Sex Offender Search Made Easy

Southeast Texas cities this year have engaged in a fevered game of sex offender one-upmanship.
Nederland, Groves and Port Arthur have approved ordinances restricting where sex offenders may live. The city of Liberty also has one, and ordinances have been in the works this summer for Lumberton and Port Neches.
The city of Beaumont has yet to become the next falling domino. The idea has gotten a luke-warm council response, with Councilwoman Nancy Beaulieu, according to Enterprise reports, questioning whether such ordinances provide a false sense of security.
The mindset behind rolling wave of sex-offender ordinances is that if a neighboring city approves the restrictions, that will push sex offenders into their own city.
The ordinances, in general, prohibit sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of where children gather. That doesn't seem like much distance, a little more than the length of three football fields. I'd feel more comfortable with a 1,000-mile restriction, but I suppose some civil rights activists might bark about that.
I guess sex offenders who pay for their crime deserve to live somewhere, and we do have some control over whether we decide to live near one.
This web site - http://www.familywatchdog.us/Default.asp - can give you a quick idea of a sex offender's residential proximity. It even includes their pictures, and some of these guys are downright creepy-looking.
There is no assurance that the offender didn't move out yesterday, but it's nice to have a general tool such as this to know where they are, who they are and what they look like.

Weather Coverage 101

Weather is probably the planet's oldest and most common discussion topic.
Everyone talks about the weather, and the meteorological Goldilocks in all of us is rarely satisfied. Either it's too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. It's rarely just right.
Like cop reporting and, to a certain degree, sporting-event coverage, there is a certain formula for weather reporting, and it goes something like this:

1.) Several graphs on what's going on, possibly told via an anecdote such as this:

Edith Johnson stepped out onto the porch of her Beaumont home and grimaced at watery scene before her.
With her yard flooded for a week, the 81-year-old has been cooped up for days in her home, waiting for the waters to recede so she can get to her car and go to the store.
"I'm tired of all this dadblammed rain," said Johnson, a retired school teacher and widow for the past 10 years. "I need to get to the store soon, because my beer supply is running low."
Johnson and other Southeast Texans for the past week have endured record-setting rain that has swamped cars at intersections, flooded hundreds of homes and, in general, made life miserable.

2.) Next we go to the statistical facts to support the anecdote. This would include rainfall amounts for the week, month and year to date, with comparative figures from the previous year as well as the average. (I'm going to just make up some numbers here, by the way.)

Since July 1, Beaumont has been splashed with 21 inches of rain, making it the wettest July in history, according to the National Weather Service. The average for July is only 15 inches, the NWS said.
However, the 38 inches of rain so far this year still is well below the average of 45 inches, according to the NWS.

3.) So what's causing all the rain?

Roy Bucknut, an NWS meteorologist based in Lake Charles, La., said a stalled low-pressure area hanging partly over the Gulf and partly over land has been steadily pumping precipitation into Southeast Texas.

4.) So what's the forecast?

Bucknut said conditions should clear up by 2 p.m. today as the tropical weather moves north, with a 30 percent chance of rain and a high in the low 90s, with southwest winds of 25 mph. Saturday's forecast calls for a 20 percent chance of rain with a low around 70 and a high of 95.

5.) Now for the parade of anecdotes capturing the effects of the past week's rain. Essentially, this is a series of details regarding how the heavy rains have affected people's lives, from those who clear debris out of ditches to people who might have lost a car or home in the flooding.

So there it is, our paint-by-numbers weather reporting.
Weather stories are a good way to break in new, inexperienced reporters. Once they learn the formula, and all the writing speed and reporting consistency it brings, they can apply that to other areas of their news coverage, from in-depth, issue-oriented pieces for the weekend to breaking news and colorful features.
Some day, they'll learn to get away with creatively breaking the formula and attain the next level of professional development, one that will put them in position of landing a job on a larger paper, if that's their goal.

Getting Well These Days A Butt Pain

Getting rid of bacterial infections such as strep throat was a lot easier when I was a kid.
Mom would take me to the pediatrician, who would prescribe an antibiotic quite mild in comparison to the strong, bug-battling medicinal monsters of today.
Recently, in addition to other assorted minor disasters in my familial life, strep throat has burned through our household, starting with my wife and then my two sons. Considering that the inexplicable Bad Karma continues and is even spreading (my dad wiped out in a church food buffet line Sunday, cutting himself to ribbons), I've been bracing for strep throat to put me in a choke hold.
Sure enough, the curious burning in my throat yesterday turned into a forest fire around 4 a.m. today, accompanied by a 101 fever and various aches.
Strangely, I felt a little better by morning, even showering and putting on my work clothes in hopes that my subsequent treatment at the clinic would result in a quick road to recovery.
Mercifully, I got a negative strep test, thereby narrowing the problem to only a sinus infection, albeit a nasty one.
Being sick in the summer is a bummer. The Southeast Texas heat and humidity contribute to the misery of illness during this time of year.
The last time I had a sinus infection, I got a painful shot and then some pills. This time, however, I had to endure TWO painful shots and then some pills.
For those who have had one of these buggers, you know how much they hurt. The syringes are the size of turkey basters, and the viscous medicine, injected through a needle the size of a railroad spike, burns when it goes in. The soreness can linger for days.
Nevertheless, those shots put the recovering process in overdrive, and I'm happy to report that I'm almost feeling normal as I write this.
However, it is alarming how it takes tougher measures to kill out infections these days. The antibiotic that worked on the strep throat of my older son, Curt, did not work when his sibling, Luke, had the infection, so we had to put him on stronger stuff.
All of this reminds me of when a nurse long ago told me why it is important to take all your medicine, particularly antibiotics, and how not taking them leads to more drug-resistant strains of bacteria.
Ironically, the stuff that cures us might ultimately kill us all in the long run, when scientists fail to come up with a solution to the biggest, baddest bacterial infections of them all.

If It Weren't For Bad Luck ...

The litany of bleeps, blunders and minor disasters continues in the Pearson home.
From strep throat to falls down stairs, from double mortgages to triple trouble, the almost comical rash of recent problems has made me ponder the source of the bad-karma tsunami and whether we should have a priest perform an exorcism on our new home.
Yesterday, my wife called at mid-morning to report that her car battery was dead, possibly because she'd left an inside light on all night. She learned of this when she tried to start the car and go to a park to meet another mom and her two kids.
No neighbors were around to give her car a jump, so I advised her to invite the other mom out to our new home and provide a jump source, sort of killing two stones with one bird, etc.
Subsequently, the car would not jump, and by this time our new neighbor, a retired guy whom I'm beginning to think is the right hand of God, due to willingness to help us with problems with the new home (and he lets me use his awesome riding lawnmower), jumped in to help.
However, he quickly determined that the battery had gone to motor-vehicle heaven.
The emergency falls in my lap, and that means buying a battery and driving all the way out to the country install it. My wife needs the car because she has to go to work, and she has to work (she does child care at our church, among other things) because we have two mortgages and gotten smacked with a lot of surprise bills in the past month, such as the ones for treating all the strepped-up throats. (I was the only one who didn't catch it. Oops, I shouldn't have written that ... AAAAHHH!!!)
I drive all the way out there and put in the new battery. The car alarm - which has been an intermittent problem in the past - then starts going off and will not shut down. This disables our ability to start the car.
It's 95 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and I'm out there in my dress shirt and tie, sweating enough to fill a small pool and cussing up a hurricane, because all of this is just more craptastic icing on the poopcake that is our lives right now.
The kids are whining and getting all up under my feet, the car alarm is blaring and I'm trying to sort through the chaos for any kind of solution.
The Right Hand of God can't figure out what to do, and I'm about ready to just set the car on fire and collect the insurance.
However, my wife needs the car to get to work, and I'm going out of town on a fishing trip tomorrow. In addition, I was scheduled to meet a Boy Scout and his father in my office at 2 p.m. so he could ask me questions about newspapering and get his journalism merit badge.
We needed this &^%$#@!! car to work.
I go inside, get the phone book and call the first car alarm place on the list. I'm not thinking this is going to work, because, as everybody knows, nothing like this ever works, particularly for us.
Of course, I get some guy with a thick accent, and I can't understand half of what he's saying, but finally he speaks slowly, and he tells me there should be some kind of button under the dashboard. I will need to hold down this button and then start the car.
And, by cracky, I found that button, and the car started right up.
So I burned $70 for the battery, a gallon of gas and my lunch hour, which I'd planned on using at the gym to burn off stress.
Nevertheless, it was a blessing that the battery died at home, and we also gained valuable knowledge on how to turn off that %$#@!! car alarm the next time it goes off and buggers up the car's ability to start.
Priceless.

The Panicked Mind Can Do Strange Things

I remember the old driver's education film in which you're put in a seat of a moving car and little circles appear around potential dangers lurking down the road, including cars approaching intersections, clueless pedestrians about the cross the street, balls bouncing out from behind cars, etc.
I suppose good drivers still mentally draw circles around possible vehicular trouble. I know I do. I'm guessing that at least one time in a motorist's life, one of those circles goes from a potential problem to an accident, too often tragic ones.
About 20 years ago, my mind had circled an old pickup truck approaching a stop sign while I was toodling down a frontage road on the way to work. The circle ran the stop sign, and a mental alarm went off.
It is in circumstances such as this when the mind seemingly goes into slow motion, engaging in a hyperspeed thought process in search of a way out.
In the example of the truck, the collision was unavoidable, but the brain somehow sorted through several options, albeit undesirable ones.
One option was to hit the truck's cab, possibly endangering the other driver. A second was to aim for the back tire, possibly minimizing his damage but compounding mine, not only to my car but possibly my body. I chose Option 3, which was hitting the soft part of the truck just in front of the rear tire.
I chose wisely.
My car took a beating, but it wasn't totaled, and I got out of the car with only a slightly sprained neck. Being a good newsman, the first thing I did was call the newspaper a couple of blocks away and have a photographer come out to take a shot of my car. I still have that photo. It hangs in my house next to the one of me and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.
Anyway, I'm writing about all this because I had a similar slow-motion experience Friday night, when a misjudged step in my new home resulted in the beginnings of that sickening here-we-go feeling we get when something starts spiraling out of control.
I was coming down the darkened staircase, and my right foot made the misstep. Suddenly, I started falling forward and lost almost all control.
My brain went quickly into the Rolodex of options.
Keep falling forward and use my hands to brace my fall? No, because I didn't know what was in front of me, and I could break my hands, wrists or possibly my neck.
Grab something on the side? No, there's not much to grab on this staircase.
Subsequently, like an ice skater - a big, uncoordinated one who skates pigeon-toed - I used my left leg to launch me through the open part of the staircase. I did a half axle and landed on the wooden floor below. Pain shot up my right foot, and I crumpled to the floor.
Serious point reduction for that one.
I got up and tested the foot, comfirming that something had gone askew in there.
I limped off to bed, hoping that it would be better by morning.
It wasn't, so I drove myself to the clinic Saturday morning. The doctor said that luckily, I had not broken any bones, but I did have a serious heel bruise coupled with some hyperextension.
Today, the pain is still there, but it is dull and getting better by the hour.
So like with the car crash, my brain chose wisely.
Next time, maybe I'll make better use of my brain and turn the damned light on before I descend the staircase.

http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/918/8865scdxt3.jpg

Sept. 11 Effects, Non-effects

Business Editor Dan Wallach and I recently had a debate about Sept. 11's long-term effects on life.
Planning for this year's fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, we tossed around ideas for a staff project regarding that event.
Our viewpoints could not have been more different.
Thinking about the fifth anniversary as far back as a year ago, I envisioned a project on how, other than extra airport hassles, life today isn't much different than pre-Sept. 11. Then Wallach, a New Yorker, recently proposed doing the opposite, a project about how drastically different life is today.
I cited my examples, and he cited his.
Unable to reach a middle ground, I decided to take it to our online readers.
On June 30, I posted the poll asking: This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. How much has Sept. 11 and the ensuing nationwide changes affected your life?
The poll ran June 30-July 7 and garnered more than 300 responses.
The choices were:

• Drastically
• Somewhat
• A little at first, but life is almost back to normal
• Not much at all

I was certain that the third choice would be the most popular. I was wrong, sort of, and Wallach was right, kind of.

http://sitemanager.zwire.com/site/PollAnswer.cfm?brd=2287&pag=460&poll_id=23453

The responses were almost evenly split, with Wallach's choice - "Somewhat" - getting the most votes at 32.4 percent. "Not much at all" came in second, with 23.5 percent. My response - "A little at first ... " - gathered 22.5 percent, while "Drastically" gathered the lowest number of votes, at 21.3 percent.

Considering the relatively even split in voting, Sept. 11 evidently has affected - or not affected - people in myriad ways. So that's our project: How much has life changed/not changed in Sept. 11's aftermath?

Phone, Cable, Plumbing Gripes

Why is it that when a Beaumont customer wants to cut off television cable and high-speed Internet service, he has to drive the modem all the way down to Mid-County to do so?
Seems like there should be a Beaumont office that can handle this. Judging by the customer line I saw today, it's warranted.
Also, why did the phone company say that service was scheduled to be turned on by 5 p.m. today, but when I call to find out why it's not on, I'm told that a 5 p.m. scheduled startup time essentially means that this only starts the clock ticking for service to be turned on 24 to 48 hours after that?
Furthermore, why can't they just standardize dryer plugs and outlets instead of having a crazy, confusing array of potential mismatches?
Lastly, why does the home warranty say that when getting to a plumbing problem, it will cover "access through ceilings" but then turn around and say it won't cover access through a wooden ceiling, even though the home warranty doesn't specify ceiling types?

WHY?

Truck Rental Places Have Gone Bananas

Drastic changes have come to the truck-rental industry since the last time I relied on it almost a decade ago. It seems to have grown into a desperate, paranoid business, one that frustrates users and dealers alike.
At one time, a customer could just walk into a dealership, rent a truck and go. Simple as that. Plenty of trucks for all.
Last Tuesday, thinking I was ahead of the game, I called around to get truck-rental quotes and was to surprised to find few vehicles available for our move, which took place Saturday. Furthermore, the dealerships, even if you provide a credit card number, won't guarantee that the truck still will be there by the time you arrive to fetch it.
I started with a U-Haul in Beaumont. No trucks were available, so I called the dealer in Lumberton and, using a credit card, reserved a 17-footer for $29.95 for a day and 99 cents a mile. Plus, of course, you pay for whatever gas you use. They really stick it to you when you don't drop off the truck as gassed up as when you acquired it.
I was told that there was a chance the truck would not be there when I picked it up. That seemed rather odd.
I wanted to ensure the best deal, so I called around, to places such as Penske, Enterprise, Ryder, Budget and a few mom-and-pop dealers.
Ryder charges $59.99 plus 59 cents a mile for a 16-footer on a Saturday. For the 50 or so miles I traveled Saturday, this did not beat U-Haul. Furthermore, Ryder requires the customer to pay $30 for insurance, even though my auto insurance covers rental trucks. Like with the medical industry, liability apparently has taken its toll on trucking.
Budget does not require the insurance purchase, but it charges $34.99 plus 99 cents a mile for its 15-footer. Penske, according to its web site, charges $19.95 for six hours plus 99 cents a mile for a 16-footer. However, I ultimately needed the truck for longer than that, and Penske charges $29.95 for the 24-hour period, which is what U-Haul charges.
I tried to get a handle on Penske's insurance requirements, but a local contact was so busy that he said he'd have to call back later.
Everyone else I called either rents only for commercial purposes, had no trucks available or charged an outrageous fee for insurance.
I finally just decided to stick with U-haul. On Saturday, when I picked up the truck, the lady there regaled me with hilarious tales of truck pirating, irresponsible customers and a vast array of headaches, which she gladly would shed if she didn't need the money.
Apparently, any truck left out in the open is fair game in the U-Haul shell game, Lumberton Lady told me. If some other dealership needs a truck, someone might be sent out in the night on a mission to retrieve one. Trucks will disappear in the night, resulting in angry, jilted customers in the morning.
Lumberton Lady said that if my truck had not been put behind a locked fence, it would have been long gone by morning. Even behind a locked fence, however, the trucks aren't safe, because some truck pirates carry around key-making tools so they can open locks and swipe trucks, she said.
She also told me about customers who leave their rentals in sorry shape, with a cargo area full of dirt and debris. Lumberton Lady said one customer was so lazy that he just urinated inside the truck cab instead of pull over and use a rest room.
I don't get these people. Not only is this kind of behavior barbaric and irresponsible, they ultimately have to pay an outrageous fee for the cleanup.
So I left the dealership feeling lucky to be behind the wheel of a relatively clean rental truck. As I pulled out of the parking lot, The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" was playing on the radio.