A Whole New Newsroom

Part of the fun of Beaumont Enterprise building restoration following Hurricane Rita has been wandering up to the third-floor newsroom every so often to view the repair progress.
Rita trashed the newsroom, thanks to a blown-off roof covering that allowed rainwater to drip through insulation and create bloodlike pools of foul-smelling liquid, which ruined floors and Sheetrock, among other things. Soggy ceiling tiles fell. Air conditioner equipment fell through.
Renovations have been under way for weeks now. Sheetrock has been replaced. Floors have been stripped. The ceiling has fresh tiles. It looks kind of bleached and hygienic up there, almost like a bland hospital.
I don't know how much there is left to do or how long it will take, but I look forward to getting back into newsroom. And other Enterprise employees who've worked around us will be glad to see us go. We can be rather loud and unsettling sometimes.
Minutes ago, I returned from my usual progress-seeking mission to the third floor, and I'm excited to report that the newsroom will be nothing like its former self. Editor Tim Kelly got the idea to whack out some walls, such as those housing the library and antiquated darkrooms, and create more free space. In fact, the entire photo department's walls are gone, with the exception of Assistant Managing Editor Pete Churton's office, which looks like an island now.
I'm not sure what all is planned for all that newfound newsroom space, but it sure is going to look a lot bigger and better. Gone will be the hideous wallpaper in our offices. Gone will be useless storage closests and darkrooms. Gone will be outdated equipment, unused books and heaping piles of old newspapers that needed to be discarded years, maybe even decades, ago.
Like a lot of things around here in Rita's aftermath, it'll be better off in the long run.
But there will be a slight sense of loss and longing for the old, kind of like how a parent feels when a child starts using the toilet instead of a diaper or bathtub for a poop deposit box.

Ack! You Knocked My Block Off!

Video games these days, particularly the fighting ones, have reached a point where players almost need additional appendages to reach a modest skill level.
The noble joystick has been replaced with a staggering array of buttons for kicking, punching, jumping, running, spinning, etc. Video games have sure come a long way since Pong.
I wonder if kids today even play board games, such as Monopoly, Life, Clue and Candyland, the kinds of games I played like crazy on steamy Houston summer afternoons.
We didn't have sword-swinging ninjas, like they do in today's video games, but we did have Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, a loud, hilarious game in which two plastic palookas smash each other in the face until one of their heads springs. It is not complicated. It's just two hand-controlled plastic pugilists popping each other's noggins until a head goes BOING!
Here's a photo, courtesy of http://www.theplaymakers.com/welcome/archives/000050.html

The game emerged in 1967, accompanied by television commercials in which a kid hollers "Knock his block off!" The red robot is known as the Red Rocker, while the blue guy is known as Blue Bomber.
Like the Big Wheel, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots was one of those popular things that most kids had but I didn't for some reason. I suppose my folks would have given me one, but I never bothered to ask. Considering that every other neighborhood kid had it, I didn't need it.
Since then, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots have come to symbolize all manner of large things pitted against one another, such as two corporate giants going at it, two heavyweight lawyers mixing it up in the courtroom, competing blockbuster television shows or just two fat guys getting into a bar fight. Here is a reference to George W. Bush vs. John Kerry: http://www.blogula-rasa.com/archives/000826.php The phrase has become so commonplace that many people - including my wife - didn't even know that the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em game actually existed. I didn't know they still were produced.
The reason I bring all this up is because on Saturday, the day my son, Curt, turned 4 years old and we had a big birthday party, complete with one of those blow-up bouncy things in the back yard, he got Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots as a gift from his Uncle Kristen and Aunt Mark.
After everyone left the party to go to their respective domestic corners, I quickly assembled Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots and challenged my 4-year-old to a brawl. At first he seemed rather confused - and his mother and Aunt Becky rather horrified - by all the raucous fisticuffs coming from my Blue Bomber, but the second his Red Rocker lost his block, hilarity ensued.
And, by golly, Curt figured it out fast enough to pop Blue's block several times, laughing hysterically every time. We rocked and socked some more yesterday.
I can't imagine that the lifespan of this thing will be long, considering its construction, but that's OK, because Curt also got his first bicycle for his birthday, so it was just a matter of time before he got bored and threw in the robot towel anyway.
But for now, I look forward to going a few more rounds with Curt as well as my own childhood nostalgia.

Some Like It Too Hot

A dangerous game of nuclear one-upmanship could threaten the delicate fiber of our human existence, or at least our tender innards.
I'm not talking about building a bigger, badder atomic bomb. I'm talking about creating a more diabolical hot sauce.
Every now and then, I venture by this web site to see how high the Scoville unit bar has been set: http://www.chez-williams.com/Hot%20Sauce/hothome.htm
This site for years has chronicled the hot-sauce arms race. This week, I ventured by there and, to my alarm, learned that an evil sauce that I unwittingly and liberally doused on a cracker years ago at a foo-foo shop, subsequently setting off a China Syndrome in my mouth, had fallen out of the Top 10 and all the way to 31st.
Scoville units are used to measure heat intensity. A pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville invented the scale in 1912 to measure pepper heat, according to the above web site. A "Scoville Unit" actually measures capsaicin, which gives peppers their heat.
My aforementioned fateful sauce, Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce, carries 250,000 Scoville units. Tabasco Sauce, at 2,140 units, is milk by comparison.
And Dave's sauce is Pepto-Bismal compared to the current Scoville champion: Blair's 16 Million Reserve. The 16 million in the name refers to the sauce having 16 million Scoville units, enough to rival the blood that poured out of those scary critters in "Aliens." Based on my calculations, even a teaspoon of this stuff would render four gallons of chili inedible to everyone but the extreme sauce hounds who have killed off all the nerve endings in their mouths.
What the heck would one do with this stuff? Kill fire ants? Put out volcanoes?
Other sauces whose Scoville prowess falls into the millions have names such as Magma 4, Demon Ichor, Da Bomb Final Answer, Pyro Diablo and, my favorite, Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally ... Chet's Gone Mad.
Heck, at a measly 800,000 Scoville units, Satan's Blood doesn't even make the Top 15.
Just to provide some perspective, I'll detail my terrible encounter with Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce.
A few years ago, I was with my family, including my wife and relatives from my side of the family, in this quaint little tourist town called Salado north of Austin. We went into this place called The Strawberry Patch, which had all kinds of dips an sauces and stuff. My brother-in-law and I were tasting up a storm and got to this line of products from Dave's.
There was a sign that said: "WARNING: THESE SAUCES ARE HOT! TASTE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!"
I rolled my eyes, knowing that a bunch of little old ladies ran The Strawberry Patch, and I'd had plenty of superhot foods and sauces in my life. How hot could Strawberry Patch sauce, doled out by little old ladies, actually be?
So I start going down the line and dipping crackers, and I didn't find anything too tough to handle. But then I got to Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce and ignorantly soaked an entire cracker into it and popped it into my mouth. It was OK for about 0.03 seconds, but then it felt like the Chernobyl meltdown in my mouth. Fantastic pain ensued, and to make matters worse, I got the hiccups and turned red.
My brother-in-law laughed uncontrollably as I desperately looked around to find something to put out the fire. Then I looked over to see the evil grannies - the owners - laughing uncontrollably as well. One of them cackled: "The sign says it's hot! Didn't you read the sign? Bwhahahahahaha."
So then I spied a help-yourself soft-serve ice cream machine and proceeded to just put my mouth under it and turn on the spigot. Finally, about 15 minutes later, my mouth stopped being an inferno.
The evil grannies told me that the sauce is so hot that they have to change out the Styrofoam bowl every few hours so the stuff doesn't eat through and drip on the floor. They also sold something worse, Dave's Private Reserve, which is 50,000 Scoville units higher, but they wouldn't let you taste it or even buy it without signing a legal waiver.
A few hours later, I experienced the joy of that sauce coming out the other side. I still have nightmares about it and am literally breaking out in a sweat as I type this.
I can't even imagine Blair's 16 Million Reserve. Mercifully, the creators made only 999 bottles, and, according to http://www.sweatnspice.com/429-13.htm , a 1-ounce bottle sells for about $300.
If I really had the hankering to bring that kind of pain to my izzards and gizzards, I'd just as soon spend $10 and make myself a peanut-butter-and-Draino-and-lighted-gasoline sandwich.

New Orleans Mayor Exhibits Hilarity

OK, so God sent Hurricane Rita to Southeast Texas and southwestern Louisiana to kill, destroy and rub our collective noses in the soiled carpets of sinfulness.
That's according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the mastermind behind leaving thousands of desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees stranded in horrid living conditions for days at the Super Dome.
Nagin, in news reports published today, said God, riled up about divided black communities and the general state of America, stuck his Texas-sized pointer finger into the Atlantic Ocean and whipped up couple of monster storms, just to send us a message.
Nagin made his comments during a Martin Luther King Day commemoration. I'm sure MLK would be proud of that assessment, as well as the mayor's bizarre comment that New Orleans needs to be "chocolate again," referring to the fact that so many residents of that city fled Katrina and have yet to return.
Had I been treated to day after day of post-Katrina living in New Orleans, I might never come back, either.
When it comes to natural disasters, God gets as much blame in the aftermath as FEMA and the insurance companies. Human nature calls for someone, or something, to take the fall for catastrophic hardship.
I don't blame God or anything else for Hurricane Rita. She was just a dumb, ignorant storm, albeit a brawny one spawed at a time when the climate is ripe for such things. As has been reported numerous times in the past year, the ebbs and flows of meteorology have swung into a period of busy violence.
With not enough cold weather to cool off the Gulf of Mexico, the 2006 hurricane season could not only be as bad as 2005 but come a little earlier than usual.
Although I hope another storm is not in God's 2006 playbook for Southeast Texas, I nevertheless am prepared emotionally for another white-knuckle maelstrom of awe, fatigue, despair and character-challenging hassle.
I am not killed. I am stronger.
Maybe toughening us up is what God had in mind all along.

Sesame Street Stew

Dear PBS programmers:

I know you have better things to do than field "Sesame Street" complaints, but I just wanted to register mine in regard to moving the show from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.
I'm sure a lot of critical thinking went into the move, but that show at 7 a.m. was part of my morning routine with the kids, ages 2 and 4, who have soaked in numbers, letters and culture like little sponges. Of all the kids shows out there, "Sesame Street" is by far the smartest, most educational and most entertaining. It always has been and likely always will be.
However, I take my hyperintelligent 4-year-old, who is mildly autistic, off to his special education class at 8 a.m., so he no longer benefits from "Sesame Street," although his younger brother still does.
Neither child is interested in "Caillou" at 7 a.m., so I switch it over to The Disney Channel, where "Jo Jo's Circus" is playing. However, they've seen "Jo Jo's Circus" a million times and have only marginal interest in it, so they spend the next 30 minutes doing things like fighting or trying to stick their chubby little fingers in my cereal bowl while I'm reading my newspaper.
They like the opening to "It's A Big Big World" but then quickly go find something else to do, like fighting or trying to stick their chubby little fingers in my cereal bowl while I'm reading my newspaper. I watched a little of it the other day and, frankly, found it kind of stupid, inaccessible and uneducational. I'd rather have "The Three Stooges" on there. At least my boys would learn creative new ways to bonk each other on the head.
"Sesame Street" kept them glued to the TV for the entire hour. (And that's the only TV we let them watch, other than a short video or something right before supper.) Subsequently, my mildly autistic kid had all his letters and numbers through 20 nailed down by age 3 and is now operating close to a 6-year-old's level in school. Furthermore, the whole family did The Sesame Street Dance in the living room during the closing credits, so now I'm missing out on a formerly important part of the morning routine.
Anyway, there it is. Sorry to bug you, but if you could move "Sesame Street" back to 7 a.m., that would be peachy.

Sincerely,
Brian Pearson
Beaumont, Texas

Cheap Beer Wishes, Crawdad Dreams

An occasional fever to move just comes with the turf on Planet Homeownership.
Can we get a bigger house? Is there a better school district? Can we save tax money? Can we save on insurance? Can we get a better mortgage interest rate? Can we get some better neighbors? Can we afford this? How 'bout a faraway half bathroom I can hit before my morning run and avoid waking up kids?
You add all of this to natural human wanderlust, and it's a powerful drive, a deep-seeded instinct that whispers for us to move on. I have a good friend, Dave, who has The Fever so bad that his moves, to everywhere from China to Romania, have consumed several pages in my address book.
Right now, he's in Houston.
Just about everyone desires a higher quality of life, or maybe just something different, so from time to time, we ponder the domestic possibilities.
Ideally, I'd love to live in the mountains. My wife, Amy, on the other hand, loves the beach. The mountains are snowy and cold, while the beaches are steamy, gritty hurricane magnets. Some day, we'll find a happy medium, maybe a lake with some hills around it, but for now, being Beaumontoids will do.
We like our house and community just fine, but about once every six months we get the itch to see what else is out there. The itch arose earlier this month after a golf game on the outskirts of town.
Man, it would be nice to live next to a golf course on the outskirts of town.
Earlier this week, the wife and I took some online ganders at what's for sale in the area, and the itch turned to The Fever, just as it always does.
Man, it sure would be nice to get a bigger house, one in which my wife could scrapbook herself into a lather, the kids could have a recreation room and I could have a place for all the equipment I have to make rock music whose outbreak might rival bird flu in the horror department.
Oh, and don't forget that half bathroom!
House hunting is fun, like window shopping but with higher stakes and commitment level. The wife and I have driven all over Southeast Texas to look at houses.
Man, it would be nice to live here, there or anywhere than where we live now.
Yesterday, while snooping around the Internet, I found what appeared to be the perfect little gem, a massive, reasonably priced country home with five bedrooms and 2.5 baths "on 5 to 10 acres." A photo made the home look pretty good, too. A co-worker found the address on an Internet map and noted that "it's beautiful out there" and on a growth corridor that would ensure that the home retained or grew in value. That gave me visions of subdividing that 5 to 10 acres and making a fortune off the land sales.
And minutes later, by golly, during her own Internet search, the wife found the exact same house and sent me the link. We made plans to contact the realtor and check out the place sometime this weekend.
But I couldn't wait.
Driven by The Fever and with no lunch plans, I decided to drive out there today to see for myself. I envisioned a place perfect for raising our two young boys. They would walk down the road, side by side, with fishing poles over their shoulders. We'd sit out on that wraparound porch at night in the summer, observing fireflies, listening to croaking frogs, gazing at the stars, sipping cool drinks and patting ourselves on the backs for our spectacular fortunes.
Man, it would be nice to live in a place like that.
So I climbed into my car about noon today and drove.
And drove.
And drove.
And drove.
Apparently, the Internet map made the rural street seem much closer than it was, but I kept telling myself the long daily work drive would be a small price to pay for the Rockwell-painting lifestyle that awaited.
Finally, I arrived and hooked a right onto a narrow asphalt road that took me up to the house.
To say the least, it was certainly more than I imagined.
For starters, the photo showed a patch of dirt in front of the house. But what I thought was a patch of dead grass that easily could be replaced turned out to be the driveway.
Despite the empty house being less than five years old, it looked well-lived-in. In fact, it looked too lived-in.
Plywood covered up busted windows, and the floor was covered with a carpet that falls far out of our taste range. Looking into a bathroom window, I spied new life forms growing in a garden tub. A rickety-looking pier anchored to one side of the home jutted out into a weedy stock pond, a death trap for young children.
However, this wasn't the most interesting part.
I was alarmed to learn that seemingly half of the 5 to 10 acres of property was swamp. I'm not talking a pristine pond with some lily pads. I'm talking about a miniature Everglades, with turtles, snakes, alligators and murky, scum-covered water for the summer's perfect mosquito factory.
Someone literally had some prime swamp land to sell to someone else.
It's not that I'm some kind of snob who eschews swamp living, but this place really wasn't right for our family. It might be a dream for the right person, but now the wife and I must point The Fever in a new direction.
Ultimately, The Fever will break, and we'll develop new appreciation for our current abode, with its goofball corkscrew metal staircase to the near-useless open-air loft, a fraying carpet terminally stained through sippy-cup drops and a bedroom deficit that makes us long for larger digs.
But for now, man, I sure would love to live somewhere else.

Burnt Orange Bittersweet

A week has passed since the University of Texas Longhorns planted their flag atop the national championship hill, and the unrelenting burnt-orange fan fires continue burning.
T-shirts, sweatshirts and other UT items are flying off store shelves and being worn everywhere, to the gym, to church, to Chuck E. Cheese. The championship-starved Longhorn fans finally have their long-awaited feast, and they are making the most of it. I have a Montana friend who, in an e-mail, begged for last Thursday's copy of the Beaumont Enterprise, just so he'd have as many pieces of rah-rah UT victory stuff as possible. I obliged.
A week ago, I sat in an orange shirt next to my orange-sweatshirt-wearing wife, who got her master's degree from UT. She doesn't give a frog's fart about football at any level, but not even she could resist getting caught up in what turned out to be one of the best college football games ever, with the underdog Longhorns emerging triumphant over the USC Trojans.
I rooted for the Longhorns, too, and it wasn't easy.
Every night when I pull into my driveway after work, I park my maroon car beneath the tattered, faded, weather-beaten maroon flag that is mounted to a fence, which I'd paint maroon, too, if I could get away with it. In the winter, I walk into the house, take off my work clothes and put on my comfy maroon sweatshirt. On Saturdays, I secretly root for the Longhorns to lose a game and their shot at a national championship.
I must admit that this 1986 Texas A&M University graduate had a tough time deciding for whom to root leading up to last Wednesday's big game, but my loyalties quickly solidified at kickoff: My heart was behind the Longhorns.
This came despite years of A&M losses - some of them embarrassing - to the Longhorns. This costs me $20 and a meal. The $20 goes to my sister, a University of Texas graduate, and the meal to my wife. It is an annual standing bet, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Nevertheless, at least when it comes to a national championship of a Texas team vs. the outside, Aggies will root for their intrastate rivals.
This photo, which made the e-mail rounds last week, nicely sums up Aggie sentiment:

I'm not sure of the photo's source, but it speaks volumes about how Texans stick together.

After the tragic Bonfire collapse Nov. 18, 1999, killed 12 students and injured 27 others, the two schools united. Instead of the usual Texas Hex rally preceding the game, for example, the Longhorns joined with the Aggies for a candlelight vigil honoring the fallen. The Aggies beat the Longhorns that year but have been losing ever since.

Should tragedy befall the Longhorns, Aggies likewise would be there to help heal the wounds, despite the schools' differences, from longtime gridiron rivalry to their political philosophies, with the Aggies, in general, being polite conservative and Longhorns, in general, leaning more toward commie freako hippie pinko weirdo liberal. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

I'm proud of the Longhorns and their championship accomplishment. After years of stellar recruiting classes that managed to find a way to throw a wrench into their goal of being No. 1, they finally got it right.

I'll give them their moment, for now, but once the next season starts ...

Media Junkie Fodder

Some Beaumont Enterprise readers are as loyal and addicted to the newspaper as Texas Longhorns fans are to their newly crowned national football champion.
They scour every square inch of the day's edition. They get angry when their paper arrives late or, sometimes, not at all. They call to complain about errors, spelling, factual or otherwise.
If it weren't for these savvy subscribers, newspapers might be less on their toes about striving to put out the best edition possible every day.
We're newspaper fans, too, and have our own ways of learning from our peers and seeing how we stack up against them, from story ideas to how a particular story played that day on Page 1A. I swipe a lot of story ideas from other newspapers and retrofit them to Southeast Texas.
Today, I'll let you media junkies out there in on some of what we like to look at.
First, I offer this little professional-development gem, The Poynter Institute:
http://www.poynter.org/
This is arguably the premier U.S. training ground for journalists. They offer workshops for all things media, from television to newspapers and beyond. Based in St. Petersburg, Fla., the place is run more like a university than it is your average training center. The staff is highly trained and experienced, and the sessions are well-organized and, for the student who attends one, unforgettable. I went there for a week in late 2004 and not only learned a great deal, I made a bunch of new friends.
Anyway, Poynter also has a killer web site, which offers helpful information on everything from news within the media as well as professional development and story ideas. Most editors at the Enterprise pay a daily visit to Poynter.
Another great place to go to know more about the media is the American Press Institute - http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/ - also a leading professional training ground, located in Reston, Va. I spent an unforgettable week there as well a few years ago.
For those curious about how the Enterprise plays stories and writes headlines vs. their peers nationwide, the Newseum in Washington, D.C., offers some one-stop shopping: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/ .
Here, dozens of newspaper from around the nation - and world - are posted daily. Not only is it fun to see how the stories play elsewhere, but it's also a gas to see the clever headlines on those spicy stories that beg for some pun fun.
So there it is, and that's all I've got to say about that!

Hammers Finally Flying in Newsroom

More than three months after Hurricane Rita two-stepped across Southeast Texas, newsroom restoration finally began yesterday. Hammers are pounding, and Sheetrock is being moved around.
The rag-tag news team that endured the harsh conditions of Rita's aftermath has been scattered throughout The Enterprise offices.
Here's a breakdown of our current whereabouts:
Editor Tim Kelly works in an abandoned office in circulation on the first floor, with newsroom assistant Marie Richard at a desk just outside his door.
Meanwhile, I'm working in what has been nicknamed "Murderers' Row," just outside the office of Ruth Potts, personnel manager. Ruth is a popular woman. Employees are either in her office or knocking on her door almost the entire workday.
Other Murderers' Row members include Assistant Managing Editor Pete Churton and Associate Managing Editor Sheila Friedeck. My managing editor counterpart, Ron Franscell, used to work alongside us here, but we traded him to The Mezzanine level for a box of Christmas cookies and an editor to be named later.
Actually, after a few months of bonding with us on Murderers' Row, Franscell packed up and moved to the The Mezzanine to be closer to his staff.
Or maybe it was because he was ashamed of his lame performance in the gnat-killing contest. A couple of months ago, before the cooler weather moved in, pesky gnats plagued our work area, zipping in front of computer screens, landing on noses, getting onto our food and even drowning themselves in our coffee mugs.
That's when the gnat-killing contest began, for a six-pack of beer. Within a short time, almost 30 gnats met their fate in a deadly succession of thunderous slaps. But then the gnats grew scarce and the contest died down. Reporters had a similar contest going across the hall in their work area, formerly a grand meeting room on the first floor. They actually have it a little nicer than Murderers' Row occupants.
Meanwhile, the photo staff set up in another formerly empty room in the personnel office, while the three business writers are holed up in the Newspapers In Education office. Features and sports are on The Mezzanine next to the business office.
On the second floor, the copy desk is scattered throughout an area that production once used before the magic of pagination came along.
The news staff's biggest lone wolf is Tom Taschinger, the editorial page editor who has found refuge with the classified ladies on the second floor. He's got it pretty good, considering that the staff up there often has pot-luck lunches and whatnot. We might have to send in the National Guard to retrieve him once the newsroom is restored.
This is how it's been the past three months for the news staff, scattered and displaced but not divided, putting out the day's news under less-than-ideal circumstances. It could be six weeks before we're back in our restored newsroom.
Nevertheless, there haven't been many complaints, particularly from me, whose mighty gnat-smashing prowess has given me a comfortable lead for that coveted six-pack.