My guess, for the record

I'm not sure if any of you are as into Esquire as I am, but they've had a pretty cool feature running the past few months. Each month, they've slowly been unveiling a picture of the "sexiest woman alive." As a journalist, I have to say this is a great trick. It infuriates some people, but it's a talker, and keeps people coming back.

I especially like that they gave that title to Angelina Jolie a few months before they started this project...so the new one must only be like three months old, right?

They've been dropping hints each month, most of which have been too obscure. But I think I've got it figured out now.

And the winner is....Jessica Biel? Who is Jessica Biel? Apparently someone obscure enough to warrant this kind of committment. Anyway, the pieces add up, in my opinion. Check it out yourself and let me know if you have a better idea. I'm sure the photo I've included here will remove all doubt from your mind.

Well, this was unexpected

Last night, I noticed a job ad for the editorial adviser at the student newspaper in Athens, Ga. Luckily, it was e-mail only, so I shot off a cover letter and resume this morning.

A short time later, I got an e-mail back from the publisher. It was a form letter letting me know that they had received a ton of applicants and didn't expect to get back to me for a few weeks.

So a few minutes later, I get another e-mail from the publisher. He had just read the slideshow from my presentation in Chicago and jokingly said "YOU'RE HIRED!" Yeah, if you ever want to give a job applicant a heart attack, say that. Then say, "just kidding."

I called him at lunch and we chatted for a while. He'll be visiting Reno soon, so I'm going to go out and meet him for a face-to-face talk. He hopes to fill the position within a few weeks.

This is a rare position, but it sounds like a great one. I'd be a full-time adviser (but non-faculty) to the staff of an independent student paper. I'd be close to home, paid pretty well and able to work on a master's in my offtime.

So yeah, that came out of nowhere. But very cool.

Now my resume looks faked

The year was 1996.

I had hair encroaching on my shoulders, I was picking up guitar for the first time, and I was racing to make up for 18 years of not drinking beer.

I had a few newspaper writing clips, and they weren't terrible. I had been an entertainment writer for the student newspaper for my first semester, then became the entertainment editor. It wasn't exactly a sprawling resume, but I suppose it was better than some.

Then, armed only with some crappy feature articles and a highly negative review of the new Bond movie, I got a little cocky. Or lazy. I'm not sure which.

I applied for three internships: one at each of the major dailies in Alabama. This doesn't sound that daring, perhaps, but these were pretty hefty papers for someone with no real experience to speak of.

My hometown paper, The Huntsville Times, shot me down quick and dirty. The Birmingham News never responded. That left the Birmingham Post-Herald, which actually interviewed me, then said they'd call back within two weeks. Two months passed, and I prepared to spend the summer selling plasma and enjoying the revival of Jackie Chan movies.

But in the end, the Post-Herald did pick me up, and I was soon wearing a shirt and tie while suffering through abysmal heat, humidity and pollution.

It was a great job.

No, seriously.

At 18, I was covering plane crashes, multiple homicides, tax measures (woohoo!) and the new Mercedes plant. I was even assigned to track down a former FBI informant in the Ku Klux Klan, but that's another story.

That summer actually made a journalist out of me, for better or worse, and it was solely because the Post-Herald treated me like any other reporter. They didn't pad the intern's assignments with fluff. They didn't pull their punches when I screwed up. I spent each day trying to meet their expectations, and I was on the front page just about every other morning.

No one else will ever get to experience that sensation, though.

Last weekend, the Post-Herald published its last issue. Long a morning paper, the Post-Herald was forced by the competing paper to switch to afternoon while I was there. We lost tens of thousands of readers in a day. I realize this switch might sound strange to you folks outside journalism, but this is just part of the modern life of "joint operating agreements," corporate ownership and readership decline.

When I worked at the Post-Herald, the circulation was estimated at 65,000. When it closed, it was at 7,500. I'm just amazed they held on as long as they did.

So join me in raising a glass of Abita Turbo Dog (or whatever you were drinking in 1996) to the Birmingham Post-Herald, my first real employer and one of the best papers I've ever worked for.

Here are a few related links (in reverse chronological order):

• A former cops reporter I worked with there shares his memories of the Post-Herald's "guerilla journalism"
• A sports editor points out, among other things, that "the newspaper's death was inescapable from the day in 1996 when the Post-Herald and The Birmingham News switched morning-afternoon cycles."
• A photog's thoughts from my hometown paper.
• The corporate CEO explains what happens.
• The press release announcing the closure.
  

Wait, yes, another job update

Sounds like they'll be flying me out back to Virginia in October for a final round of interviews, assuming I make the cut of the final three candidates. That sounds like pretty good odds, though. I also got an e-mail from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asking me to send them an application for a section editor position they have open. A friend of a friend there had put in a word for me. So that puts me in pretty good shape for some job negotiations.

OK, I promise not to make this a Griner job update board...but it's obviously eating a lot of my mental energy lately. I just want some sense of finality on where we're headed, and when. It's making it tough to plan for holidays or even weekend trips, since I don't know when or if I'll be flying for an interview or moving. But hey, I'm in better shape than I was a few months ago.

Oh, and if you haven't heard Ambulance LTD, give them a shot. I've been pretty addicted to their debut album recently. Hard to describe the sound, but there are clips on their site.

Hey, the job exists...

Well, there are a few little updates on the job front. The managing editor I interviewed with in Virginia has been promoted to editor, which I assume is good news for me. We seemed to share a lot of the same ideas on where journalism is headed. Also, an editor I had a great chat with out there got promoted to the managing editor spot.

Also, they finally got around to posting an announcement about the job I was being looked at for. It basically just said they're adding a news editor spot to oversee the wire editors and make the big calls late in the night (do we scrub in a late-breaking story, are the headlines good enough, etc.).

Obviously, I'll keep you all posted. I should be hearing back in the coming weeks, at least to be told what's next. I might still need to fly back out there, or at least do some follow-up interviews over the phone.

Oh, and if you don't care about any of that, here's a cool preview of Civ 4. It sounds like they've put a lot of work into the multiplayer...which I doubt I'll ever use. Oh well, still sounds cool.

Aye, that's the rub

Well, Karen and I officially have completed our six-month massage class, but we still have about 15 hours of practice (each) to finish before we get certified. Still, just being done with all the tests (and boy, were there a lot of them) has helped alleviate the stress of getting it all done.

I'm going to try to write a newspaper column about my experience with the massage class. But I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say. The question everyone asks is, "Why'd you get into that?" And I'm still not really sure. It's not like we're ever going to do this for a living, although it might be nice money if one of us ends up jobless.

I asked my instructor once why he doesn't charge anyone for treatment. He said it was partly because he didn't need to (he has a full-time job doing some kind of tech thing), partly because it would involve business logistics, and partly because it would take the fun out of massage. It would become a job, and it's hard not to dislike your job a lot of the time.

It's ironic that we seem to enjoy things least when we're paid to do them. But it makes sense, if you think about the mental formula it creates. You're giving your creative energy, and in return you're getting money. Most times, when you give creative energy outside the workplace, what you get in return is enjoyment. It's hard to imagine getting both, but I suppose that's what we all shoot for.

What does this have to do with me and massage? I'm not quite sure, especially since no one's exactly jumping to pay me. But I think it gets at the root of the idea of why I learned it. It has been a tremendous mental and physical challenge to get here, and I like the fact that it's a road that goes on as long as you're willing to take it.

Each massage we do shows us more about the human body and how different people react to different things. In that way, it holds a lot of the same intrigue for me as martial arts. Each time you think you're starting to figure something out, it seems to just open 100 new doors. In the same way that martial arts isn't about beating people up (unless it's kempo), massage isn't about rubbing muscles.

So what is it about? Obviously, I don't know, but I'm interested to see what I find out in the coming years.

Good news, everyone

Big thanks to Bill for passingon this exciting news for nerds like me:

2K and Firaxis announced today that Sid Meier’s Civilization IV will be released in October. The game was originally slated to be released in fiscal year 2006, so the announcement moves up the release date, a rare event indeed.

That puts it only a month away. So much for being productive this fall.

Well, in other news, we officially finish our six-month massage class today, assuming we pass the lengthy final. Of course, we still have 15 hours of practice left to complete. Lately, a lot of people have been asking how we plan to use the massage. The answer is, um, we're not really sure. I guess if our friends or ourselves get busted up, we'll try to fix it. Mostly, it was just something we wanted to learn, and it really has been an amazingly intense process.

Maybe I'll talk about that more when I have a little more time...for now, gotta go take a final.

The Office meets real life

Any fan of The Office has to get a kick out of this story today about the FEMA chief: (from MSNBC)

Brown's biography on the Federal Emergency Management Agency Web site says he had once served as an "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," and a White House news release in 2001 said Brown had worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., in the 1970s "overseeing the emergency-services division."

However, a city spokeswoman told the magazine Brown had actually worked as "an assistant to the city manager."

Need some good news?

Here's one bright spot in the disaster hitting one of my favorite cities in the world...

McIlhenny Company is operating normally and the production of TABASCO® brand products are unaffected by the recent hurricane. Our New Orleans office employees are all accounted for and have been relocated to our Corporate Office on Avery Island, Louisiana.

I also tried looking for the status of the Abita and Dixie breweries...but no luck. I did find this comment on a Dixie fan site:

Dixie Rocks a Bayou 'gators ass!!!

With that level of quality, it's difficult to believe a simple natural disaster could have disrupted Dixie's production.

I also found this scarily predictive story about people who got out of the way of Katrina from the Philadelphia Enquirer:

With Hurricane Katrina poised to slam into the Gulf Coast, Dawn Salmon of Huntingdon Valley tried to find a way to get her daughter out of New Orleans. But all of the airlines and trains were booked and Liz, 19, was too young to rent a car on her own.

So Salmon, 49, went to her.

Yesterday morning, she took a near-empty flight from Philadelphia to Louis Armstrong International Airport. There, she met up with her daughter, a student at Loyola University. Together, they went to find a rental car. Poring over a map, they said they didn't know where they would go - Houston or Memphis or Little Rock or Atlanta - but they knew they would be all right if they were together.

"I'm not scared, but I would be if I weren't here and she were here by herself," Dawn Salmon said. "I'm a mom."

I haven't quite felt a sincere emotional impact from the storm yet. That's strange, since I truly do love New Orleans and can't believe that it's been all but knocked off the map. I don't doubt it will be rebuilt, but I fear it will lose much of its old-world charm if speculators and developers swallow up all this ravaged land.

It's been interesting seeing how this disaster has put things in perspective for so many people. Surprisingly, it made me feel my job was even more important. Each day that we've run stories of local assistance for the Gulf Coast (which has been every day, really), the number of volunteers and donations has almost doubled. Now I realize that might have happened without us covering anything, but the local relief agencies have credited our coverage with much of the aid.

I haven't heard about my distant family in the Florida panhandle, but I'm assuming they're OK. Other than gas prices matching California's, my family in Alabama made it out pretty much unscathed, as well.