Signs

Sign Sign everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign

The great poet Jim Morrison once wrote “people are strange.”

The more I go though life, the more I agree with him.

Today, I went to the bank to deposit my meager earnings with them as I do every other Friday. As I was driving up, I saw a lady with a sign and thought “great, who is protesting what now?”

But that’s where the story gets strange.

She wasn’t protesting the Iraq war or the city’s proposed ordinance regarding parking in front yards. She wasn’t urging us to free Tibet or to eat only free range chicken drink only free range coffee.

Nope. Instead, her sign read “have a great day” and she was shouting the same message to passing motorists.

My first thought was “oh, that’s nice of her,” but the more I thought about it, the more confused I got.

First off, why is she shouting at me. Perhaps her message would have had more of an impact if she told me the same thing in a more soothing tone. After all, more than 70 percent of all communication is non-verbal (a statistic I just made up, but admit it, it sounded good.) Shouting at me has never made me have a great day.

Secondly, how is this supposed to improve my day? Some random stranger holding a sign is supposed to make me forget I’m dropping more than $700 on car repairs. If she really wanted me to have a good day, she could offer to help pay for my car or buy me lunch. Heck, if she’d quit yelling at me, my day would improve.

Finally, doesn’t this woman have anything better to do with her time? If she really wanted people to have a good day, couldn’t she go volunteer at any of the numerous non-profit organizations throughout the area?

So now I’m perplexed. It reminds me of the Lewis Black situation where he heard “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

To steal a joke from Family Guy, I haven’t been this confused since the end of Waterworld.

Cut to scene of Chris Griffin walking out of the theater: “How does Kevin Costner keep getting work?”

Fantasy Update: The Fighting Squirrels are just three days away from claiming the championship in fantasy baseball, mostly due to the hiring of Catherine Zeta-Jones to serve as team mom/model. (She gives all the players juice boxes after the game, and as the patron saint of the Fantasy Update, it’s only fitting to pay her homage as we close in on a championship.)

In fantasy football news, the Fighting Squirrels are 1-2 in one league and 2-1 in the other, but we’re looking forward to improving after Zeta-Jones joining the teams after her duties with the baseball team are complete (Someone’s got to give the guys orange wedges at halftime.)

Neighborhood update: One of Yes Dear’s coworkers and her husband recently moved into the neighborhood. They’re nice and I really like them. Good times for us.

Work update: No work tonight, no work this weekend. That’s the last I want to think about it until Monday.

Hope everyone is doing well. Enjoy your weekend and thanks for reading.

The need for feed

Note: the following is a work in progress I'll be tinkering with it for a while. It’ll publish on the day the Herald’s redesigned website launches.

Also, coming Monday (hopefully), my super Fantasy recap to get you up to date on all the fantasy news of mine that you really didn't care about. Sorry I've been gone so long, but it's good to be back.

I have a confession to make.

I like to eat. I do it on a regular basis. In fact, there are times I eat two, three or four times a day.

Some may say I'm addicted, and I think they're right. I eat everyday. I can't help it.
Making matters worse is that I've surrounded myself with enablers. Yes Dear cooks delicous meals for me. My Parental Units invite us over to eat with them. Friends call and want to go out to eat.

Even my job enables my behavior by sending me to cover luncheons and other events where food is served.

So why bring this up?

Because my job is putting me in a position where I may finally have to break my food addiction cold turkey. (Yeah, I went for the obvious joke. I'd like to appologize for writing that. Hopefully the rest of this column gets better.)

Today, the Statesboro Herald is launching a redesigned website that will hopefully make it easier for everyone to navigate and find what they're looking for.

We're also adding blogs (web logs) for our reporters where we're free to write about pretty much anything we want.

This freightens me more than people dressed up in bunny costumes.

Putting a person in front of their company's website and telling them to put their thoughts on the screen is a recipie for disaster.

Heck, it's borderline entrapment. If I'm having a bad day and sit down to blog about it, I'm liable to post something that would get me fired.

And if I get fired, I can pretty much kiss my food habit good bye.

So with that in mind, my blog on our website is giong to be bland, to say the least.

Below are just a few of the light-hitting topics I plan on tackling with my blog:

‰ Statesboro Herald Editor Jim Healy: Great boss or greatest boss? (Yes, I stole that from Stephen Colbert, but it applies to my boss as well.)

‰ Statesboro Herald Publisher Randy Morton: Legend or diety?

‰ Cuter animal: Puppies or kittens?

‰ peanut butter or jelly: the world's greatest debate.

‰ Tulips or roses: which will make Yes Dear happier today?

‰ Where do I recommend going out to eat? (Ok, I'll give you a glimpse of my answer to this one. Go eat at any restaurant that advertises with us and boycott the rest until they start running ads in our paper. After all, I'm nothing if not a company man.)

Obviously the blog will be a work in progress and I'm sure there are innumerable topics to tackle.

The important thing is I don't say anything controversial. If it turns out more of you think puppies are cuter than kittens, then I'll agree with you, the customer. If you think Randy
Morton is a god among men, I'll sing in that choir.

After all, I've got make sure I can eat.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go ask our advertising manager where I should go to lunch.

(Note, feel free to suggest your own innocuous topics I could write about on my work blog.)

Rest in Peace, Erk

We'll miss you.

To publish or not to publish?

Note: I'm not sure if I want to publish this as a column in the publication which shall not be named. So I'm posting it here and asking your opinion.

"Gentlemen, the hopes and dreams of an entire town are riding on your shoulders. You may never matter again in your life as much as you do right now." - Permian High School football coach Gary Gaines to his team (From the book "Friday Night Lights").

In his book "Friday Night Lights," Buzz Bissinger focuses on the high school football team the small, economically depressed town of Odessa in west Texas where they derive their entire identity from its football team.

When the team loses a game, the coach returns home to find a "For Sale" sign in his yard. And that's one of the more tame incidents in the book that chronicles the 1988 Permian Panthers from summer workouts to their heartbreaking loss in the semifinals.

The pressure on these kids (and coaches) is enormous for an extra-curricular activity.

While the book (published in 1990) is superficially about high school football, the true emphasis of the book is the pressure put on the students and the apparent lack of big-picture thinking in the town.

Bissinger, himself, described the book as being about "the power of hope, the spellbinding brilliance of it as well as the danger of it."

He was also struck at the very nature of the beast that is high school sports.

"I saw the way in which they were discarded once their athletic powers dried up . . . I saw the way in which educating these boys, because they were still boys, of preparing them for life after football, was considered as little more than an afterthought."

How could it happen that a town would allow the school board to spend more on athletic tape than on English books? Why would a town stand for a coach that discouraged his players from taking the SAT because it would interfere with the game film study on Saturday mornings?

And while the book was about a Texas town, it could just as well have been written about any town where football is king and everything else is inconsequential.

"Ten years later I am more convinced that what happened in Odessa was by no means unexceptional," Bissinger said in a speech in 2001.

It could be about a place where thousands of fans, parents and friends attend games each week, but never ask how history class is going. It could be about a town where thousands of dollars and countless hours are donated to athletics, but academic teams struggle for any attention despite the fact their teams put in just as much effort to their competition.

More than anything, the book is about priorities and what a community places the most importance on.

So why bring this book up? Well, with the start of high school football season around the state, I figured it was a good time to have a priority check.

After all, thousands of people will go to a high school football game each Friday night, but how many of those people (myself included) bother to show up to a school board meeting unless something crucial like the colors of the school's mascot are being discussed?

And we here at (The publication which shall not be named) aren't immune from this either. We've got three reporters dedicated to covering sports (two who are mainly focused on high school athletics), but no one who covers the education beat.

Is this a good thing? Well, it sells papers, which is the ultimate goal of the business. (In theory we're here to be the watchdog for the community, but only if that watchdog status will pad the bottom line.)

This is far from an indictment on high school athletics. I played soccer in high school and the games and teamwork can teach valuable life lessons. But the key there is "life lessons." If what is learned is only applied between the lines on the field, the character-building element of high school sports is nonexistent.

So go, enjoy the games on Friday nights (as well as the games of the not-so-high profile sports.) Just remember, they're called student-athletes for a reason.

Friday Night &$^#*ing Lights

(Note: the following is a rant, pure and simple. I hate writing about what’s going on in my life and would rather tackle some various topics, but sometimes you just have to vent. Sorry for the second rant in as many weeks. Maybe this will get it out of my system)

So here I am, late Friday afternoon, stuck at work. Normally, I wouldn’t mind so much, but today, I’m ticked off.

As you may recall, I’m working Friday nights for the publication-that-shall-not-be-named for their extensive coverage of high school football (that’s another rant, maybe when I’m done with this, I’ll tackle that issue.)

It’s generally boring work for most of the night. I can generally get everything set up by 8 p.m. and then I’m just waiting. Waiting for games to end. Waiting for reporters to write their stories. Generally having the worst Friday night imaginable.

But that was before I found out some new information.

Not every sports writer on the publication-that-shall-not-be-named is even working on Friday nights. That’s right, we’ve got a total of three people on the sports staff (one more than for the news staff, by the way) and one of them is getting every #&#^$ Friday night off.

I don’t hold this against her. She’s a fantastic writer and covers Georgia Southern football, so there would be times were it wouldn’t be feasible for her to cover a high school game Friday night and then drive to wherever GSU is playing to cover that game.

But the Eagles have seven (count them, SEVEN) home games this year. That’s seven Friday nights where this sports writer could do some sports writing on the biggest sports night of the week.

For reasons known only to chief bossman, she doesn’t have to.

I, on the other hand, am stuck spending every other Friday night sitting in the gray cubicle farm waiting for high school football games to end. In case you missed it earlier, one half of our news staff is spending his Friday’s covering for the sports department while an actual sports writer goes home.

It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. It *(&# sucks.

I don’t understand the logic, if any, behind such a decision. As I said, on weekends when GSU has a road game, I can see the reasoning behind her not working. But every Friday?!?

Obviously I’m ticked off. I’d go talk to the boss, but at this point, I’m scared I’d say something that would lead to me not only not working on Friday nights, but not working at all.
So any suggestions from the faithful Nexus readers? Help me come up with a calm, rational approach to address my boss about this.

I wish I was this funny

One of my favorite websites to peruse is fark.com, a news aggregator (calling it a blog will get you on the farkers bad side, never a good place to be. People from all over the world submit offbeat news articles and give them funny headlines.

Below are a few of my favorites (plus it makes for an easy blog.) All of these were on fark in the past week. Enjoy.

Hanging a sausage out of your pants and chasing a female employee generally not considered good workplace etiquette

Receding Texas lake reveals prehistoric skeleton. Ted Kennedy immediately denies involvement

Bored with your job? Be creative and make some work to do. Difficulty: You're a federal firefighter

Apartment residents discover there isn't a Brita filter in the world that can get the taste of dead guy out of your tapwater

Bruce Springsteen not splitting from wife. Millions of big-haired Jersey girls weep uncontrollably

Never wanting to see a one-legged woman again, Paul McCartney to donate to minefield charity

Miss World pageant symbol judged too erotic, redrawn. Because so many people watch Miss World for the sexy logos

If you can afford the $99,000 price tag, the original 1964 S.S. Minnow could be yours. Ginger and Mary Ann not included

The sales of Paris Hilton's CD projected to be less than her tally of sexual partners

Friends at work raise £17,500 to buy man the drug he needs to save his life. Look around at the slugs you work with. Yeah, in his situation, you're dead