Blogging in paradise

I’m coming to you from sunny Tampa, Florida today. Since it’s my day off, I figured I could write about whatever I wanted, work-related or not. When I first started this blog — before the legend of Flener, when Elvis was just a face, before the video camera — the idea was to have a place where I could post news stories without going through our Web site. It quickly turned into a medium for me to give readers an idea of what goes on behind the scenes of news. Now, I’ve kind of decided that it has beome a dialogue — one-sided as it may be — about life in journalism and in Jessamine County. Which is why I decided to do a little bit of work on my day off, the one day off I will get in 2008.

For reference’s sake, I am blogging from here:

Sorry if the picture is blurry; it’s pretty humid and my phone fogged up immediately when I stepped outside. Now for some of my musings:

• I hate flying. I hate the entire experience from going through security to waiting in a giant terminal with thousands of other people who are in the same sour mood that I am. I hate giving up my luggage and standing by the carousel to get it back. I hate takeoffs, landings and turbulance. Our flight out of Lexington yesterday was delayed three hours, and we missed our flight out of Atlanta. Luckily, we were an eleventh-hour addition to standby for the 10:55 flight to Tampa — the last three added to the plane three minutes before takeoff.

But I realized yesterday that I might not just hate flying, I might be afraid to fly. I didn’t tell anybody else, but I got a horrible feeling as we were boarding the plane out of Lexington. It was one of those Final Destination moments where I, for a split second, thought about getting off of the plane. A completely irrational fear. As we took off into pretty thick clouds, we went through some of the worst turbulance I have every experienced. The plane shook, dipped sharply, rose quickly, and I was sick to my stomach the whole time — frantic, look-for-the-barf-bag sick. Well we made it, and the flight out of Atlanta was much less frightening, but I was bothered by how skittish I had gotten on the previous trip. There is not really a point to this story, but I am just trying to work this fear out in my head and in writing. I hope that was a one-time thing.

• Joe Crawford was drafted by the Lakers last night, and I’m pulling for him. I think he was very much undervalued going into the draft, and I didn’t even see him spring up on any of the mock drafts, which pretty much tells you the value of mock drafts. Those guys are cocky enough that they feel the need to publish what they think is going to happen, and then they beef up their egos by calling the picks that they didn’t pick surprising or unorthodox. Crawford is a great example of that kind of pick. Chad Ford of ESPN (that ought to tell you something right there) didn’t have Crawford being drafted. When he was, Ford’s analysis was:

Crawford is a bit of a tweener as a combo guard. He played well in Orlando but I doubt he sticks in the league.

Crack coverage, there, Chad. I’m thinking about starting an “ESPN is Lame” category. Anybody interested?  I’m also on the record as saying Michael Beasley not going first is silly.

• I try to keep political coverage to a minimum, but this Obama-Hillary lovefest is interesting. I’m genuinely surprised that Clinton is going along with this campaign. This is the woman who refused to concede the democratic nomination even after it looked like she was completely sunk. She continued the divide of the Democratic Party, and now she’s working with Obama to try and fix it? Sounds to me like she realized her mistake from a couple months ago and is trying to salvage some respect among democrats for that 2012 campaign that I know she hasn’t started thinking about yet. Or maybe she just despises John McCain that much…

• Did I mention I’m in Tampa?

• I’m not normally one to question Joe Posnanski, one of the best sports writer’s alive today, but I’ve got to disagree with him about Kansas City signing Barry Bonds. I’m all for sticking it to the man, but not by playing to one of the most well-documented jerks in the history of sports. I still believe that sports is about character and character-building, as much as money plays into it. If the Cincinnati Reds were full of guys whom I didn’t respect, I would not pull for the team. That says something. And I feel that baseball, more so than any other sport, is about the people. Baseball stories are legendary, and they don’t focus on the numbers or the World Series; they focus on those playing the game. Those athletes are our best friends, our worst enemies and the people who we want to see succeed on the individual side of the game, sometimes even more than in the team aspect. That is why you saw New York Yankee fans give Ken Griffey Jr. a standing ovation when he hit his 601st home run at Yankee Stadium in a series that had seen the Reds take the first two games from the Bombers. Sorry, Joe.

• I hear Hancock is a travesty. I’m still going to see it, though. Time will tell if it breaks Will Smith’s impressive streak: I have never seen a Will Smith movie I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed.

• Tampa rocks.

That’s all for now. I plan to post again tomorrow.