Top Hat Logic

A source called this morning to let me know there was more going on in an investigation that we’ve been reporting on. He and his wife were instrumental in helping us track down information.

So when he mentioned her involvement, my ear was pressed against the phone and my head was nodding as I loudly said, “Your wife was great” within earshot of the entire newsroom.

Heads shot up from desks and away from computer screens. Laughter everywhere.

So I got up — cell phone in hand, conversation going, with a face warm and red — flipped the bird and spun around to get all those b-holes.

When you’re a reporter, people expect you to know EV-ER-EE-THING

Someone: You didn’t know that I took three dumps yesterday?! Come on, you’re a reporter!

Sorry I don’t know about the 2.4 earthquake in China that happened six minutes ago. Sorry I don’t know about the murder that rocked in your small town of 350 more than a decade ago. Sorry I don’t know there some sort of storm thingy in the northeast right now.

Jesus, people! Get off my fucking back!!!

A source returned my call one day last week, apologized for not getting back to me before my deadline and told me I had a wonderful voice. Radio was for me, she said, adding that if I looked as good as I sounded, I had a bright, bright future in television.

That really made my Friday.

You haven’t lived life until you mess around with a 20-year-old college student and then four months later you end up being the subject of a newspaper column titled “gonebetter”

Best line ever: “He leaned in, and I gave in.”

But now my nickname is surely going to be “hot mess” because of this line: “A smart smile and just the right amount of stubble. He was visibly mature and, yet, a hot mess. I was intrigued.”

|-(

I tried to interview the family members of a man who was sentenced today for abusing a child back in the early 1990s.

I left the courtroom after the judge adjourned and camped out by the doors so I’d catch people as they came out.

A woman came out looking a little distraught and I asked her if she was with the family. She said no. I asked her what her association with the case was. That’s when a man got in my face, looked at me very intensely and asked me who I was.

“I’m Jon, and I’m with the [newspaper title]. I’d like to talk to you about the sentence.”

“Oh no! OH NO!” he said and started to walk away.

Then when he’d made it 10 to 15 feet, he shouted down the courtroom hallway, “We have a white trash newspaper!”

What does that even mean?

Then they complained to the sheriff’s deputies about me. He pretty much shrugged at them.

This dog helped police take a bite out of crime.

Charlie, a Beagle-Spaniel mix, was in his owner’s SUV when it was stolen around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday from a parking lot at 16th and N streets, said Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood.

The owner, a 58-year-old Ohio woman, reported the 2002 Chevy Trailblazer stolen and told police she left it unlocked with Charlie inside, Flood said.

A little while later, a woman called the victim to tell her she had Charlie and told officers that Candace Nichole Foster, 20, gave her the dog and asked her to see him home.

Officers went to talk to Foster and found her near her apartment, sitting inside the stolen Trailblazer with Traylon Lockett, 34, Flood said.

Officers jailed Foster and Lockett on suspicion of receiving stolen property.

Investigators wouldn’t have solved the crime so quickly if it hadn’t been for Charlie, Flood said.

“It was a quick apprehension because of Charlie,” Flood said. “People really have compassion toward all things vulnerable.”

Suck it McGruff. Charlie got you beat!  <—second choice for my lede

So I found out there was a verdict in rape trial I covered today after 3 1/2 hours of jury deliberation, and of course only then do I realize that I need to pee. So I walk down the hall in my very determined, super serious walk cause I’m a big deal and very professional.

Here’s how it went:

Open the bathroom door. See metal box hanging on the wall. I’ve never seen that before. They sell condoms in the restroom at the courthouse? That seems inappropriate, but cool I guess.

Then I read the box: Tampons. Why are they selling tampons in the men’s restroom? Oh shit! This is the women’s restroom!

Leave now! Immediately! Go!

Go to open the door, and then I’m staring face-to-face with the assistant lawyer who’s helping to prosecute the rape trial I’m covering. My face is totally beat red, and I try to make a joke about this being “super awkward!”

But it’s not my fault! The bathrooms on the floor below are flip-flopped, so the men’s restroom IS on the north side of the building and the women’s on the south.

UGH!

The lede of the July 10 article “Dutch ovens are a great way to cook outdoors”

Today, right now, in this moment is why I love being a reporter.

I went out to a fire this morning. It wasn’t a big fire. It’s not going to make A1; it’s probably not going to make the local front. That doesn’t matter.

Here’s my lede: “A 4-year-old firebug lit a mattress on fire Monday morning, sparking a blaze that did some $75,000 in damage and displaced her family from their two-story house in Clinton.”

The family is black, poor, probably uneducated and lives in a not-so-great part of town.

I’m white, educated, live in an OK part of town and while I’m (sorta) poor, (1) I’m not as poor as they are; (2) I don’t have kids; and (3) me being poor is largely a choice. I could easily get a job that pays way more than what I make now.

I be slummin’, yo!

This is all to say: I don’t hang out with these people, and I’d probably go a million years without coming across them. I’m white; they’re black. They’re poor; I’m fake poor. I hang out with self-deprecating hipsters; I’m pretty sure they don’t. Our paths just aren’t going to cross very much.

Except today, cause my job is to talk to people on their worst day, and for this family, it was a bad one. Everyone got out; no one was injured, so it’s probably not their worst day. In fact, 26-year-old Toya told me she feels pretty lucky, but still, not a humdinger.

And they didn’t really want to talk about it. I totally understand, I told them. And I do. I left them my card, and I hung around as they watched firefighters toss all their earthly possessions out of a charred second story window.

And then Toya’s little boy came up to me. Well, waddled. He’s probably 1 or 1 1/2 years old. He’s got the walking thing down, and he thought I was interesting, probably because I was skipping rocks across the street and trying to throw twigs on top of other twigs I’d already thrown onto a patch of grass.

I gave him the piece of bark in my hand. He took it. Then he walked closer — uncomfortably close — and put his tiny little foot in the doughnut hole-like space between my crossed legs.

I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything for 10 seconds. Then I picked him up and put him by my side. He sat down, his little legs dangling over the curb, not quite reaching the street. He put his tiny hand on my thigh and his head on my arm.

My heart just brokemelted into a thousandmillionpieces rightthenandthere and ohmygodIlovethisjob!

Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, Berkeley, Calif.