Bill (S. Preston, Esq.) and Billy’s Excellent Lookalike Contest

My boss:

A movie character that was a hero to me in my formative years:

One and the same?

(If you haven’t seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, this makes no sense.)

I hope I don’t get fired.

Long live the King

Tomorrow (Thursday) will mark 30 years since the death of Elvis Presley.
I love Elvis. There’s no matching his performance, his charisma, his energy, most anything about him. Save your criticisms, please. I’ve heard them all. Rock and roll has come in a lot of different forms since he started his career, but I think anyone playing loud music owes a lot to Elvis and his peers.
Rock music is supposed to have a vaguely dangerous element, and it’s on full display in the video clip I’m linking. Enjoy:

Also, I think it’s funny to note that in this screen shot, there are women to either side of Elvis – one in an orange dress and one in a green dress. One of them is clapping off beat:

On the road again

I found this on youtube. It’s completely pointless and I only posted it because it could have been taken by me when I was in high school. Bad punk music and U.S. 1 – ah, memories.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been driving that fast. And I think U.S. 1 only had two lanes back then. Okay, that’s enough.

Full-contact journalism

We here at The Herald have been getting our hands dirty lately. Fun!
Our sportswriter Randy Quis suited up for football practice down at Southern Lee this past week and the hit I saw him take from number 20 was brutal, to say the least (of course this is being written by a guy who gets hihs most physical with a golf cart, a set of clubs and a few cold ones, but still, it looked like it hurt). And it came after something like 20 minutes of exercise in the 1,500 degree heat. I think we’re going to have video soon.
And then my other colleague Jon Owens climbed into a three-seat airplane and got a flight lesson. May not seem too dangerous, but he had to land the dag-blamed thing, which I wouldn’t be too excited about. He came back alive, I’m glad to report. You can read about it in Sunday’s Herald.
I didn’t have this blog in May, but I volunteered to take a taser shot (50,000 volts!) back then, which was, well, I guess you could say it was fun. I mean, if you consider that type of thing fun. You can watch a video of it here.
Anyway, I’m just writing this because some of the stuff we’ve been doing here at the paper in the past couple of months is really cool. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in my 5 years here because we get to do things that not everyone else gets to and then write about it. Really, that’s what it boils down to. Awesome.
You can expect more stuff like this, too, although I doubt I’ll be putting myself in front of anymore tasers anytime soon. My parents made me promise not to.

Sanford’s finest

One of them pulled me over last night.
It turned out to be a pleasant experience though. The officer, a member of the Sanford Police Department’s Selective Enforcement Unit, stopped me because my truck apparently matched the description of another vehicle that the police thought may have been invovled in some break-ins.
“I don’t believe you’re the same guy we’re looking for,” he said to me, easing my nerves.
Of course, it’s always nerve-wracking to get pulled over for anything, but I knew I wasn’t breaking any laws so I figured I’d be okay. And in the end, I walked away (drove away?) from the experience with more appreciation for what the police are doing out there. They were looking for a bad guy, someone who’d broken into a bunch of homes and stolen somebody else’s stuff. Hey, I hope they found him.

Newspaper editor murdered by hitman

I ran across this story today while scanning the San Francisco Chronice’s web site.
The recently-named editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly newspaper catering to that city’s black community, was apparently gunned down walking to work this morning. Police there have said it was a “targeted killing” and described the killer as a hit man.
There’s another version of the story here that has a few more details.
I’m not going to wax poetic about how all newspaper people are bound together as some kind of brotherhood or anything, but this really does hit close to home.
People quoted in these articles say the editor (his name was Chauncey Bailey) was known for holding people’s feet to the fire and making sure the government in Oakland was accountable to its people. That’s something I understand as a reporter, and it’s fairly shocking to think that it could have gotten him killed.
Of course, nobody has said that Bailey’s killing was related to his work as a journalist, and its entirely possible that this was over a matter from his personal life. But the description of the events (a masked man got out of a van, walked up behind Bailey and fired two or three times before getting back in the van and driving off) reeks of organized crime, something you’d see happen on The Sopranos. And that doesn’t suggest to me a jealous lover or something else. It suggests that the wrong person took serious issue with something he wrote.
In any case, I’ll be following this story closely, even if it is all the way across the country.

$1 million or two more years?

A guy I was talking to last night made an interesting point about this whole Jim Black sentencing story.
Long story short, in case you missed it: Possibly the most powerful man in state government (Black) was convicted a little while back in federal court for bribing other members of the legislature and sentenced to five years in prison.
A couple of days ago, he appeared in a Wake County court, where a state judge fined him $1.1 million, saying the federal courts stripped him of his power and that the state courts will now strip him of his assets. Black doesn’t pay, he serves 23 more months in state prison, following his federal sentence.
So anyway, I’m talking to this guy last night, and he says if he were Black, he wouldn’t pay the money. Black is 72 years old; he’ll be 77 at the end of his federal sentence – if he lives that long. Sounds morbid, I know, but 72 is 72.
So this guy I was talking to said he’d bet that Black won’t pay. He expects to die in prison and his wife (and kids, and grandkids) will get to keep that $1.1 million.
Hard to say. The story I linked to above seems to imply that he’ll be cooperating, and all I really know is that we’ll find out by December (that’s when he’s required to fork over the dough).
I don’t know. What would you do?