teen boy from their highschool.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29167296/
also at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2009/02/12/0212simrape.html?imw=Y
May I just say, WHAT?! I...I just....I don't understand! What kind of family lives did these two boys have that even hinted to them that doing this was OK? Seriously disturbing. He "realized his actions were inappropriate"?? So that means that the peer pressure to prey on others is so great, that kids will go so far as to fake rape?
Let's move on to other parts of the world. I found this article published online today by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7887520.stm
"FIVE CHILDREN SHOT IN AFGHANISTAN"
I seriously doubt the troops were aiming at the children; what I would like to focus on is the fact that children were anywhere near that sort of situation. I've never been to Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, or any other countries in that immediate area. Yes, I'm the privileged white chick who, one might argue, understands only that Prismacolor pencils are the best and that some university professors respond better to BS than others. But I think I know when and where children shouldn't be around adults, and I'd say war is one of those times.
For that matter, adults shouldn't be around adults at that time. I'm tired of reading death counts and hearing about martyrs and children being killed because they were in the middle of a situation everyone says they hates yet no one can ameliorate. A couple of semesters ago, one of my journalism profs would give my class pop quizzes on the headlines of the day. The last question, 8 times out of 10, was, "Current Iraq War Death Count?"
I'd honestly never paid attention to it before. But when you're reading through the obit page every day, reading about people who you didn't know who are now being buried under dirt and flowers, and you're watching this number climb every month....
Maybe this is entirely unrelated, but I watched the Incredible Hulk last night with one of my favorite friends. I would suggest seeing it, Edward Norton, I would argue, was the best Hulk so far. In the beginning of the film, General Ross calls in a group of soldiers to hunt down Banner, who they've found in Brasil. Here's the pertinent part: Does the general tell the soldiers exactly what they were up against? That Banner would turn into a fifteen-odd-foot tall anger machine and tear them to pieces? Nope. He tells them that the scientist stole military secrets and was a fugitive from the law.
OK, so the film was made by Hollywoodiens. It's part fiction, part social commentary. It just makes me wonder, how much of the truth was told to the soldiers going into what we call the Middle East? In relation to what they were told, I don't care as much about what I, as a citizen, know. If it were between me knowing and them knowing, I'd want them to know.
When I get into things like this, all I can keep thinking about is how sad our world is. Look at some of these photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/08/europe_warehouse_a_home_for_italy0s_migrants/html/1.stm
Sometimes I wish I were more politically and economically minded, so that I could at least explain these things to myself.
12 February 2009
10 February 2009
The heart of an editor and The Stylebook
It's another Tuesday at the Greeley Tribune, and Nicole, one of the copy editors/page designers here, keeps on breaking computers. She says the first time she did it, it was on purpose. The second time, all she had to do was sit down in front of the computer we use for photoshop, and it spazzed out. She went to open the program and the screen went BLLAAAAAAACCKKKKK.
I feel happy that I haven't killed anything yet. I suppose the day will come.
I feel like this internship is going pretty well so far. I mean, I haven't done anything incredibly stupid, and when I do miss things, they're usually special Greeley rules, or things I haven't been told to pay attention to in the past.
One of my projects earlier this evening was to edit a short article written by another intern named Jessica. She goes to UNC; I met her a couple of weeks ago and she seemed like the energetic, go-getter type. This idea was confirmed when I was told that she, unlike most every other intern here, is an English major.
I don't want to say that she's not a good writer. I think basing a person's writing ability off of a single example of newswriting is really kind of mean. But this piece. Oh, this piece. I read the lead (the first line). Twice. Three times. She'd never interviewed anyone before, and it showed: The entire article read the same way I'm sure my newswriting did when I was in Reporting 1. Dull. Very little personality.
That was the moment I realized I've turned into a newswriting snob. I don't think I was like this two years ago. It made me feel bad, like I'm a mean person who only finds joy in demonstrating my writing superiority over others. I told Casey this (he's one of my mentors) and he almost laughed and said, "Well, that's a good quality to have if you're going to be an editor."
The tiny snort of a laugh that Casey gave while keeping his eyes on his computer screen didn't exactly make me feel better. Editing some mini briefs he had written and finding mistakes in them did. So it seems like I'm either a very mean person....or I am going to be a fantastic editor, because I don't care about feelings when I edit. I care about the words sounding right.
Then again, I feel like a sort of diseased something is churning in the pit of my stomach. I never wanted to be one of "them." I've always hated pyramid-style articles -- hated writing them, hated being forced to read them -- and I have to confess, I'm a tad horrified with myself right now. It doesn't matter so much that I really did make it better. What matters was my first instinct to push the pertinent information to the top. Like my French prof would say, I've started my "chute au mal." My fall to evil.
But at least I really did make it better, at least, Casey said I did. I'm a big fan of reading things out loud, sometimes I'll plug my ears after editing a piece and whisper it to myself. It's a little difficult to do that and not feel weird, since the newsroom is really quiet after 5:03. With just sports and the copy desk still sitting around and working, the only loud things that happen mostly concern bantering and the police scanner. I had to do the ear plugging thing a couple of times with Jessica's article to get it right. See? Fall to evil.
Hopefully I can get to the point where I can just glance through things and not have to look up punctuation entries in the AP Stylebook. Oh, and concerning the Stylebook? Oy. I'd always been convinced that it was simply the collocation of strange rules written by a bunch of completely sloshed news editors trying to change the world of journalism.
Now that I've been using it more frequently, I am almost positive that my hypothesis is correct. How do you decide that in all American newspapers, "traveling" will only get one "l"? Or, for that matter, that all punctuation (except for that question mark) goes inside quotation marks? Oh, but there are even more exceptions.
I don't really know what they are yet. I just know that they exist. That's the most frustrating part of what I do: knowing that there may or may not be something wrong with a sentence, and knowing that its correctness lies solely in the hands of a bunch of drunkies. That if the sentence appeared in almost anything besides an article in a newspaper, it would be perfectly fine.
I can understand why being a copy editor isn't really on the top of the list for careers. You have to follow rules. Lots of rules. Some rules don't even have an explanation. In the Stylebook, they're just listed as a single word. Like "seesaw," or "'hooky' Not 'hookey'."But why isn't is "hookey?" Who decided? Was it a linguistics thing? Is "hookey" actually a bad word? How can normal people know these things, unless they had a hand in creating the Stylebook?
They can't. And that is why we editors are the elite (haha!). Although, the elite as compared to who, I'm not exactly sure. Who knows. But I'm sure that somewhere in the world, there exists a career that is the proletariat to our bourgeoisie.
I feel happy that I haven't killed anything yet. I suppose the day will come.
I feel like this internship is going pretty well so far. I mean, I haven't done anything incredibly stupid, and when I do miss things, they're usually special Greeley rules, or things I haven't been told to pay attention to in the past.
One of my projects earlier this evening was to edit a short article written by another intern named Jessica. She goes to UNC; I met her a couple of weeks ago and she seemed like the energetic, go-getter type. This idea was confirmed when I was told that she, unlike most every other intern here, is an English major.
I don't want to say that she's not a good writer. I think basing a person's writing ability off of a single example of newswriting is really kind of mean. But this piece. Oh, this piece. I read the lead (the first line). Twice. Three times. She'd never interviewed anyone before, and it showed: The entire article read the same way I'm sure my newswriting did when I was in Reporting 1. Dull. Very little personality.
That was the moment I realized I've turned into a newswriting snob. I don't think I was like this two years ago. It made me feel bad, like I'm a mean person who only finds joy in demonstrating my writing superiority over others. I told Casey this (he's one of my mentors) and he almost laughed and said, "Well, that's a good quality to have if you're going to be an editor."
The tiny snort of a laugh that Casey gave while keeping his eyes on his computer screen didn't exactly make me feel better. Editing some mini briefs he had written and finding mistakes in them did. So it seems like I'm either a very mean person....or I am going to be a fantastic editor, because I don't care about feelings when I edit. I care about the words sounding right.
Then again, I feel like a sort of diseased something is churning in the pit of my stomach. I never wanted to be one of "them." I've always hated pyramid-style articles -- hated writing them, hated being forced to read them -- and I have to confess, I'm a tad horrified with myself right now. It doesn't matter so much that I really did make it better. What matters was my first instinct to push the pertinent information to the top. Like my French prof would say, I've started my "chute au mal." My fall to evil.
But at least I really did make it better, at least, Casey said I did. I'm a big fan of reading things out loud, sometimes I'll plug my ears after editing a piece and whisper it to myself. It's a little difficult to do that and not feel weird, since the newsroom is really quiet after 5:03. With just sports and the copy desk still sitting around and working, the only loud things that happen mostly concern bantering and the police scanner. I had to do the ear plugging thing a couple of times with Jessica's article to get it right. See? Fall to evil.
Hopefully I can get to the point where I can just glance through things and not have to look up punctuation entries in the AP Stylebook. Oh, and concerning the Stylebook? Oy. I'd always been convinced that it was simply the collocation of strange rules written by a bunch of completely sloshed news editors trying to change the world of journalism.
Now that I've been using it more frequently, I am almost positive that my hypothesis is correct. How do you decide that in all American newspapers, "traveling" will only get one "l"? Or, for that matter, that all punctuation (except for that question mark) goes inside quotation marks? Oh, but there are even more exceptions.
I don't really know what they are yet. I just know that they exist. That's the most frustrating part of what I do: knowing that there may or may not be something wrong with a sentence, and knowing that its correctness lies solely in the hands of a bunch of drunkies. That if the sentence appeared in almost anything besides an article in a newspaper, it would be perfectly fine.
I can understand why being a copy editor isn't really on the top of the list for careers. You have to follow rules. Lots of rules. Some rules don't even have an explanation. In the Stylebook, they're just listed as a single word. Like "seesaw," or "'hooky' Not 'hookey'."But why isn't is "hookey?" Who decided? Was it a linguistics thing? Is "hookey" actually a bad word? How can normal people know these things, unless they had a hand in creating the Stylebook?
They can't. And that is why we editors are the elite (haha!). Although, the elite as compared to who, I'm not exactly sure. Who knows. But I'm sure that somewhere in the world, there exists a career that is the proletariat to our bourgeoisie.
05 February 2009
The best pictures
It's Thursday again, and the worst thing about today is that it was nice enough to wear shorts. I almost feel sad that I live in Colorado, and we seem to be completely skipping over winter this year. Whatever happened to the February flurries, the blizzards trapping my car in the driveway (at least, that's where it would be trapped if my parents let me park in the driveway, instead of on the street)?
Then again, I'd better not complain too much. Driving in snow and ice up to Greeley twice a week ...yech. That doesn't exactly sound fun. Or safe. And then I would never get here before 5, as it is my eternal goal to do, and then one day, one fateful day, I will have to ring the doorbell. It laughs at me whenever I leave work at night (or is it morning?) to go to my car. Someone put a piece of fake fauna on top of it, probably as some cruel joke to camouflage something truly evil with the reassuring presence of green vine leaves. But I see through the guise. I know what it really is.
Today, as with most Thursdays, I started the evening by checking the wedding, birthday, and engagement announcements. The first problem I ran into was totally me. I forgot how to enter the search commands so that all of the announcements show up at once, in a neat little row. I sat in front of the computer and wiggled my mouse around a little, perhaps hoping that I would accidentally click on the magic command. I didn't.
I should have just asked, but I've done this three times already (yes, three. Oh, so many times), and, as I've always known, I'm rather proud, and I like to figure things out on my own. This is probably something I should work on, i.e. change. I'm trying to ask more questions more often, but it's hard for a person who is used to being able to assume knowledge, if not fake it outright. If you haven't noticed, I'm somewhat ridiculous.
After I managed to find all of the announcements (though through a different means than normal; I'm glad I was actually able to figure it out), I found the best wedding photo ever. Well, maybe it's not the best ever, but it was so much cuter than all of the other pictures. I always make sure to look at the photo attachments when I check the engagement and wedding announcements. I think I do it for the sake of being girly. Or something. I don't really know. I just really like looking at these photos, and knowing that this is how the world is going to remember this couple.
Sometimes they're not very good pictures. Sometimes I look at them and inadvertently grimace, because neither subject looks very comfortable, or because the photographer thought that it would be oh-so-adorable to have every single one of his clients stand with the girl holding her hand on the guy's chest. Maybe it was cute the first time.....but the twentieth time? Not so much.
But today, the picture was of a December 2008 wedding, the Carrico-Dieke wedding. The woman had long blond hair, swept into long ringlets reaching halfway down her back, and she was smiling the smile that comes halfway between laughter and trying to hold a serious face. Her groom had long dreds tied at the back of his head, and his nose was pressed into the woman's cheek. He was grinning, and the white blocks of his teeth made me want to grin with him. A painting of two praying hands pressed together was in the background.
The reason this picture stood out to me is its moment. All the other pictures are too simple. The bride and groom stop, turn to the camera, and smile. Click. This photo wasn't staged. It was like the bride had asked for one more picture, the groom wanted to walk away, he wanted to kiss her. They started talking, they started laughing; the bride wanted to be serious and take the picture, so she turned to the photographer and started to smile.
Sometimes the best pictures are the ones where no one cooperates.
Then again, I'd better not complain too much. Driving in snow and ice up to Greeley twice a week ...yech. That doesn't exactly sound fun. Or safe. And then I would never get here before 5, as it is my eternal goal to do, and then one day, one fateful day, I will have to ring the doorbell. It laughs at me whenever I leave work at night (or is it morning?) to go to my car. Someone put a piece of fake fauna on top of it, probably as some cruel joke to camouflage something truly evil with the reassuring presence of green vine leaves. But I see through the guise. I know what it really is.
Today, as with most Thursdays, I started the evening by checking the wedding, birthday, and engagement announcements. The first problem I ran into was totally me. I forgot how to enter the search commands so that all of the announcements show up at once, in a neat little row. I sat in front of the computer and wiggled my mouse around a little, perhaps hoping that I would accidentally click on the magic command. I didn't.
I should have just asked, but I've done this three times already (yes, three. Oh, so many times), and, as I've always known, I'm rather proud, and I like to figure things out on my own. This is probably something I should work on, i.e. change. I'm trying to ask more questions more often, but it's hard for a person who is used to being able to assume knowledge, if not fake it outright. If you haven't noticed, I'm somewhat ridiculous.
After I managed to find all of the announcements (though through a different means than normal; I'm glad I was actually able to figure it out), I found the best wedding photo ever. Well, maybe it's not the best ever, but it was so much cuter than all of the other pictures. I always make sure to look at the photo attachments when I check the engagement and wedding announcements. I think I do it for the sake of being girly. Or something. I don't really know. I just really like looking at these photos, and knowing that this is how the world is going to remember this couple.
Sometimes they're not very good pictures. Sometimes I look at them and inadvertently grimace, because neither subject looks very comfortable, or because the photographer thought that it would be oh-so-adorable to have every single one of his clients stand with the girl holding her hand on the guy's chest. Maybe it was cute the first time.....but the twentieth time? Not so much.
But today, the picture was of a December 2008 wedding, the Carrico-Dieke wedding. The woman had long blond hair, swept into long ringlets reaching halfway down her back, and she was smiling the smile that comes halfway between laughter and trying to hold a serious face. Her groom had long dreds tied at the back of his head, and his nose was pressed into the woman's cheek. He was grinning, and the white blocks of his teeth made me want to grin with him. A painting of two praying hands pressed together was in the background.
The reason this picture stood out to me is its moment. All the other pictures are too simple. The bride and groom stop, turn to the camera, and smile. Click. This photo wasn't staged. It was like the bride had asked for one more picture, the groom wanted to walk away, he wanted to kiss her. They started talking, they started laughing; the bride wanted to be serious and take the picture, so she turned to the photographer and started to smile.
Sometimes the best pictures are the ones where no one cooperates.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)