Where am I?

... kind of retiring Fourth Estater for the time being. You can find my new posts over at the blog my wife and I share. It's pretty doggone awesome!

We made the list

... of ridiculous laws.

Anniston: You may not wear blue jeans down Noble Street.

If you're bored

We newspaper people have some serious competition on our hands from this Web site. You can create your own news story and then send it to people. Eh, there's worse ways to spend your time.

A poet and I didn't even know it

A cool feature piece from Slate here in honor of National Poetry Month. The author talks about poets worth reading. One of them happens to be a former professor of mine at UF: Sidney Wade. I got a minor in English by taking a bunch of poetry-writing classes. It really helped inform my journalistic writing. The same rules apply: active verbs, show don't tell, go easy on the adjectives, etc. Wade was an awesome teacher. I seem to recall a class that involved a few bottles of red wine.

Here's an excerpt of one of her writings picked by Slate:

I didn't have a forever grant,
but we dealt with that as masterful adults.
We approached the ultimate adding machine
and grabbed us a statue bereft of sin

and some mausoleum gear.
There's not enough shriek and swagger
in our utterly transgressive faith, he confessed,
but he looked down on the others

in their cold, crawling context.
Those people are injured by the time of day,
he sniffed. As we entered a carnelian cloud,
I suggested we leave early and often.

(from "The Visionary from Apopka")

Apopka -- that's just north of Orlando.

And here's what Slate says of her:

Wade's poems always yield to paraphrase, pointing to something recognizable in the real world or the news. Her project—to remain sane despite the gloom these words point to—requires that she reassure herself and the reader that while we really are seeing what we're seeing, the consolations of light and love still exist.

Insouciance defined

"Nobody told me I was in competition. If there is competition, http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifsomebody better let me know. If there is competition, they better eliminate me out of the race and go ahead and do what they're going to do with me. I ain't never hit in spring training, and I never will. If it ain't settled with me out there, then they can trade me. I ain't going out there to hurt myself in spring training battling for a job. If it is [a competition], then I'm going into 'Operation Shutdown.'" --Pirates outfielder Derek Bell's reaction to competing for a starting job with the Pirates in spring training 2002, after hitting .173 the year before. True to his word, Operation Shutdown never played another game in the big leagues.

A good reminder of being nice from ESPN's .

My own craption

Barack Obama engages a gas pump in debate Friday.

(Here's what a craption is, by the way.)

Of time and the panther

File this blog post under the "If You Wait Long Enough" file.

Last year, as my five regular blog readers may recall, I wrote a three-part series about the plight of the Florida panther for the Naples Daily News. Along the way, I highlighted the stories of a handful of panthers, many of whom are tracked by radio collar. One of them was FP131 (which stands for Florida Panther 131, or the 131st that's been collared). The subhed immediately above this anecdote was "Recovery vs. development."

Here's what it said:

Last winter, a radio-collared male panther known as FP131 left the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge just north of Alligator Alley on a trip to the north. Not quite 10 miles into his journey, he stopped dead in his tracks.

He had no choice.

“He regularly crosses Oil Well Road, travels up a cypress slough called Camp Keais Strand and hangs out on the edge of the construction area” of Ave Maria, a planned 5,000-acre town and university, wrote Layne Hamilton, the refuge’s manager, in a recent newsletter.

She added: “Perhaps as he stands there he is lamenting over the loss of more panther habitat as he watches the bulldozers, cranes and construction workers.”

Today, I received this blast e-mail from a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist.

We recovered the carcass of FP131 today (16 April 2008). Immediate cause of death is unknown at this time. The carcass is currently in route to be necropsied. FP131, an adult male, was recovered on private land near the northwest corner of SR29 and Oil Well Road . FP131 is the fifth documented panther mortality for 2008.

Now, the panther may have succumbed to natural causes. But if it was mauled by another panther or hit by a car, that sort of death would have human fingerprints on it. The car is obvious; a human was driving the car. Intraspecific aggression, a fancy term for panthers killing their own, is less obvious. But the thinking goes that if these territorial animals have less space due to development, they'll be more apt to run into each other and fight to the death.

The bigger picture is that births and deaths are canceling each other out. There are 80 left. And the equation seems to be 80-1+1+1-1+1-1-1+1+1-1=80.

Blame John Grogan

Grogan would be the author of "Marley and Me," a book about the life and death of a Labrador retriever. It's porn for dog lovers, basically. For our editorial class, we had to read Grogan's collection of columns, "Bad Dogs Have More Fun." The book includes the column about Marley's death, which sparked the book-length story (and now a major motion picture starring Owen Wilson).

Thus prodded, I finally let loose a column about Pickle that's been nagging at me ever since he died last August. I wasn't ready to write it then. I still wasn't. But the threat of a failing grade does funny things to a person. It's truly impossible to capture a life in words, especially when the one who did the living couldn't speak. But I gave it a shot.

The storage room beneath my stilt house in Southwest Florida was always dank and crawling with God knows what, but those qualities seemed magnified during that fateful night last August.

Armed with a dying flashlight, I fumbled through the dark in search of an empty box. The pickings were slim.

As it happens, my wife, Jennifer, and I were moving in two days, and most of our boxes were spoken for. We were about to embark on a real and metaphorical journey. A one-year journalism fellowship awaited both of us 700 miles away in Anniston, Ala.

Jennifer and I had been married barely four months. But here we were about to leave comfortable jobs at a newspaper for the uncertainty of graduate school in an unfamiliar and – let’s face it – strange state.

But Jennifer took comfort in the thought that she would have Pickle by her side.

The beagle had been a graduation present to herself when she left college in North Carolina for a job as an editorial assistant at a large paper in Orlando, Fla. For more than a year, Pickle was the only companion she had, and the pair grew as inseparable as a dog and owner could be.

Then I came onto the scene. When Jennifer and I started dating, I became Pickle’s adopted dad. Let’s be clear here: He adopted me, not the other way around. Pickle made the rules, and the rest of us followed them.

Pickled weighed 30 pounds but thought he weighed 2. He rarely went without a lap to lie in for long. He would walk on top of you as if you were a piece of furniture. His favorite pastime was sleeping between your legs, even in the dead of summer.

Jennifer liked to say that Pickle had issues, which made his problems seem like they could be dealt with on a psychiatrist’s couch. He was the dog who loved too much. Whenever we were about to leave, Pickle would dart into his training cage and howl like mad, daring us to shut him inside.

He wasn’t the sort of dog who could be left to his own devices. At one apartment, he would break out of his cage and scratch on the lower part of the guest room door until we got home. This happened so many times we stopped bothering to repaint it.

The summer before we came to Alabama, Jennifer and I got a second dog to be Pickle’s playmate. We hoped that the dachshund, whom we named Oscar, would alleviate some of our antsy beagle’s anxiety.

The pair became fast friends, but Pickle’s mood didn’t improve. He was still having near-daily accidents on the floor. He was as testy as ever, often using his cage as a pulpit for yelling fits.

Once, he bit me on the top of my thumb and refused to let go as I reached into his cage to take off his leash. On the advice of a well-meaning obedience school instructor, we had been leaving his leash on around the house so he could be restrained whenever necessary, which was often.

The incident freaked out Jennifer and me. We no longer risked our flesh to unlatch the ubiquitous leash. It stayed on Pickle inside and outside the cage.

We should have known better. We did know better. We did it anyway.

On that obscenely humid night in August, we came home from work to find Pickle hanging lifelessly by the neck, the leash latch having snapped itself to the roof of the cage.

He must have been trying to perform one of his escapes. He must have panicked. He must have struggled.

Jennifer and I were overcome by a feeling so raw and fierce no word could aptly describe it. Horror. Grief. Shock. Anger. Guilt. Nausea. Rage. None comes close to how we felt.

And that’s when I found myself standing beneath the house with a shaft of fading light in my hand, looking for a temporary coffin for my best friend, our best friend. We ended up wrapping him in a blanket for the horribly long trip to the 24-hour veterinarian office. It seemed more respectful.

We were leaving that house the day after the next.

I never wanted to leave somewhere so much in my life.

In the temporal and geographic distance between then and now, one phrase has been set on repeat in my head: “God has a purpose.” I’m not religious or even all that spiritual of a person. And yet those four little words keep turning over and over in my mind whether I want them to or not.

Did God have a purpose in taking Pickle from us?

I don’t know. But for some doggone reason I find comfort in the asking.

Southern stylings

Another critique, this one about food.

Editor’s note: Warning! The first sentence of this restaurant review may be offensive to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

No food has been revered so much for so little as Southern barbecue.

Does anyone really like sweet barbecue sauce? There’s a reason sweet wines are consigned to the dessert menu. That’s where the sweet stuff goes.

And yet Southern barbecue has attained iconic status in Alabama and northeast Alabama in particular. It is to this area what crab cakes are to Maryland.

It is little wonder then that Quintard Avenue boasts nearly as many barbecue restaurants as fast-food joints, which is really saying something. Most of them aren’t half bad, if you want a side of sweet with your pork.

Give me a barbecue sauce that tastes as smoky as a piece of wet wood on fire. My palette should tingle with warmth. My eyes should think about watering but back off at the last minute.

The folks at Goal Post Bar-B-Q in downtown Anniston know what I’m talking about. They have perfected a sauce that delights the nostrils and drives taste buds to distraction.

According to Alabama’s tourism bureau, the Goal Post’s barbecue plate ranks fourth among the “100 Dishes to Eat in Alabama Before You Die.”

It’s one place ahead of Classic on Noble’s jerked pork tenderloin and peach papaya salsa. How one town could produce such disparate yet top-notch dishes is a question for philosophers and not one that can be answered in a humble newspaper review. (No. 6 is the Victoria Inn’s smoked lettuce salad. Must be something in the water.)

It is perversely appropriate that one of the Goal Post’s dishes should be on a list of meals to eat before you kick the bucket. Here’s a sampling of menu items: corn dogs, country-fried steak with brown gravy, barbecue salad, homemade onion rings, peanut butter pie. Even Paula Deen, the Goddess of Grease (copyright: me), would feel guilty about serving up such artery-clogging fare.

But it’s so good. I never have trouble cleaning my plate when it’s loaded with pulled pork and sauce from the Goal Post. You get two pick two sides with that. I recommend the green beans (overcooked to perfection) and the macaroni and cheese (homemade, awe-inspiring).

The Goal Post is nestled along the same Quintard Avenue that boasts five fast-food restaurants per foot -- or so it seems. Its neon sign, which depicts a field-goal kicker putting an animated football through a pair of uprights, ensures that the restaurant stands out from its bland competition.

The football theme continues indoors, where the walls are decorated with artifacts – jerseys, pennants, you name it -- from local high school football teams. Unlike the Anytown, USA, junk that festoons the walls of many a chain restaurant, the local flare gives the Goal Post a sense of place.

A sense of place that is the perfect complement for a barbecue sauce that is anything but typical.

Even more on the ball

We had a nice trip over to Turner Field last Thursday night. I had to turn around that night and write a review of our experience for editorial leadership class. Such is the price you pay when you write about what you love.

When the Baltimore Orioles trotted into Camden Yards for the first time in 1992, critics were unanimous in praise of the stadium’s then-unique blend of modern amenities and nostalgic flourishes.

It was only a matter of time that imitators would pop up, littering baseball cities across the country with fake arches, parking lot-size Jumbotrons and bizarre outfield dimensions. Of the 16 ballparks constructed since that fateful year, only one has been brave enough to break the retro mold: Turner Field in Atlanta.

I visited the ballpark on a chilly, drizzly Thursday night in early April to watch the Braves take on the Pittsburgh Pirates. The weather was better suited for football than baseball. Nonetheless, the combination of good products both on and off the field kept things interesting.

Turner Field is nestled against Interstate 75 in downtown Atlanta, about an hour and a half east of Anniston. It’s the sort of trip you can make after work without fear of being useless the next day.

Anniston’s first love is college football. That said, if you had any question about whether Anniston is Braves country, look no further than the recent headline at the top of the Star’s sports page: “1580 AM will broadcast Braves game.” Anyone desperate enough to listen to baseball on the radio is a fan indeed.

The Braves also are the only club that can lay claim to having an active Anniston native in its organization. That would be 30-year-old relief pitcher Colter Bean, who currently is toiling in the minors.

At Turner, parking is about as hassle-free as you could hope for in a highly urban setting. I parked a block from the field at a Comfort Inn, where I was charged $10 for the privilege. The stadium itself is no sore thumb; its brick exterior blends quite nicely with its surroundings.

My visit got off to a rocky start. At our concourse level, I was greeted by one shuttered concession stand after another. To be sure, Thursday night games probably don’t offer brisk business. Nevertheless, fans should feel welcomed, and this wasn’t helping.

Before taxes and fees, my upper-deck seat came to $11. I’ve paid considerably more to watch spring training games in Florida, so I wasn’t about to argue about the price. And since the seat was right behind home plate, it felt more expensive than it was.

Refreshments were as expensive and unsatisfying as you would expect at a sporting event. For $16.75, I got a jumbo hot dog, a bunch of broken nachos with lukewarm cheese and a large Coke.

Oddly, the stand had no lids for that particular drink size. That would come back to haunt me an inning into the game when my wife accidentally kicked the cup’s contents onto my shoe, soaking me to the sock.

The saving grace of Turner Field is that it was constructed to host the 1996 Olympic games. That, I suspect, limited the architect’s palette, keeping at bay some of the kitschy accoutrements that blight many post-Camden atrocities.

Save for the slightest of notches in right-center field, the outfield wall forms a semicircle bowing outward from home plate. Here, there are no weird angles, deep porches or walls that would make a muralist salivate. It’s so refreshingly dull.

The stadium lets the city be the star. Downtown Atlanta looms beyond the outfield bleachers, giving the field a much-needed sense of place. The gold leaf-covered Georgia State Capitol dome is unmistakable in the distance.

In the foreground stands the Jumbotron in all its pixilated glory. The purist in me would like to rid every stadium of these gargantuan attention hogs. But then what would I watch between innings when the pitcher is warming up and the infielders are playing catch?

Lacking in some of the bells and whistles of its peers, Turner Field’s relative simplicity lets the game be the game. Despite three Pirates errors and one by the Braves, there were sparkling defensive plays to be seen on this night, namely Bucs centerfielder Nate McLouth’s diving catch at the warning track.

The hitters’ bats were as cold as the weather. After nine innings, the scoreboard registered a mere three runs for each team. A few well-placed hits in the 10th inning gave the Pirates a one-run lead, and closer Matt Capps ensured it didn’t slip away in the bottom half of the frame.

For Braves fans, the park’s inviting atmosphere surely helped take the bite out of the loss.

What the stadium would have looked like if the weather hadn't been so crappy for us.

On the ball

Baseball's back, baby! Our editorial writing class has switched gears and now we're doing criticism. So, in acknowledgment of the new season, I give you a five-years-after review of Michael Lewis' "Moneyball." (Note the Alabama angle up high.)

Jeremy Brown, a “fat catcher” from Hueytown, Ala., wasn’t first-round material when the Oakland Athletics used one of their top picks of the 2002 amateur draft on him.

In that regard, he was the “extreme example” of Oakland’s draft strategy, Michael Lewis wrote in his paradigm-shattering 2003 book, “Moneyball.” Here was a cash-strapped, small-market team that was winning games and doing it by going after castoffs like Brown.

A’s General Manager Billy Beane had found a way to game the system, Lewis tells us over and over again. While other teams shelled out millions of dollars for young studs who looked good in a uniform, the A’s pursued players who looked good on a stat sheet.

Brown fit the mold even though he had trouble fitting into anything else. (His baseball-reference.com page lists the former University of Alabama standout at 5 feet, 10 inches tall and 226 pounds.) The A’s drafted Brown with the 35th overall pick on two conditions: that he would sign for a mere $350,000 – about $1 million less than such a pick typically receives – and that he would drop some weight.

Time has a funny way of treating a book like “Moneyball.” It is of the species of books that is so of the moment that even just a few years distance can unravel the premise like a sweater caught on a nail.

Lewis clearly wants us to see in Brown’s tale an illustration of the new world order destined to supplant the old ruling class of Major League Baseball management. It turns out that even the upstarts aren’t immune to some comeuppance of their own.

Last month, Brown, the hero of “Moneyball,” announced his retirement at the advanced age of 28. This after a career that spanned six forgettable years in the minors and 10 at bats in The Show.

One of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of “Moneyball” was Lewis’ uncomplicated enthusiasm for “sabermetrics,” a term coined by Bill James, the father of the field. Sabermetrics is at its most basic a nerdy idea -- studying baseball through objective evidence.

In the late-1970s, James came to the realization that the game’s statistics “were not merely inadequate; they lied,” according to Lewis’ account.

Take the error. In baseball’s infancy, when poor playing conditions and the absence of gloves translated into many a misadventure in the field, the error was an important statistic. But in modern play, the bar has been set so high that players ought to be judged, in James’ view, by their ability to reach balls that ordinarily get missed rather than their ability to make routine plays. But no statistic exists for that.

The error punishes fielders for doing something right: getting to the ball. Even if the ball was hit directly at them, at least they were standing in the right place. It was just this sort of wrongheaded thinking that James and his followers sought to change.

Doing so, however, required the creation of new statistics. Tossing around unwieldy acronyms such as VORP, OPS and DIPS didn’t exactly endear the nerds to the baseball establishment. Much of their work was ignored by baseball front offices and the media.

But in 1997 the sabermetricians finally got their day. One of their own was named general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Billy Beane was an unlikely convert. He was a jock, a flameout, a former first-round draft pick who looked the part of a baseball player but never seemed able to nail the role. He hit a ton except when it counted. His story represented everything that sabermetrics wasn’t.

Over the next five years Beane’s reliance on numbers paid off. The A’s went from fourth place in 1998 to first place and a playoff appearance in 2000. They followed that with two more playoff runs in 2001 and 2002, despite having one of the lowest payrolls in the game.

That “Moneyball” is one of the most readable baseball tomes of all time despite its bookish subject matter is a credit to Lewis’ palpable awe of the A’s organization and, namely, Billy Beane. Lewis spent a year by Beane’s side, giving him the ability to get inside his subject’s head and the authority to spin a convincing argument.

After the book’s release, sabermetrics clubs popped up across the country. Baseball organizations rushed to hire their own number crunchers. The Red Sox hired Bill James in 2003 and promptly won two World Series titles.

But Lewis often came off as a bit too much in the tank for Beane and his methods. In “Moneyball,” Beane is always the smartest man in the room. He always gets the better of his dimmer competition. His team always benefits when he bases his judgment on reason and analysis. His only failures arise when his emotions get the best of him.

Since 2003, the A’s have finished in first twice and finished worse than second only once, in 2007. That’s not a bad track record, especially for a team not named the Yankees or with access to the Yankees’ purse strings.

Does Jeremy Brown’s early retirement diminish “Moneyball’s” central argument? No, but it does prove that even smart men like Beane and Lewis can do everything right and still make a mistake.

Quote of the Day

"I enjoy environmental journalism precisely because it's not the most popular beat in the newsroom. And because it's not predictable. But the amazing thing about doing this job is how quickly it humbles us when we move outside of our ecosystems. I know the Great Lakes like few other reporters do, but put me in an Arizona desert or a Pacific Northwest rainforest and I'm lost. Yet the parallels I find between those areas and my familiar territory fascinate me, as do the stories in each of those places that are waiting to be told." -- Tom Henry in Nieman Reports, Winter 2002

So true. When I left Naples, I could have told you just about everything you ever wanted to know about the Everglades. In Alabama, I'm still finding new words to describe mountains. Um, "tall." "Pointy." "Mohawk-like."