Time with Tarcheechee, Turquoise, Te'Air and Thirplus Moose

Around the same time I read “Freakonomics” and its chapter titled, “Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?”, Thirplus Moose got arrested. Yup. Thirplus Moose. My boss at the time said, “That’th when you have exthtra mootheth.” Actually, what Thirplus Moose did was pretty terrible – he killed a 70-something-year-old guard during a bank robbery. Google his name and “bank robbery” and you can get all the awful details. He’s in prison for the next 35 years.

Also around this time, I heard the urban legend that exists at our local pediatric hospital where a couple of my doctor friends did their residencies. It goes like this: A doctor walked in to see the infant patient, La-a. Upon greeting the mother, the doctor asked, “So, how is, um, La-Ah doing today?” And the mother angrily replied, “It’s La-dash-a! You say the dash!”

The confluence of La-dash-a, my reading of "Freakonomics" and my introduction to Thirplus Moose prompted me to start a collection: a collection of ridiculous names. I have accumulated these for the last five or so years. I’ve seen them in public court documents, news articles, obituaries, and reporter friends have passed on to me amusing ones they’ve run across. Nearly all of them are local - encountered in the middle of the Midwest. I’ve left out names that are obviously foreign. These also span the racial spectrum. Many of them I don’t even know the race. Some are names of elderly people and some are of very young kids. And I absolutely did not make any of these up. So for your enjoyment, here’s a curated collection of some of my favorites (my apologies if you are one of the people named here, and I'm sorry you've had to carry such a burden during your life):

Best Full Names

Barbbie Liberty

Turquoise President

Luv Wrotten

Rapture Mapps

Miss Mellos Love

Sundance Silvertooth

Best first-middle name combos

Sparkle LaStarr

Princess Adorable

Befored Bangs

Mac Hercules

Now on to just the first names. I’ve tried to group these into categories. And all of them are “sic.”

Words misappropriated as names

Aliance	Alias	Aryan (ironic because this was not a white person)
British	Burley	Cinnamon
Desire	Heaven	Iranian
Jock	Latrine (seriously)	Lent
Lover/Lovey	Major	Marvel
Menthol	Morocco	Nimrod
Pleaze	Princess	Queen
Radius	Rejoin	Sabre
Series	Shrine	Sparkle
Unique	Zephr

And last but not least, these three members of the same family with an aspirational mom: Vision, Knowledge and Future

Dreams of the Good Life and Brand Names Gone Awry

ATM (also, seriously)

Capone (well, the gangsta’ life)

Cashinita

Champagne and this sad spelling of it: Champayne

Chiquita

Jimillion

Lexus

Nautica

Princess

Sirterry (aspirations of knighthood!)

Hmm, that sounds like something else…

Cushun

JuWanna

Quareter (“quarter” with a southern accent?)

Wyomie

Youwanda

Zxerius (yes, I’m Zxerius)

Other stuff that I imagine these names rhyme with

Angel: Ain’Jel

Ammonia: Armonia

Banal: Banial

Diarrhea: A’Keyrea, Duryea, Kiearea

Entrail: Sentrayle

Go cheese: Coqueese

Kwanzaa: Jwanza

Nation: Nae’Sion

The Taint (Spanish): El Teainte

The Air: Te’Air

Smithereen (the singular version of what you blow something up into): Vivereen

Yule: Uel

And this one that I think rhymes with Connecticut: Shunteticut

People whose parents obviously wanted a child of a different gender

Dale’Kia

Earlmisha

Earlnita

MacNadine

Martyia

Norbertine

Oscartenia

If you can pronounce these correctly, you know more than me

Daeshafaun	Day’Smyne
Ersar’rne	Franatte
Gikadhyn	Knolues
Lastrape	Micean
Mounnea	Muryel’Zha
Odies	Ounjanishe
Quachai	Tateasheia
Thresse	Tosjia
Tychius	Vandolon
Zakiyat

De/La

De’Asia and LaAsia

DeClue

De’Elegance

DeMony (I’m assuming this is pronounced  “da’ money”)

DeVoice

LaKeista (Spanish for “the keester?”

LaQueena

Just, why? Why?

Altrances	Author May	Bhishm	Birdylene	Calixx
Cleother	Elcue	Fulece	Gearmon	Ijris
Jugbear	Mandingo	Mingus	Pagerine	Pornlert
Quitman	Rayth (“race” with a lisp?)	Suitumua	Supreen	Tarcheechee
Toekeywon	Tonto (only OK if you’re American Indian)	Toyyonka	Venoris	Verple

So when it came time to name my own child, my husband and I thought long and hard. There’s a lot that goes into deciding a name, and we took it as a very heavy responsibility (unlike the parents of some of the people on this list – ATM? Quitman? Sundance?). Our child would carry this with him for the rest of his life, and it would always affect people’s perceptions of him. It took us eight months to decide. I didn’t want anything too weird or too popular. My husband wanted only apostle names, but I thought they were too common and bland. We wanted to dub our son something that would set him up for success, unlike the strange ones that "Freakonomics" says people give their kids because they subconsciously have low expectations for them. It turns out our biggest obstacle was one of us would like a name, then the other one would say, “No, I went to high school with a total douche bag who was named that.”   

In the end, we chose Spencer. And it is perfect for him. Maybe Pornlert is a perfect fit for that person, too. 

Let's find a cure for CWAD

I have this untreated disorder for which science hasn’t come close to finding a cure. I don’t know that they’ve even tried. I might try to set up a foundation for research. We would do 5Ks and luncheons with celebrity keynote speakers and send people address labels with the foundation’s logo on them. 

Since modern medicine has not formalized the diagnosis, I call my disease CWAD (I’d like to think it’s pronounced see-wad): Cries When Angry Disorder. It can be a debilitating condition. It strikes most often at work. Precipitating factors include a boss or coworker who is a total jackhole. While other normal people can get ticked and tell these butt weasels just what they think of their jerky behavior, CWAD sufferers simply break down and cry upon confrontation. When provoked, the CWAD sufferer is no less angry than the normal person, but instead of coming off as assertive or indignant, people with CWAD present themselves as spineless babies when they’re infuriated.

In the CWAD sufferer’s head is a host of logic and corroborating evidence for their argument. But on their journey out of the brain and to the mouth, these messages are converted to a blubbering mess. Tears ignite and mucus flows. The CWAD sufferer tries desperately to save face and hold it together, and she does OK until forced to talk. Once it is her turn to argue, the blubbering begins. 

But the CWAD sufferer is not sad! Far from it! She is super, super enraged! In someone else’s body, she might be throwing chairs. But for those afflicted with CWAD, the rage just comes out in the form of weak, weak tears and little gaspy breaths. The person against whom she is arguing, often a d-bag male boss, feels superior and as though he has won because he is so much tougher (The only teeny tiny positive side to CWAD is that women crying typically makes males, especially bosses, super uncomfortable, and they wrap up the confrontation more quickly.). The CWAD sufferer had outstanding arguments, but she walks away feeling defeated, because all those zingers she had planned really lost their luster between the Kleenexes. 

After the confrontation (and by the way, CWAD sufferers NEVER initiate the confrontation because they know the weepy conclusion of such things), the CWAD sufferer rehashes all the things she should have said. She recites the clever one-liners and irrefutable evidence she should have presented with a straight face. She beats herself up over her weakness. She also must repair to the bathroom or some other secluded area and wait for her nose to stop being red. 

Can we please come together and help find a cure for Cries When Angry Disorder? Millions of people (OK, mostly millions of women) lose face at work because of CWAD every year. There are so many d-bags who need to be put in their places but aren’t because the wisdom of CWAD sufferers isn’t being heard. It’s just being drowned in tears. Imagine how much better the world would be if those a-holes got a taste of their own medicine. When we cure CWAD, we will be so much closer to that dream.

Oh, and here’s my rough sketch of what the CWAD Foundation logo and motto should be:

I am not ashamed

My mom recently told me she wanted to see the new “Dumb and Dumber” sequel, but she didn’t want to go to a theater to do so. She said she would be embarrassed to be a middle-aged woman out in public watching such a stupid movie. Well you know what? I want to see the “Dumb and Dumber” sequel, too. And I’m not ashamed of it. The first one was one of my all-time favorite comedies. I haven’t seen it in years, but I laughed a LOT every time I saw it. If I can find someone similarly unashamed to come with me, I’m going to proudly march into a theater to see the sequel.

This got me thinking about what guilty pleasures people are secreting away, and what things we’re ashamed of that we totally don’t need to be. So to help others be loud and proud, I’m going to come out with what I’m not ashamed of. (Obviously, I’m not ashamed to end a sentence in a preposition. It’s OK if it makes it less awkward.)

I like every Taylor Swift song I’ve ever heard. Not enough to purchase any of her music, but whenever a song of hers comes on the radio, I’m happy about it. Even if it’s been way over-played, I just like her songs. And I’m 32 years old. I also think she’s handling being a major celebrity pretty well. 

I loved “Beavis and Butthead.” This was a staple of my middle and high school years (almost as important as “Dawson’s Creek”). And I’m totally going to throw her under the bus again here, but my mom liked it, too. We both thought it was hilarious, and it gave me insight into the sometimes alien-seeming adolescent boys who surrounded me at school. I still remember the episode in which Beavis and Butthead cut off their pubes and glued them to their faces because they were having trouble growing real facial hair. 

I haven’t vacuumed in three weeks. Do you know how hard it is to vacuum when you work full time and have a toddler? When I’m home from work, I want to spend time with my son, not cleaning. I get a lot done after he goes to sleep, but vacuuming is loud, and it wakes him up. So you can’t do it while he’s sleeping. So that leaves me with what kind of time to vacuum? I don’t care. We’re on the floor with constantly with the kiddo, and it looks fine to me.

I think poop/fart humor is amazing. Given my affinity for “Dumb and Dumber” and “Beavis and Butthead,” you could probably have figured that one out. We’re not going to be friends if you can’t laugh about turds. 

I just ate barbecue sauce that expired six years ago. Trying to convince my toddler son to eat popcorn chicken, we got the barbecue sauce out of the fridge to dip it in, and we all partook. (He loved it, by the way, and when it was offered to him again the following week, he refused to even put it in his mouth and threw it on the floor. Ah, toddlers.) As my husband was putting the sauce back in the fridge, he saw it expired in 2008. It tasted fine and no one got sick. We’re going to finish off the bottle.

I’m way into books. I would rather be at home reading than out somewhere partying and drinking, hands down. And even in my early 20s when I occasionally went out dancing and to bars, most of the time I was just thinking, “I just want to go home and read a book with my cat.”

I still wear some pairs of maternity underwear. Toward the end of a pregnancy, nothing fits, including underwear. I found these awesome panties at Motherhood that are cut low on the abdomen and just fit perfectly. But a year and a half after the baby came out of my body and I lost all the weight and then some, they still fit great. One pair has a print of ice cream cones and pickles. Clever, eh? My husband even said the low cut was “sexy.” So hell yeah, I’m still wearing them.

I don’t like the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Hate on me if you will, nerds, but I don’t care. I watched the first in each series and didn’t feel compelled to see any more. 

I adored spray cheese from a can, and I still want it. As a teenager, I ate loads of Easy Cheese. In case you don’t know, that’s processed cheesy goo in a compressed can that you spray out like whipped cream. I haven’t eaten it since high school because I tried to stop eating things I was pretty sure were bad for me, but every time I pass it in the grocery store, my heart burns with yearning.

Speaking of nasty food, I love McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I allow myself to eat McDonald’s exactly once each year. It’s usually in November, so the big day could be very soon. And what do I get at this exciting annual junk foodtopia? Chicken McNuggets. Yes, I know they’re made of mechanically separated pink chicken goo that is stamped into disturbingly uniform shapes before being breaded with God knows what and fried. I know. But I want them anyway. Much like the spray cheese, I want them far more than I ever allow myself to have them. Because I want to go on living for a while, too. 

Stretch marks. OK, that’s kind of a lie. I am ashamed of my stretch marks. I know, I know, they’re “tiger stripes.” My badge of womanhood and proof I created a life. But I cover them up. My swimsuit is a two piece, and I make absolutely sure the bottom is high-waisted enough to keep them covered, and I’m constantly checking to make sure they’re not visible. I’m really trying not to be ashamed about this. But it’s really hard when so many of my friends snapped back into place without a mark. 

Buying feminine hygiene products. In the early years of my menses, I would sneak up to a female cashier, pull out the package of pads or tampons I’d been hiding like a shoplifter, and try to conceal it among other purchases. I would buy extra stuff just so the cashier would have to scan four or five things and wouldn’t pay as much attention to the “embarrassing” product. Not now, my friends. Unashamedly, I will buy a single box of tampons - a big one, too - and hand it right to the teenage male cashier. Read it and weep, son.

The most impressively bad idea of all

I have had some impressively bad ideas in my life. When I was a teenager, I decided pregnancy would be awful (I wasn’t entirely wrong), and I had the idea that if I ever wanted to have a kid, a surrogate would be ideal. But not a regular surrogate. I thought that would be too expensive and too messy, emotionally. My idea was to have a large dog, like a St. Bernard, gestate my fetus. I would keep the dog with me at all times, so I would be there for the baby’s development and know it was OK. Then the dog could have the baby for me, lick it clean, and I would go on to raise the child in a completely normal fashion. In college, I decided that was a pretty bad idea.

I got my driver’s license and a 1986 Ford Taurus with 100,000+ miles on it the day I turned 16 years old, which was in the middle of the summer. You don’t have a lot of forethought when you’re 16, so when fall and the first frost of the season rolled around, I hadn’t purchased an ice scraper (an essential item for a Midwest resident). My childhood home had no garage to protect from the elements, either. I needed to get to school, which started at the ungodly hour of 7:20 a.m., and I didn’t have time for the defroster to do its work. So I looked around and came up with the perfect solution. I grabbed a rock and started dragging it across the windshield. It didn’t do as thorough of a job as a standard ice scraper, but it cleared a good spot. Midway through my rock scraping, my mom - from whom I inherited my flakiness - came out onto the porch and said, “Do you need an ice scraper?” I held up my stone and said, “No, I’ve got a rock.” To which she replied, “OK, have a good day at school,” and went back inside. I did not realize what I had done until I drove home that day, and the hundreds of scratches on the windshield caught the afternoon sun. Needless to say, my dad was pissed. Rock-as-ice-scraper turned out to be a very bad idea.

Taking three No Doze pills at once when I had no tolerance for caffeine also was one of my more impressive bad ideas. Driving home from college once, I’d fallen asleep. I woke up on the rumble strips, and it was terrifying. I knew I could never let that happen again. I had one last final exam to take before leaving for Christmas break my sophomore year. I needed a D on the final to get an A in the class, but because I’m a chronic over-achiever, I pulled an all-nighter anyway. The test was at 7 a.m. By 9 a.m., I was ready for the three-hour drive home. I stopped for gas and went into the station and bought a box of No Doze. Let me preface this by saying I gave up caffeine at age 14 on the advice of my dance teacher. I didn’t and still don’t drink pop or coffee. Once or twice a year, I’ll have an iced tea. So I had absolutely no caffeine tolerance at all. The pills were packaged in pairs, so I assumed you were supposed to take two at once. I did. About an hour into the drive, I didn’t think they were kicking in, so I took another. Then, something started happening deep inside me, and I had to make an emergency stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. My bowels proceeded to explode, like the dress store scene in the “Bridesmaids” movie. At least I made it to a toilet. On the way out, I bought a pack of gum for 50 cents because I figured I owed the proprietors something for how I had just defiled their facility. It was a struggle to make it home before the same thing happened again. And again. And again. I lost six pounds in one day. I had multiple panic attacks. When the caffeine finally wore off, I slept for 15 hours. When I awoke the next afternoon, I passed out in the shower, my heart started palpitating and I went to the emergency room. I was diagnosed with severe dehydration and felt much better after I was pumped full of fluids. Even Jessie Spano would realize what a stupid idea the No Doze OD was. It turned out each pill had the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee, and I’d slammed three in an hour.

But none of those ideas can compare to my latest one in terms of sheer idiocy and utter awfulness. So what is this bad idea to trump all bad ideas? 

TAKING A TODDLER ON VACATION.

(And in case you were wondering, I did not gestate my baby in a dog. He was conceived, carried and birthed the standard way. Although throughout the process, I did occasionally pine for a St. Bernard surrogate.)

I spoke at and attended a conference in Orlando the week before last. It was four days, and I didn’t want to be away from my son for that long. Also, I thought it would be nice to vacation a little while there. So while booking everything back in the spring, I decided to tack three more days onto the trip and to take my husband and kiddo. My parents also came along for the first four days to help out with child care and have a little vacation, themselves. They wanted to drive for some reason and left two days before us.

My first indication that I had made a very big mistake was on the flight to Florida. It involved being confined in a small space for about three hours. You know what 18-month-olds find absolutely unacceptable? Being confined. Even though we didn’t have to, we bought him his own seat so he could move around. But it wasn’t enough. He did great on the ascent and descent, but in the middle of the flight, he just lost it. He wanted to run and climb, and there was turbulence, so he couldn’t. God bless the people behind us who did puppet shows with stuffed animals for him. And the people in front of us who, when we were getting off the plane, blatantly lied by telling us we did a great job and they could barely hear him. With all the frustration, we then left a very expensive board book from the library on the plane. 

We got to the hotel, and everyone was exhausted. My husband and I rented a suite so the baby could sleep in one room while we were up and about in another (he goes to bed at 7:30 p.m., and we didn’t want to tip-toe around in the dark for two or three hours). My parents had a different room. The hotel provided a pack-and-play, which we stocked with his favorite blankets and stuffed animals from home. We also brought his little projector that puts a picture of stars, moons, cows and sheep on the ceiling. We read him the same books we read before bed at home. Basically everything to make it as familiar as possible. Which means that he stood up in the pack-and-play screaming for two hours and refusing to go to sleep. That was especially great since I had to speak to 150 people from around the world the next morning. The next night he only screamed for one hour before falling asleep. Then about 15 minutes the next night. Things seemed to be getting better. 

Until he got sick. He barely ate one day, then woke up crying the next. It was the last day of the conference, and I was supposed to be at an 8 a.m. session. But he was inconsolable. He would stop crying for a few minutes only when I snuggled him in my lap and read to him. I couldn’t leave. He drank bucketfuls. He was so upset that I freaked out and had a full-on panic attack. I called our pediatrician at home and asked what to do. As I explained the symptoms to the nurse, she stopped me and said, “Wait. Mom, are you OK?” She even asked if I had someone there with me to help. Like she could tell from 2,000 miles away that I was not fit to care for a child at that point. After I calmed a little, she recommended we find a clinic there to make sure he didn’t have an ear infection or something. 

We did find a wonderful pediatrician’s office that took our insurance and could get us in at 2:15 that day. Which was right in the middle of my son’s very sacred nap time. So he was in a super great mood when I woke him up and made him sit in the car for the half-hour drive. (Praise Jesus we rented a car.) Apparently, his ears were so full of wax the doctor couldn’t see in them. I was afraid they were going to call DFS right there. I sputtered, “Our doctor told us not to stick Q-tips in there because he could jerk his head and we could hurt him.” The hot, young doctor guy with a thick southern accent assured me that was true, and that there was no need to clean out a baby’s ears unless you needed to see his eardrum, which unfortunately, he did. The response my son had to having wax scraped out of his ears was about the same as if he had to have a limb amputated without anesthesia. “Bloody murder” cannot even begin to describe the screams. The doctor ultimately determined it was just a cold with a pretty sore throat. He advised us to give the baby some ibuprofen and come back if he took a turn for the worse. I suspect it might have been RSV. This is a really severe cold that I didn’t even know about before having a baby. Anyway, I missed the entire last day of the conference dealing with baby illness and my own anxiety disorder. 

But with painkillers flowing through my kiddo’s little system, things started getting better. Copious amounts of snot soon followed, but he didn’t mind that in the least. He was content to just rub his nose with his hand and spread it all over his face, forming a crusty mask of boogers. He was feeling so good that we decided to go to Downtown Disney, which is an all-Disney retail area. (No way was I paying to take him to the real Disney when he can’t ride anything and won’t remember it). We came upon a Ghirardelli chocolate store that had some amazing ice cream sundaes on the menu. They were also huge. My husband and I got one covered in chocolate-chip cookies and shared it with our son. We figured it would feel good on his throat, and he hadn’t eaten much since getting sick, so we’d offer him something he couldn’t refuse. He ate it with amazing vigor. It might be the most I’ve ever seen him eat in one sitting. We were all stuffed after eating it and decided that was going to be dinner for the day. We went back to the hotel, put him to bed, and everyone was fat and happy. Until 11 p.m. My husband and I were asleep when we heard the baby start giggling. Then he started babbling, then whining. We tried putting him back to bed. Over. And over. And over. Because apparently sugar is to toddlers what caffeine is to grown-ups. Once he didn’t take a nap after eating a cupcake and ice cream at a birthday party, but that was in the middle of the day, so I didn’t care as much. Finally, at 3:30 a.m., I put on a bra and made a desperate escape to a CVS in my pajamas. I purchased children’s Benadryl. The clerk saw my disheveled state and what I was purchasing and said, “Rough night, huh?” I am not proud of drugging our child. But our pediatrician had told us in the past that we could give Benadryl to help with congestion, so I knew the safe dose. And he was congested. Mercifully, it worked, and he finally fell asleep about 4 a.m. He slept until about 9:30 the next morning. We then went to Sea World, and he slept through most of it in his stroller. I’m glad his admission was free. 

The last couple days of the trip weren’t that bad. And he actually slept for about half the flight home (no Benadryl, I swear - the flight just happened to be during his regular nap time) and was happy for the other half. It was however, probably the worst “vacation” of my life. And my most impressively bad idea to date.

My husband holding our son, who mercifully slept a good portion of the flight home. He looks deceptively darling and innocent here. I was jealous his dad got the sweet, sleepy snuggles, though. 

TV reporters

When I was a journalism major in college, the media in which students specialized was pretty segregated. I was a print (newspaper) journalist. We had some classes with those from other media, like radio, TV, magazine and yearbook, and they seemed like nice folks. (With the internet, there’s a much bigger push for integration between the media now.) But everyone knew that working for the award-winning student newspaper was the hardest gig there was. 

I usually put in 40-hour weeks while maintaining a full load of classes. I started as a reporter when I was a freshman and worked my way up to editor in chief as a senior. Our newspaper won two national awards that year, and to toot my own horn, I also won 2004 Missouri College Journalist of the Year (beating out several uppity Mizzou folks). I nearly killed myself along the way. My colleagues and I worked so hard to get scoops, expose wrongdoings and tell the stories of seemingly ordinary people who had done extraordinary things. In short, my work at the college newspaper taught me more about the career of journalism than any professor or textbook every could, and it secured me a job two months before I even graduated. But there was one thing for which it did not prepare me: television reporters.

Let me say that I know some first-rate TV reporters. They are bulldogs for truth and have high journalistic standards and integrity. Sadly, they are the minority.

My first introduction to the incompetence of most TV reporters came during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I interned at a newspaper in one of the larger suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. There were three other reporters there, and the awesome editor gave me just as much responsibility as they had. About a month into the internship, I was covering a board of aldermen meeting in a smaller, neighboring town. It had drawn in TV reporters because of the oddity of what was going to be discussed that night: the town’s police chief had almost died because he overdosed on crack that he stole from their police department’s evidence room. I felt honored that the editor chose me to cover it. Seated on one of the metal folding chairs in the gymnasium of the high school, I furiously was taking notes. I wanted to get everything right. Then I felt something on my shoulder. I looked up, and the TV reporter sitting next to me was copying my notes - writing down the juiciest quotes that I had captured. What I’d felt on my shoulder was his face. I wished I’d had a desk where I could covetously wrap my arm around my notes, like you do to prevent cheaters from stealing your answers on tests in elementary school. All I could think was, “Dude, you’re copying the notes of a 20-year-old intern. What does this say about your skills?” He just hadn’t been paying attention. This was before smart phones, so he wasn’t distracted by that. I don’t know what the deal was. I turned to the side so that mostly my back was facing him. I wanted him to realize the 20-year-old intern caught him cheating. A few years after that, I learned he got fired for getting too many DUIs. So maybe he was just drunk during the meeting.

When I started my real-world newspaper reporter gig at a daily newspaper, I encountered TV reporters often. I would see them report things about the same stories I’d covered that I knew were wrong. If I had made those mistakes, a correction would have had to be run in the next day’s edition. The general rule was three corrections = fired. And what happened to the TV reporters who got the facts wrong? Not a damn thing. They didn’t even acknowledge the mistake. On more than one occasion, I also saw my story on a TV station’s web site, verbatim. My managing editor would call the stations and ask them what the deal was, and they would take the story down or give us attribution. But as far as I know, nothing happened to the reporters who claimed to have written them. In print, just one instance of plagiarism is a fireable offense. You see how different the standards between TV and print journalism are, here?

Now that I’m in PR, I often serve as the liaison between media and the law enforcement agency for which I work. We get calls from TV reporters all day, everyday, especially if something big is going down. About a third of the time, they’re just calling to say, “Is anything going on?” Because unlike newspaper reporters, who dig up their own stories, most of the TV folk just want an easy story handed to them on a silver platter. And crime stories are generally easy. 

Another third of the time, they call to ask, “Can you confirm …?” This means, “I saw the story another reporter wrote, and I’d like to steal it, but my boss is making me call you to make sure that the story I want to steal is accurate.” 

Other common calls include:

* The 4 p.m. request for statistics that either do not exist or would require a week’s worth of labor to compile. E.g. “Can I get numbers on how many domestic violence victims were eating soup at the time of their assault?”

* Asking a question that someone else at their station already has asked, but they haven’t bothered to communicate with each other.

* Trying to get a local perspective on an inapplicable national story. E.g. “This one town in another state allows public nudity. What would police do if that happened here?”

From a PR perspective, TV reporters’ lack of enterprise reporting skills makes it easy to feed them positive stories about our organization. But some of them just don’t want any part of that. One guy called last month and asked if anything was going on. We told him about something good our officers had done. He said, and I absolutely am not making this up, “No, I was hoping more for a school bus crash or double shooting. Do you have any of those?”

Let me reiterate that there are some extremely talented TV reporters out there. I know and respect them, and their work has changed lives, exposed corruption, prompted government action and the like. But they are rare flowers. 

Also, this post also only discusses local television reporters. National network reporters are a whole other post. 

Meanwhile, enjoy some of these awesome local news bloopers.

Current first-world problems, Vol. 1

This probably will be a recurring series. Because I frequently get annoyed by stuff that people in places ravaged by ebola and famine likely think is stupid. So here are my current first-world annoyances:

Not being able to see the Royals

For the first time in 29 years, the Kansas City Royals baseball team is in the post season. They are thisclose to competing in the World Series. They haven’t even made it into the playoffs since I was 3 years old. The postseason games have been thrilling, and I haven’t seen a single one of them. Like someone who really is from a third-world country, I’ve had to listen to them on AM radio. Because Major League Baseball hates the poor and only broadcasts their games on cable. OK, I’m not poor, but I don’t have cable as a lifestyle choice. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that will make just make me fat. Because I imagine if I had cable, I would just sit on the couch a lot eating Cheez-Its and watching shows about picking the perfect wedding dress and hoarding. (I do pay $8 a month to watch reruns of such shows on Netflix, which I honestly hardly ever do.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to watch my hometown, underdog Royals make history. I can watch the Chiefs play every game because apparently the NFL isn’t classist and elitist. They broadcast their games for all to see. The MLB might as well hang a “Po’ folk not wanted” sign on the stadium door.

Putting babies on the phone

I don’t want to talk to a baby or toddler on the phone. Not even my own. He doesn’t get it. Someone is holding this electronic device to his face, and all he thinks is, “I want to throw that on the floor to see what sound it makes.” So they could care less, and I’m left there on the other end of the line - often at work - saying nonsense to him in high-pitched voices in an effort to get him not to throw the phone on the floor. Which I really shouldn’t worry about because it would serve the person right who gave their phone to a baby.

Cheap toilet paper

I was telling my pal Emily the other day that I feel like my husband and I are finally successful enough to buy really good toilet paper. For years, I lived the impoverished life of a college student and then single, underpaid newspaper reporter. I bought the cheapest, store brand, two-ply I could find. (Even at my poorest, one-ply was not an option. It’s basically air with a few fibers and no absorptive capabilities.) 

So in the last year or so, after five-plus years of marriage, we decided our income could support buying smaller versions of soft paper towels for our bums. Because it’s so thick and scrumptious, you don’t have to use nearly as many squares as you do of the cheap stuff, so I think we’re actually saving money. 

But the wonderfulness of our home toilet paper makes the stuff I encounter at work all the more infuriating. It’s lower quality than the stuff I bought at Aldi’s in my early 20s. It falls apart, rolls up into little chunks and gets stuck in your special bits. When you flush it, little pieces of it break off and float back up, and you have to flush it again. It’s a travesty. And a waste of water. But I’m not going to leave flecks of my used toilet paper in there for the next person.

Then Emily told me that at our local zoo, they’ve put up signs in their bathrooms requesting you only use two squares of toilet paper. Two squares of one-ply. That’s like saying, “Please only use this plastic grocery sack when jumping out of an airplane.” No. Just no. You need a parachute for that, and if it’s one-ply, you’re going to need like 50 squares. You can’t even pick a boogie with two squares of one-ply.

Hidden frozen dinner directions

So when I microwave a frozen dinner - ironically, usually for lunch at work - the only thing I want to see is the directions for how long I should cook it. And yet that is consistently the most obscure thing on the packaging. I don’t want to read about your home-style recipes and delicious ingredients. I know it’s mostly just factory-produced sodium. Nobody’s grandma was involved. So I don’t want to read a story about her. I just want to see how many minutes to nuke it. And whether I need to pull back the plastic or stir midway through (which is a huge pain, by the way. I buy these things to cook and eat quickly. I want to put it in the microwave in the lunch room, go to the bathroom or answer an email, and then come back when it’s all done. But noooo, on some of them, you have to babysit them and stir it midway through, like an animal.). 

I just want the directions in big, bold type on the back of the box, in the middle, so I don’t give myself mouth burns or salmonella by cooking it incorrectly. Also, when I get older and need reading glasses to see stuff close up, that seems like even more of a danger.

You hear me, Amy’s and Stouffers?

My ideal (and therefore imaginary) political party

Around election time, I always lament that there is no political party for me. I often end up picking the lesser of the two evils. 

Right now there is a guy from my neighborhood who is running for state representative. I’ve met him a couple of times. Once at a neighborhood picnic. And then again when he was going door to door last month right after my son pulled out a drawer too fast. It hit him in the face, and he was a hot mess. In other words, the worst time for a politician to stop by asking for you to vote for him. With the baby (I’m reluctant to call him a toddler, although I think he technically is, since he’s toddling and all) screaming in the background, my husband told the candidate our son had an accident, this wasn’t a good time, and we kind of shut the door in his face. A few days later, we got a card from him saying how sorry he was to have come by at such an inconvenient moment, and how he hoped our son was OK. I was like, “Bam, you have my vote, sir.” That kind of consideration is rarely heard of these days, especially from wannabe politicians. He’d also sent us something about how much he was going to work to make public schools better. But later that week, we got a mailer from his campaign all about how much he loves guns. You know, those killing machines that make America and its ridiculous violent crime rates the laughingstock of the rest of the civilized world. So he seems like a super nice guy who wants to increase school funding, and I’d really like to vote for a nice guy, but I don’t want to vote for someone who is going to move to make guns as available as candy.

And there is my dilemma. I feel really strongly about things on both sides of the aisle. 

Why can’t there be a party that loves unborn babies AND hates guns? 

It seems like both of those stances are pro-life. Anyway, I’ve already said what I think about guns. But here’s what I think about unborn babies. After having one in me (who later came out of me, but at that point he was a newborn, not unborn), I can’t be anything but pro-life. I had significant bleeding when I was 11 weeks pregnant. It was terrifying. I got sent for an ultrasound, and I was sure they were going to tell me I’d lost the baby. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. But I got to see this thing inside me, and it was a complete person. At just 11 weeks. Before my pants even got snug. He had every finger and every toe. I could see individual vertebrae. Earlier, at eight weeks, I’d heard his heart beat. He already was a person, and “getting rid” of him seemed so unconscionable. But a lot of the argument could be avoided altogether with better contraceptive accessibility and education.

That cares for the poor AND supports a flat tax rate? 

Our tax code is redonkulous. There are tens of thousands of people whose career is just to interpret it and to help us commonfolk make sure the government gets enough of our money every year. And then there are the ridiculously low capital gains taxes and other handy loopholes for the rich to become richer. Also, there’s the whole issue of people who hardly pay any taxes at all because of their low income getting tax returns that are like $10,000. I pay probably ten times the taxes they do, and I get just enough back to make an extra mortgage payment. So let’s just make it fair across the board. Everyone pays a certain percentage of their income, and it’s the same. For rich people, poor people, small businesses, big businesses. And businesses HAVE to be a part of it. Even if they’re headquartered in another country. If they do business here, they have to pay taxes here. Which pretty much means no politician will ever champion this because then where would their campaign donations come from?

But we still need to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. Children born into poverty. The elderly on fixed incomes. Those with debilitating illnesses. And yeah, down-on-their-luck immigrants. I am so very OK with my tax money helping all those types of people out. I don’t know how you can’t be, but those politicians who purport to be Christians are the ones who speak most loudly against it. They conveniently forget that part of the Bible where Jesus says to care for the widows, orphans and aliens. They’d rather focus on all that stuff he said about gay people. Wait a minute…

That champions individual responsibility AND the environment? 

However, I’ve seen the system not just abused, but beaten senseless. People complaining at the pharmacy that they have a 4-cent copay on their medication that Medicaid didn’t quite cover. Complaining about four cents! I heard this happen! I had to pay $200 for a crazy antibiotic to kill my strep face a few years ago, and it ended up giving me panic attacks. But I just sucked it up and swiped my debit card. There’s a whole unit of the police department I work for that investigates disability fraud, and they have found some doozy fakers. And also, good people I know who have been on public assistance have told me that the system creates dependency. If they get even a part-time job, they lose their food stamps. So work or keep getting free food? The choice seems obvious. And do you know what food stamps can buy? Like, anything. Bathtubs full of soda. Bushels of candy. The cut-off isn’t whether it’s junky - it’s whether it’s hot. Seriously. So you can’t buy a rotisserie chicken with food stamps, but you can buy a cart full of Oreos and Doritos. I just want something that makes sense. Something that helps people who need it but encourages them to become self-supporting.

So can I get that along with a party that cares about the environment? That believes global warming is a thing and that some regulations on stuff like manufacturing and energy production are OK so that there’s still an Antarctica for my grandchildren (and for the freaking adorable penguins)? That realizes what we’ve done to food through GMOs and factory farming not only is bad for our earth but bad for us (and maybe is why everyone’s gotten so fat and allergic to everything recently [but they need to leave Cheez-Its alone. Also, I eat McDonald’s chicken McNuggets once a year, don’t judge.])? 

Also, I’m for universal health care, strong public schools - including universities, taking excellent care of our society’s most vulnerable (including animals), solid infrastructure, revising the FMLA and just enough defense to keep us safe.

I think adding all those things together makes me a flaming moderate. Maybe a little socialist. I think the point is that I don’t fall into any political category, and it makes me so frustrated. I don’t have the time, passion or thick enough skin to run for office myself, so like a true patriot, I’ll just whine about it on a blog.

What does and does not deserve your paranoia

Picture of really worried guy I found on the internet.

There are a lot of things to worry about in the world today, but some of them you shouldn’t lose sleep over. I’m here to help you sort out what is and is not worthy of your paranoia:

WHAT YOU SHOULD NOT BE PARANOID ABOUT:

Someone breaking into your house

Gun nuts are by far the most paranoid people out there. You ask them why they need one, and they inevitably will say it’s because they need to protect their family and themselves in case someone breaks into their home. You know whose homes do get broken into a lot? Drug dealers. If the last 7.75 years I’ve spent working at a big police department have taught me anything, it’s that people who aren’t involved in criminal activity are rarely victims of violent crime. I think it’s safe to say 99 percent of home robberies in my city (a robbery connotes that someone is confronted when the crime takes place) happen at homes in which the occupants are up to shady and illegal business. The other 1 percent is not worth possessing a gun over. Those are usually people’s houses who got mistaken for drug dealer’s houses. Also, it’s statistically far more likely that if a struggle ensues with a suspect, the victim will be disarmed and have their gun used against them. So stop freaking out over your “castle” being breached, and just lock your doors and windows. Also, don’t sell narcotics. If you do, then you do have justified paranoia about your house getting broken into.

Stranger danger

Your local news stations love this stuff. They know it makes terrified parents everywhere tune in and boost their ratings, especially during sweeps months (I’ll have to do a whole post on those in the future). It usually goes something like, “A single-digit-aged boy/girl says a man in a white van pulled up to his/her bus stop and tried to get him/her to get into his car.” And four out of five times, the kid just made it up. I don’t know why - attention, a disconnect with reality, having watched too much local news, who knows. Once or twice a year, this legitimately happens somewhere in the United States, and a child really does get kidnapped and something horrible happens to them. It’s all over Nancy Grace and the 24-hour news networks. But it only gets that much news coverage because it’s so rare and unusual. The news doesn’t care about stuff that happens every day. CNN isn’t having some southern-accented talking head babbling for half an hour about possible motives in a car break-in (see below). Because thousands of those happen every day. A good rule of thumb is that the more news coverage a particular type of incident gets, the more rare it is.

Big brother

I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that I don’t care if someone is spying on me because I’m law-abiding and my life is boring. Maybe I’m naive, but again, I think this is mainly a concern of drug dealers. Oh, and terrorists. And people who look at porn at work. Also, don’t ever take naked pictures. Ever. They always end up on the internet. Also, guys, women pretty much never want to see that.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE PARANOID ABOUT:

Super bacteria

Now this - this is scary stuff. With our lackadaisical attitude toward antibiotics and antibacterial everything, we’re creating bugs that are mutating to the point that they’re resistant to everything we can throw at them. A few years ago, I had something called erysipelas multiple times over a two-year period. I referred to it as “strep face” because it was a strep infection on the skin of my face, similar to cellulitis. Why did it keep coming back? Because it was resistant. I had to see an infectious disease specialist and try three different antibiotics, including one that made my pee and tears turn neon red. Anyway, one of these horrid things superbugs, C. diff, can only be cured by fecal transplant - yup, getting someone else’s poop transferred into you. (Thank you to my nurse friend Nicole for telling me about this amazing medical breakthrough. There are poo donors and everything. Is there a national registry for that? I’m on the National Bone Marrow Donor registry, and I think it would be much less painless to be a poop donor. I’m always terrified the marrow donor people are going to call, but I think I’d be kind of eager to get the poop donor notification.)

“Anti-vaxxers”

I recently read an article in The Atlantic titled, “Wealthy L.A. schools’ vaccination rates are as low as South Sudan’s.” Because one of the greatest medical advancements in the history of humanity and all the science and success behind it just wasn’t as important to those kids’ parents as what former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy thinks about why her son has autism. Not shockingly, these communities are seeing a surge of whooping cough, measles and the like. I was terrified before my son was old enough to be fully immunized because I was afraid he might be exposed to one of these idiot’s children and succumb to something that hasn’t really been seen since my mom was a kid. These people are bringing down the “herd immunity” function of vaccines and re-introducing terrible diseases. I think their children should have to wear neon shirts every day proclaiming they are not immunized so all the other kids can avoid them.

Someone breaking into your car

Oddly, it’s the crime stuff people worry about the least that they’re most likely to be a victim of (and no, I couldn’t think of a way to end this sentence without a preposition so it would still flow correctly). Please, for all that is holy, be paranoid about people breaking into your car. The police I work with have preached to the point of exhaustion that you need to lock it up and not leave any items of value in plain view. But still, the vast, vast, majority of crime in my city happens because people don’t do that. Endless police resources are expended on this entirely preventable crime. Don’t leave your phone, GPS, bag, purse, briefcase, nice sunglasses or anything like that in your car. I’ve even seen several cars broken into for loose change in a cup-holder. Here’s the thing: most of the people who do this are drug addicts. They will take whatever they can that has value and pawn it or sell it to get money for their next fix. Even if your car is locked, a junky won’t think twice about busting your window to steal your smartphone. So just don’t leave it in there. Not even for a little bit. Sometimes, however, I leave my Bible in my car in it’s kind of bag-like cover. I almost hope someone will steal it, see what it is, feel horrible deep down in their soul, and forever change their ways.