I just stumbled upon the Kent State University College Prowler book on Amazon. I don’t remember what series of clicks or searches landed me there. But it made me smile.

A book I helped edit can be purchased online on Amazon.com.

Yeah, in my list of things to achieve in life, writing a book is in the top 10. It will be a long time before that happens. But copy editing and fact checking the College Prowler book for Steve was one of those random forays into book publishing. The book is essentially a college students take on Kent State. (College Prowler has one student at each university compile the information and put together the book with his/her team.)

If you look at the “search inside” pages and click on “Copyright” you’ll see my name listed as a member of the bounce-back team. I don’t get any credit or money for the week I didn’t sleep because I had to read and re-read the manuscript or the constant complaining from Steve I had to endure as he struggled to compile the information for the book (with the help of most of the Summer Kent Stater staff). But, in the end, just seeing this on Amazon is kind of cool.

I began reading the Harry Potter series in middle school — early middle school. That I haven’t outgrown or gotten bored with the series is testament to the quality of the content and writing.

I started with book two and have had to wait it out for each subsequent book to arrive. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the final installment for quite some time now.

Apparently, now Scholastic has announced the final book’s title, and drumroll please, it will be “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Cue wild fan speculation and fanfic for the next year and a half before the book ever hits stores or even Amazon.com.

UPDATE! Wait, you don’t even have to wait for the speculation and book stores. Borders immediately jumped on this bandwagon with a mass e-mail announcing the name asking users to sign up and reserve copies today. Come on…

Apparently, the Beacon publisher has a vision for the future of the paper, and *cough* surprise, it’s local, local, local. Welcome to the rest of the industry.

The newspaper will roll out its “Neighborhood Express'’ initiative in January, which includes a full page devoted to bites of news from as many communities as will fit.

The new community-news page will appear on Page B3 five times a week, Moss said, with the editorial and op-ed pages returning to the newspaper’s A section. There will be related advertising and circulation efforts as well.

“It’s a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach to growing our readership and growing our advertisers,'’ he said.

This is the right move. It is a necessary move that every paper needs to make if it wants to continue to be relevant. What is considered news will continue redefining itself and perhaps regressing in the months and years that are ahead. News is, always has been and always will be what people want to know. And lucky for newspapers who pay attention to this trend, people really want to know about their communities.

I think the one undeniable strength papers like the Beacon and others have is they can cover their community in a way nobody else can. I can read about the latest presidential decree on CNN or NYTimes.com, and in fact, I probably will. They’re going to have it first and with better access than the other papers who are waiting on an AP story to come through. However, nobody else is going to tell me about the new buildings being built in my school district or about the cab flying through the window of a popular downtown restaurant. The only sources I have for that news are local. And newspapers are good, and getting better when coupled with the Web, at getting out such stories with context and relevance that make them compelling enough for me to pick up the paper and read.

I’m glad my hometown paper decided to join the hyper-local party the rest of the industry recognized months (or perhaps even longer) ago.

I suddenly remember why I don’t watch TV. I just want to catch the headlines, and all any of the major stations is talking about is the climbers in Oregon who are missing/dead. Yes, this is an important story, and yes it is heart-wrenching. But, certainly there are other headlines worth mentioning at least? No? CNN, MSNBC, even (or maybe especially) FOX News all seem to think nothing else in the whole world is happening. Gah.

Anyway, the point is between the talk/repetition of how little info they actually have/leading questions on CNN (what else other than news would I have on in the background?) I just saw the dumbest infomercial I’ve ever seen (except maybe the annoying “HeadOn apply directly to the forehead” commercials — p.s. that’s a link to Aman’s parody not the commerical). It was for the MXZ Saw. They compared it to another saw by saying basically, yeah sure that other saw can cut through wood… but what about this cinderblock? Now, the MXZ saw can… I don’t understand why this would convince anyone to buy the saw. Who tries a cut a cinderblock with a saw? Nobody sits around and thinks, man, if only I had a stronger saw, I could cut through that cinderblock. What a stupid gimmick. These types of things are why I’d rather read the newspaper or catch the headlines on CNN.com.

OK, now Meet the Press is on. That’s better.

Obviously, as anyone who actually reads my blog can tell, I love the Beacon Journal. The Beacon is my “hometown paper,” and even though it’s technically a metro, it has always felt like my local paper (a vibe I definitely don’t get from the Plain Dealer). I read it every day. When I have time to stop and buy it in print, I do. But even when I can’t, such as all summer when I was in Findlay, I still read Ohio.com throughout the day to keep up with the latest Akron news.

All that said, I just want to comment on a few stories from today…

First, I saw they gave out the monthly Do the Right Thing awards yesterday. This program is always great, and it holds special meaning for me because when I was in 8th grade, I was in the very first group of students to receive the award. That was a decade ago. I wonder if the officers who organized the program ever saw it taking off as much as it did. This is also the type of story many reporters dread, but it proves my mantra of “everything’s important to someone.” It’s not about corruption or about telling the untold story. It’s just about giving little kids and their families something to smile about because everyone can read about them in the paper. How do I know? Well, somewhere around here, I still have the clipping with my name and headshot that ran with the article the day I got the award.

Second, although I don’t understand the headline, this was a cute story… However, I am left wondering… what Wal-Mart at the Stow-Kent Plaza? There of course isn’t one. There’s a K-Mart that’s going out of business. There’s a Wal-Mart in Stow, which is what he’s talking about, but it’s at least a 10 minute drive from the Stow-Kent Plaza. I don’t recognize the byline. He is apparently a BJ business writer, which is probably why I don’t know the name as well as the metro reporters. But he could be new and from out of the area, which is the point of bringing this up… A local would have (and several beside me probably did when they read the line) scratched their head and said, that’s not right. But if you weren’t from the area, you probably wouldn’t have had occasion to know the particularities of what makes up the Stow-Kent Plaza. But still, an editor or someone in copy should have caught that; for all I know, one of them could have inserted it, creating a fact error by trying to give more context to the location. So, how did it get through? Because, chances are they’re new, too, or just plain busy. (I know several students who’ve been hired PT for copyediting. All of them good, but none of them are Akronites.) It definitely makes me hope that wherever I take a job, I’m able to pick up on these little nuances about the city and that I have editors who know the town well enough to do the same.

I think this is the first day “off” I’ve had in at least a year. At least.

Technically this summer I had two days off a week. But they were hardly off when you consider that being off just meant having time to drive two and a half hours back to Akron/Kent for meetings, birthdays, etc. or spending all day working on and planning the fall Stater. Plus, I didn’t even take breathing room between the Stater and the Courier. I literally finished the Stater, took exams (and to add to the craziness, we published two extra editions of the Stater during exam week), moved my stuff to Findlay and started that following Monday. I came back from Findlay with one week to prepare the office and get everything settled before my staff returned and we started putting out the paper.

Even when I was off, I was never really off. I just wasn’t at work doing my “job.”

This fall, I did take a “breather” every Saturday. I made it a point to take my dog to the park (the metro parks, not just down the street to a swingset) on a walk for an hour or so each weekend. I needed the time to refresh from a hectic schedule and break the weeks up. But she needed it as much as I did. My mom doesn’t have the time or energy to take her out on daily walks. But Shadow’s a very hyper and active dog (shepherd & lab mix), and she misses me terribly when I’m away (which is most of the time) — so much so that when I walk in the door she literally leaps into my arms and refuses to get down until I’ve held her like a baby for a minute or two. I am not joking. It’s the cutest thing ever.

But even on those Saturday walks I’d still be “on.” I remember recently I was at the park for maybe an hour and received no fewer than three calls about the Stater. Mostly they were just, “I sent you a brief for the Web, when can you get it up?” or “So, thus&so happened, but so&so won’t talk to me, what should I do…” Even on Thanksgiving and throughout that weekend, I had stories to upload and comments to approve. I guess I could have ignored the calls and e-mails. But I’d still have to deal with them anyway. And thus, I was never really off. I was just out of the office and away from campus.

But today? Well, I am no longer responsible for the Stater. So, although I wouldn’t, if someone called and asked me for advice, to post their stories or to do them a favor, I could legitimately tell them to call Seth, Rachel or Ryan instead. I’m not planning next semester and trying to arrange schedules and training week speakers, as I was doing at this time last year, when I was M.E., and this past summer, when I was editor. I’m not even worried about getting a headstart on research for my next story or about how Monday’s budget and layouts are shaping up. I don’t even have that nagging, “exams are coming up” or “I should work on that project due Tuesday” feeling. I’m not worried about work or school or any of that. I’m off. Completely off.

So on my first day off in as long as I can remember, I’m going to take my nephews, who sadly haven’t as much of me the last year or so as they’d like, out to lunch and then have them tag along with Shadow and me on our weekly walk. Then, I’m going to unpack a few boxes, sort out everything I’ve accumulated the last three and a half years and probably kick back and read one of the 20+ books I’ve bought but not had time to read in the last year.

Mostly, I’m going to relax. For now at least.

My father is a cab driver in Akron. He’s been driving cab for most of his life and all of mine. (In fact, he met my mother when she was a dispatcher at the cab company.)

So, today when I read “Cab slams into downtown restaurant” in the Beacon, I didn’t even finish reading the story. I just called him up to find out what happened.

That photo is crazy. The cab was apparently hit by someone who ran a red light and thrown through the window of the restaurant. And the witness said it sounded like “a bomb going off.”

When I asked my dad about it, he just laughed. The driver, a friend of his, is OK. Apparently though, he was joking with her earlier about the accident. After checking to see if she was OK, he asked if she wanted to go to lunch, he heard there was a new drive-in restaurant downtown. Hehe. That’s my father for you. I definitely inherited his sense of sarcasm.

If nothing else, the driver has another great story for her kids/friends. One of the best parts about having a cab driver for a father is the awesome stories he hears and the things he sees. Seriously. If you wanted to do participatory journalism and write a book about a city, becoming a cab driver would be a great way to do it. You get to mingle with everyone from coked out professionals to drunk college students to the normal working class people. Hmm. If I had the guts to be a cab driver (and I didn’t think my parents would kill me for considering it), that would actually make a great book.

So, although I did pretty horrible on my final anthropology exam, I am still breathing a sigh of immense relief. I would have to miss 50 of the 100 questions to get anything below a C in that class. And at this point, as the saying goes “C’s get degrees.” I am done with college. I have done everything I could and the burden is no longer mine to carry.

But, before I dismiss the whole final exam, I would like to point out a good part of why I feel I did horrible has to do with the test format and wording. First, 100 questions — true and false?! Second, half of the questions were based on lectures the professor himself was not present to give (he has cancer and missed several weeks of classes) and when he was were difficult to understand and hear (a large lecture with students constantly shifting, a room in an old building with loud air conditioning and heating, and a still thick accent that was only briefly punctated by bursts of cursing and offensive rants). Overall, it was a very unimpressive class and quite possibly the worst class I took during my undergraduate time. The final reason I feel I did horrible lies in the questions wording.

I will provide you with some samples of questions taken from the actual test to help everyone see why this test was ridiculous:

• Hunters and gathers, the Archaic folk in the classificatory scheme we have used in this course, demonstrate by simplicity of their lives, how incompetent and uninventive they were for something like half a million years.
• When we look at our own wasteful behavior in dealling with scarce natural resources, we can not help but admire prehistoric “primitive” man for the way his life fits harmoniouslly into an organic whole. He truly lives in tune with nature, having learnt how to conserve his natural resources.
• The best access the ordinary citizen has to the relics of the past is the Museum, although a field season digging is likely to show the novice that the study of Man’s cultural “left-overs” can be less than exciting.

Those are actual questions. To his credit, the questions from the book were decidely more straight-forward and unbiased. But still. I felt like I was doing algebra trying to eliminate any statements that were obviously true to see if any false ones remained. It was tedious and unnecessary. Those are NOT the types of questions you should be asking in true and false format.

But who cares. I’m done with my educational career. Now on to my real career.

As this Beacon story (Smoking drifts back into area businesses) notes, several area establishments have quite literally been ignoring the new statewide smoking ban, which went into effect last Thursday.

I actually debated this with my father on Sunday. He (a smoker) pointed out that everyone was (and will continue) just ignoring the ban, so it didn’t even matter. Apparently, the bowling alley I used to work at (which was always a sort of shady place) is just telling smokers to pack the back party room and smoke there because they don’t want snow being trampled in all night. The smoke in the bowling alley alone probably took a year or two off MY life just because I had to breathe it constantly every night I worked. I remember guys would come up to the counter to smoke cigars. Cigars! I would literally choke while taking their order thinking “now, is that necessary?”

My father went on, “You think the bars in Kent are enforcing it? You’re wrong. Nobody is.” To wit I replied, “The ones I was in Thursday didn’t have a single smoker, and Ray’s yesterday and BW3’s today… nobody was smoking in any of them.” Perhaps because Kent was so close to its own ban, the bar owners resigned themselves to the inevitable. My dad’s argument to continue flaunting his cigarettes in public places was that it was a basic right. My reply? And not being exposed to pollutants that literally decrease the length and quality of my life, that’s not a right of mine? He then went into the old well “fast food is bad for people but they haven’t outlawed it” argument, and I quickly put that one to bed as well with a retort, “Well, if I chose to eat at McDonald’s then so I harm myself. I’m not hurting innocent bystanders or forcing it down anyone else’s throat.”

It’s not that my family and I don’t see eye to eye on most things, we do. It’s just that I am the one who sticks up for my position even when everyone else disagrees — probably because I’m the most informed. But seriously, as the article points out, enforcement or no enforcement, choosing to continue smoking is breaking the law.

In other unrelated news, this panda video is adorable.

I won’t lie, waking up to a campus covered in snow this morning excited me entirely too much.

Usually by this time in the year, a few weeks shy of Christmas, snow on the ground in Ohio, especially in Kent, Ohio, is old hat, the norm.

But this year, today is the first real stick-to-the -ground, let’s go sledding and have a snowball fight snowfall of the season in Kent. We had a little bit earlier this week, but it only stuck a few hours and melted almost on impact. Everyone else came in the office complaining.

So, although everyone else seems to not be enjoying the “crappy weather” I am actually in a really good mood because snow, especially freshly fallen snow is peaceful and beautiful.

It’s a great last day of classes EVER. Ok, maybe I’m just in a good mood because it’s my last day of classes. It’s also the day Issue 5 goes into effect, which means tonight, which is my last Thursday out in Kent with friends as an undergrad will be SMOKE FREE! Ok, I guess it’s just a good day all around. But the snow definitely helps.