Online news and the death of journalism

Is it just me or has CNN stopped employing people to proofread releases before the items appear on the CNN website? Why would I care, you ask? My father hated this type of lazy journalism and would wave the newspaper at me when he saw it in print. I guess he ingrained it in me.

I've noticed the trend toward sloppiness for a while, but two examples from today's CNN.com home page finally triggered my wrath:

#1 "Why train workers to leave?"

Which of these describe the real content of the article?
(a) People that work on trains are leaving their jobs.
(b) Companies may train their workers with skills that enable the workers to leave for a better job.
(c) Employers may educate their workers so the workers know how to leave ... something ... the building, their jobs, food on their plates, whatever.

If you answered (b), you'd be correct. It turns out the headline for the article itself, once you follow this link, is "Training workers to leave for a better job". Why didn't they use that same clear headline on the home page?

#2: "Memorial for Mom found in suitcase".

Your choices here are more simple:
(a) Someone found a memorial in a suitcase. That memorial was for a Mom.
(b) Someone conducted a memorial for a Mom who herself was in a suitcase.

Well, tragically it turns out that (b) is correct. A woman was murdered in San Francisco and stuffed in a suitcase. The suitcase washed ashore in SFO. The CNN video article is about the memorial service her children conducted for her near San Francisco Bay. If I followed this type of horrible news more closely I'd have read about this terrible thing earlier and I would've put two and two together more quickly, but I didn't ... and so had no clue what this was really about from the description on the link.

And your last two questions: Is CNN doing it on purpose? Is it just me?

Brave or foolish? Another legless visitor.

L is on the phone yesterday when I hear, "Doug, wait a minute, wait a minute. Snake! Bobby, big snake in our front yard. Bobby, snake. Doug, I'll call you back."

I walk out the front door and sure enough a four- or five-foot long, thin, beautifully marked snake is heading across our drive and into our front flower bed. I'm thinking it's another water snake, but this one's brownish, not grey, and much more clearly marked. Pretty, really. I got my snake handling tool, a rake, and tried to coax him back the way he came. He wasn't having it, but instead of striking out, he wound himself up in a knot with his head on the bottom.

Since he looked more afraid than angry, I slid the rake under him and picked him up in a lump. He decides that's his cue to move, and slithers slowly off. In a fit of unaccustomed bravery, I picked him up by his tail and used the rake to keep his head pointed in the right direction, i.e., away from me. He was fine with that. I dragged him across the yard and over to the wooded lot next door to us.

Double-checking online after the fact, I learned I was correct that this was a non-venomous snake -- not a water snake though. He was a picture perfect Texas rat snake. They can grow to six-feet long. They're distinguished by their markings, particularly the grey stripes on top of their head. They also have a bright orange tongue, which is easily distinguished in the video below. Normally they're cranky, but this one certainly wasn't. They're also called 'false rattle snakes' because sometimes they'll rapidly shake their tail against grass they're hiding in to mimic the sound of a rattle. They eat mostly mice and rats, though they'll eat birds eggs if they can get them. They're pretty good climbers. They kill their prey by constricting, and I could really feel that when I was holding him -- strong. He posed for a couple more pictures, then we let him go. My rake was 4-1/2 feet long, so he was certainly four-feet long, and maybe five. Here are a couple pictures and a video of our adventure.

Future sometimes looks scary

I came home from work on Thursday at noon. I figured the flu was coming on: weak, blinding headache, bloated feeling in the gut. I staggered to the bus stop, plopped into a seat and thought "I will not puke, I will not puke, please, god, don't let me puke." Drove home from the park & ride -- cursing when the idiot in front of me lets a car in line in front of him, which allows that car and the guy in front to make the light and me to miss it. Lights at that intersection cause 3 minute wait, 3 minutes I wasn't sure I had.

But, I made it and dragged myself into bed. I moaned and groaned for a few minutes then fell asleep. I was glad Wife wasn't home. I just wanted to be left alone to die. I slept away the next four hours waking up three or four times to sip some water. Weirdest part was that I kept feeling like I had to stretch, like the blood wasn't getting pumped round my body. Water, moan, stretch, groan, sleep. Pretty soon it was dark.

Then my low back started aching. I lay on one side then the other then on my back then on my stomach. I lay with knees up, straight. What ever I tried, the pain would go away but be back in a couple minutes. I thought I should take aspirin or something, but stomach still wanted to roll over so I just tossed and turned and turned and tossed in bed.

I took my temperature later: normal. Well, that was something. I never actually had any stomach upset going either way. I was just miserable: weak, general muscle and joint aches, no appetite, and a back that wouldn't let me sleep which was all I really wanted to do.

Then it occurred to me: I'm old enough now that feeling this bad could be how I would feel for the rest of my life. No energy, constant low level pain, no appetite. Great -- so now, not only was I sick, I was depressed too.

I woke up on Friday feeling better, not good but better ... the depression gone ... the fear still there.

More and more critters ...

I didn't realize how much I missed being closer to nature while I was living in the UK. Nature for those six years consisted mostly of seeing bunches of bunnies and a few foxes and once in a while a deer out on the golf course. Even though we're living in a relatively heavily populated area here in Texas, we have wooded empty lots on both sides, woods behind us on the other side the golf course across a drainage canal and more woods a block away out our front door. We get to see lots of animals. I love it. I wrote in my last post about 'big guy' that crawled across our backyard a couple weeks ago. The snake made one return visit to our yard a couple days later, then last week my neighbor told me he'd killed the snake. The snake had curled up under a bush in his front yard near the driveway. He has three dogs and all of them were overly interested in seeing what this big hissing thing was in their yard ... dogs not being overly bright. So, neighbor killed the snake. I was sad, but could understand. Neighbor also relayed how, just after he'd moved in, a delivery guy was coming up his drive and a snake laying under the same bush had snapped out and bitten the man's pant leg ... fortunately only the pant and not the real leg. I guess that would've made me a bit snake-averse also.

Then a couple days ago a wide-eyed Wife comes to me at the breakfast table breathlessly saying, "Snake. Snake on the porch. Right by front door. Snake, Bobby. Snake by the front door. Snake." I quickly deduced we had another snake to deal with.

I peek out the front door and happily coiled up in the corner of our front porch is a miniature version of 'big guy' ... OK, not miniature, but at least smaller. It's relatively warmer on the bricks that were heated by the setting sun the night before. I can't tell if it is a cottonmouth water moccasin like the big one we saw. The coloring is similar but the pattern is much more clear and his head is not as arrowhead shaped. I can't see any pits under his eyes, sign of a pit viper, but no matter; I'm treating him like he's the world's most deadly.

Shoes on, jeans on, two garden rakes in hand, I gingerly open the front door. "Lil' guy" takes no notice. I give him a poke with the rake and he glares at me. I give him a push and he reluctantly crawls along the wall to the opposite corner and curls up again. I push him toward the front step with the rake. He starts to go then doubles back toward his original place. I'm not having it. I push him onto the drive. He decides OK, I'll curl up under the azaleas in front. He damn near disappears in the shadows. I'm not having it. I poke and prod from a rake's length away. He crawls next to the house and he's getting pissed. Whap. He bites the rake in a flash. Whap. Bites it a second time. Then coils back up against the house and glares at me again. I poke him a couple more times and try to lift him with one rake onto the other. Whap again, but he crawls into the grass on the side of the house and again hunkers down -- tongue whipping in and out. I can tell he's thinking, "Put the rakes down you chicken-sh--, mudder-lover. I'll show you who can poke who." He just refuses to move, but after five minutes of increasingly brave pushes and prods he crawls off into the vacant lot next to the house. It was a bit more excitement than I'd really bargained for on a Friday morning, but still ... I found it pretty cool. And, yes, I check out the window before I open the front door now.

Even neater was a tale from snake-killing neighbor that we have a red fox that visits regularly. He comes at dusk most nights, walking along the cart path that runs behind our house. Of course, Wife is all gung ho about this. We have bbq chicken that night and puts the unused chicken skin out near the path. Then she returns and perches vulture-like on our breakfast nook chair waiting for Bre'r Fox. Darned if right at sunset, the fox comes trotting over the mounds across the fairway and then along the cart path. He stops like a statue and sniffs at our house then makes a bee-line for the chicken. He grabs the biggest piece and runs back across the fairway. We'd like to think that he's got a litter of pups back in the woods somewhere who are now munching on their first chicken skin. In five minutes he's back. He grabs the remaining skin and this time isn't sharing. He takes it to the other side of the fairway and gulps it down. Then he trots back along the path and into the vacant lot next to the house -- heading we think for the bigger woods across the road. Wife gets good pics of the whole thing.

We also are starting to see squirrels in our yard. They are not the world's brightest. If I break the corn off the cob and toss it in the grass they'll eat it, but haven't yet figured out that the whole ear is laying on the ground and they can serve themselves. Four blue jays on the other hand, have got it sussed out and will peck the kernels off the cob, take them to a branch and spend the next 90 seconds or so bashing it with their beaks to get to the good bits.

We've seen the red tailed hawk glide by a couple times. Once in a while he'll sit on a pole across the fairway. You can almost hear him say, "Here, mousy, mousy, mousy." We've not heard the great horned owl at night for quite a while. We have white egrets in the lake nearest to us. I also saw the blue heron fly by last night. Mocking birds are pretty regular visitors as are suicide prone doves. We've discovered that they're the ones that confuse reflections with the real thing. One committed suicide against our patio window -- much to Wife's teary consternation.

Now I know this can't match my cousin Dianne's wildlife stories from Anchorage ... moose in the backyard or maybe even Daughter's tales of the racoon army ... but for Houston, I'm likin' it. You can see a more complete pictorial essay on my FaceBook account by (hopefully) following this link: Houston Wildlife.