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I wish I were anorexic. It would just be so much cheaper.

Do you think Keanu Reeves likes Mario Cart? Just a thought.

For some reason I bolted awake at seven am this morning thinking aliens were attacking us. It was just Dan playing "Animal Crossing" in combination with the snow plow going through the parking lot outside.

Waking up thinking you're going to have to kick some extraterrestrial ass is a very unnerving thing.

Along with some of the other things they teach you in news reporter school, they teach you to have someone spell out their name on tape so that if you use a sound bite from them, you'll have the correct spelling as they gave it to you. So one of our videographers went to cover a "street baller" tournament here in town... I think it might have been part of the "And One" caravan.

He starts to interview this guy, and he asks him: "First, could you spell your name please?"

The guy goes: "Yeah, dawg. H. O. T, S. A. U, C. E."

There is a long pause. (A spelling-in-my-head pause.) You can see the camera move, as though the videographer were poking his head around the side in puzzlement.

"...Hot Sauce?"

"Yeah, Dawg. What?"

It was the most hilarious beginning to an interview I've seen in quite some time.

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day at a meeting about our medical benefits. One co-worker who was waiting outside the conference room for the next meeting to start asked me "how it went."

"See this?" I said, holding up my "Informational Benefits Packet". "THIS," I said, "is a dildo. You will be violated with it."

Sweeps starts next week. We're down one News Director, two reporters, we have no interns, and our chief photographer just quit. That means we've got like, ten people running two newscasts. I've already worked over forty hours this week, and it's only four o'clock on a Wednesday.

I was actually afraid of what might happen when I had to deliver the 8,430th piece of bad news to the executive producer last night. News like:

The live truck broke! My tape deck broke! Camera five broke! Okay, now the tape deck in the live truck is broke! With a tape we needed inside it! The live shot won't work because it's on the 11th floor and no one has enough cable to wire the cameras all the way up there! That news car you sent out to cover a story about a thirty car pileup of cars stuck in ditches got stuck in a ditch! The satellites are all broke!

I filed a Repair Request Report that read:

Item needing to be fixed?: Newsroom.
Item location?: Newsroom.
Description of problem?: Can't make news.

I was not allowed to submit this report. I had to fill out several smaller, more specific reports. It took forever.