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Michigan Winter Beer Fest…first course

Posted by Aaron - 28/02/10 at 05:02:14 am

This should wet your appetite for now.

More from the Michigan Winter Beer Fest soon.

Beans!

Posted by Aaron - 27/02/10 at 05:02:20 am

Like most of New Years Eve, a forgotten gem.

Cuties…are you eating these?

Posted by Aaron - 20/02/10 at 12:02:28 am

Don’t call them little oranges. Probably the best thing to happen to the snack fruit market since the pocket-sized clementine made eating citrus cool again, Cuties have taken over the fruit portion of the food pyramid (and they are eying vegetables next).

So what is a Cutie? I would make sure your SafeSearch is set to at least moderate before googling the fruit.

And I’m just learning this, but a Cutie is actually one of two things. From November to January, it is a clementine mandarin. From February to April, it is a murcott mandarin. From April to November, you’re out of luck. I got all this from the Cuties Web page.

And, according to the Web site, Cuties are currently facing off against Junk Food in a soccer match. The score is nine, nil. Walt, 10, nil.

My brother first tweeted about Cuties more than a week ago. It got me interested.

On my next trip to the local Meijer, I snagged a box, so happy this is not just a West Coast thing. (By the way, the Web site claims Cuties have been around since 2000. Another thing I missed out on last decade.)

My Cutie intake is about two per day. The 5lb box is taking some time to whittle down, in part because my sister does not like Cuties. She had a bad clementine experience and has yet to recover. We will give her time. Apparently others have had less than bloggable Cutie experiences. From their Facebook page:

Welcome to 2k10. Even fruit has a Facebook.

They were making fun of twitter…

Posted by Aaron - 19/02/10 at 08:02:32 am

My favorite congressman to follow on twitter, @petehoekstra, made a stop in Jackson today.

I announced the finding with some excited this afternoon to the newsroom. “Pete Hoekstra was just in Jackson.” “Oh,” I think the education reporter said. “He just tweeted that he was at the Corney Bakery.” No response. People carried on with their days.

I did not understand why this was such non-news. Like him or not, Hoekstra is running for governor and is an essential television news talk show star. So I say, he’s kind of a big deal (and today was a slow news day).

Then later in the night, I heard a few of the reporter making fun of twitter. They were saying not so nice things about that “little twittering thing.” So it all makes sense now.

And in other news…

Feeling included, a few paczki at the end of the day

Posted by Aaron - 17/02/10 at 06:02:26 am

I did not want to miss out on my paczki today. It’s Fat Tuesday after all, and since I can’t bear it all on Bourbon Street, I should at least be able to enjoy a fruit-filled, lard-laden pastry, or two. Yum.

The box of paczki (so paczki is the plural of paczek and there’s a little tail falling off the a in both words, but whatever) that someone brought into the office about a week ago disappeared in a matter of moments, before I even knew there was goodness in the newsroom. Today, a photographer brought in a box just as I was getting to work this afternoon.

Not hungry and not ready for a sugar-high-then-crash at the beginning of my shift, I waited. I waited a little too long and hours later, the box was empty.

So paczki-less, I sent a text to my sister, who I live with right now in Ann Arbor, telling her to be awake when I came home at 11:30 so we could celebrate Fat Tuesday with paczki together. She agreed.

Then panic struck. On the way home, I worried that the Kroger near her apartment may have been so overrun by Fat Tuesday, paczki-hoarding revelers that only boxes of prune filled pastries would remain. Not the case. An ample supply was left at the Campbell Road Kroger.

And I did not feel odd buying paczki at such a late hour. The four other people I saw shopping all had boxes tucked away in their cart.

Yummy.

Regulars: photos and stories by Tanner Curtis

Posted by Aaron - 15/02/10 at 06:02:10 am

Regulars, photos and stories by Tanner Curtis

Tanner Curtis interned at the Kalamazoo Gazette as a photographer while I worked there as an intern reporter. We never collaborated on a project, but the shooter did some good work.

I just checked out his blog, Focus, and ran across this post from back in November, Regulars.

Check it out, show him some love and maybe we can get him to post a few more.

What story are you chasing?

Posted by Aaron - 13/02/10 at 08:02:23 pm

Think about this:

“We are, collectively, much like eight-year-olds chasing a soccer ball. Instead of finding ways of creating fresh, original, high impact journalism, we’re way too eager to chase the same story everyone else is chasing, which is too often the easy story and too often the simplistic story—and too often the story that misses what’s going on.” — Peter Baker of The New York Times.

The above is the last quote in a The New Yorker article from Jan. 25 about the media culture surrounding the Obama White House, Non-stop News. Fascinating, but also troubling and a bit depressing to read that the 24-hour, multi-platform news cycle journalists now have to operate in has destroyed thoughtful, in-depth reporting. Baker said:

“When do you have time to call experts? When do you have time to sort through data and information and do your own research?”

Reporting has been deduced to two opposing quotes and a he said/she said story. There is no time to investigate the claims, the facts, to provide context, to do a little digging.

I bet things are not much different in newsrooms everywhere. Rarely do daily, beat journalists get the time and space to really bite off a story and chew it for a bit. I, as much as many other journalists, am enticed by the quick, easy byline for the day so I can get on with the reporting that really matters, but that cheapens the product and rips-off the reader.

Quality journalism, among other things, informs, is useful and entertains. That takes time but should be the goal of every article. All too often it isn’t.

So, what story are you chasing?

Boredom kills…but carrots and celery will save you

Posted by Aaron - 11/02/10 at 06:02:36 am

Now that I have, as the folks at the sandwich shop called it, a big boy job, and can down-size my employment roster to only one, I have some extra time on my hands. I knew I needed a hobby to fill the hours I normally spent delivery food to the drunk, stoned and studying. But what?

Now this, from the Associated Press, Being bored could be bad for your health. Time to find something to do.

According to a study conducted by a few Brits, people who were bored were more likely to die sooner. I don’t know if this holds true for Americans, who have invented all types of ways to keep from boredom, like Google Buzz, or at least ways to broadcast to the world that you are bored, like Google Buzz, and that you will in fact die sooner than the rest so get in line for my stuff.

But seriously, these researchers found that bored people tend to engage in more risky behavior, like smoking, drinking and anything featured on ESPN’s X-Games. I always wondered who came up with the idea to do a backflip on a snowmobile. He obviously was really bored.

I just spent 30 minutes looking for a video of this guy who tried to do a backflip on snowmobile during this year’s X-Games and almost had the sled come crashing down on him. If you know where to find it, tell me.

Back to boredom. Actually, the really killer is not boredom but your heart deciding to stop working. Apparently, bored people do not exercise and do other things that make their heart see the value in continuing to pump.

No fears though, this can all be solved by carrots and celery.

“People who are bored also tend to eat and drink more, and they’re probably not eating carrots and celery sticks,” said Sandi Mann, a senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire who studies boredom.

Studying boredom. That must be so…boring.

Wow. I had to. Thanks yall.

Groundhog Day nonsense

Posted by Aaron - 03/02/10 at 06:02:56 am

So that famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow today and cursed us with six more weeks of winter.

“As the sky shines bright above me, my shadow I see beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be,” the groundhog apparently said. Didn’t know groundhogs could talk. Didn’t know black top hats were cool again.

Oh well, not much to complain about. This winter for folks around southern Michigan has been quite tame.

But with six more weeks of this stuff on the way, I ask:

Or drop me something else in the comments.

PS — I created the poll using PollDaddy.com. Any other suggestions out there for poll creation? I do like polls.

Other polls by me and help from Sarah Crone:
• What do you give Michigan for its 173rd birthday?
• Dropping a ball in Kalamazoo on New Year’s … boring! What should Kalamazoo drop?
• Carp and Cougars and Zhu Zhu Pets, oh my! Poll: What are you scared of these days?

Sheepdogs at play

Posted by Aaron - 01/02/10 at 05:02:53 am

Meet the new Aupperlee sheepdogs, Sophie and Lucy.

Back in November, my mom and I took the dogs down Knapp Street to the ball fields at Forest Hills Eastern. The dogs had a good time.

Check out photos of the sheepdogs at www.photoaup.com.

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