CBR News Friday: Vampires & Virgins

I just posted two stories for CBR News a little while ago, both part of the site’s coverage of Comic-Con International in relentlessly beautiful San Diego.

More to come throughout the weekend.

Motley Sue is 20 today

That’s right, Motley Sue (and I swear, my mother named her) is embarking on her greatest adventure of them all: her twenties. In “dog years” math, that makes her 140. My vet back in North Hollywood says it actually makes her closer to 96 in human years. Either way, it makes her old.

Motley came into the family the August before my junior year of high school, when we were fresh off the airplane after moving back from Brussels. Since then, she’s moved with some iteration of the Yarbrough family almost a dozen times, including moving to Egypt with me. (She’s been with me more or less non-stop for the past 13 years.) She’s gone walkabout, as all cats seem to feel the need to at some point, living off the land for a month in Jefferson National Forest. She has led, even by human standards, a pretty full life, without even factoring in the whole sleeping-12-or-more-hours-a-day thing.

Apparently, the average lifespan for an outdoor cat is eight years old. The apparent average lifespan for an indoor cat is 12 years old. Motley has not just had nine lives, she’s seemingly on life 18.

At her advanced age, she spends most of the day sleeping (which, of course, differentiates her from all other adult cats not at all). She’s got very short range vision due to cataracts, and has bad hearing in one or both ears, meaning she’s not always aware of where we’re calling from when we call her. (“Are they on the ceiling? Worth looking up there to see.”) And, well, she has bathroom accidents. She also has progressive kidney disease, the big killer of cats who survive everything else. But, frankly, I should be so lucky to have twice as many things wrong with me when I’m 96.

If Motley makes it to 21, I’m taking her on a bar crawl.

Your Harry Potter Order Is on Schedule

This is a welcome e-mail:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We’re happy to let you know that we’ve begun preparing your order for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for delivery.

You should have the book(s) in your hands no later than 7:00 p.m. in your time zone on Saturday, July 16. Most books will be delivered by U.S. Mail, either with your regular mail delivery or in a separate, special mail delivery. Some orders may be delivered by UPS.

Because our carriers are delivering hundreds of thousands of books on that day, we do ask that you wait until 7:00 p.m. before contacting customer service if you haven’t received your order.

Although we’re not requiring a signature, we still recommend that someone be home to accept the package, as the driver may not leave it on your doorstep if they don’t feel it’s safe to do so.

You’ll receive our usual shipment confirmation e-mail after your package leaves our fulfillment center.

Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com, and happy reading!

Normally, I’d be spending the weekend on this, but it’s a busy, busy one for me.

Friday night and Saturday day, I’m manning the Daily Press/Hesperia Star booth at the Hesperia Community Expo run by the Hesperia Chamber of Commerce in cooperation with the city and school district.

And all weekend long, I’ll be editing and posting stories from Comic-Con International in San Diego by correspondents for Comic Book Resources.

But, with Dumbledore as my witness, I will still make a dent in that book.

Anonymous sources, continued

Nothing said on this site should be taken as representing the views of Freedom Communications or the Daily Press family of newspapers.

In a weird way, I’m starting to think the case of Judith Miller might actually be good for journalism.

For some years now, I’ve been depressed at the trend towards more and more timid reporting, on all levels. If there weren’t the off-chance my grandmother or very techie publisher were going to wander by and see this, I’d likely use stronger language to describe what I think of a lot of the reporting over the past decade or so.

The Judith Miller case is causing the industry, which was always given to the sort of endless introspection and navel-gazing normally only found in freshman philosophy majors, to suddenly realize they still have their cojones. (Sorry, Grandmother.) It’s partially a proprietary sense of outrage — “How dare they come after one of US?” as though Judith was the type to call up random small-town newspapers and take the newsroom out for beers and a round-robin on current events — but it’s also because of what she’s in jail for.

She did not, in fact, write anything about Valerie Plame. She was told something (quite important) about Valerie Plame. This is something that won’t necessarily seem as important to non-journalists as it actually is: Every day, we get told a LOT of things off the record. In a single one hour interview this afternoon, I was probably told seven or eight things off the record. And, contrary to what some TV shows or movies might lead one to believe, “off the record” does not mean “you won’t report on this.” It means “you won’t report on this using my name and my information.” Reporters can, and do, take off the record info and pursue other sources for the same information — it’s a whole lot easier breaking something loose when you know what you’re looking for. In other words, off the record information is, essentially, the most everyday version of anonymous sources.

In this brave new world, those seven or eight things I heard off the record could land me in jail, if someone was upset enough that I knew about them. Now, the truth is, most off the record information just isn’t that interesting or scandalous except to the person asking it not be printed in the paper. It would rarely be printed even if it had been on the record. It’s personal information about their lives or what they really think about someone but would be impolitic to say in public. But often enough, it’s something real. Since being at the Hesperia Star, I can think of one major story that would definitely fall under the shadow of the Judith Miller case insofar as how I originally obtained the information. It was a story that, if I can risk being immodest a moment, Hesperians were better off having made public, and one that powerful folks were unhappy about me writing at the time. If Judith Miller had gone to jail 12 months ago, it might never have been published.

And that’s what’s scared and upset so many journalists. After years of not doing their jobs, or phoning it in, it feels — rightly or wrongly — like the government isn’t going to let them do those jobs at all, not in the way they know they should. And suddenly, the slumbering Fourth Estate has woken up.

Better late than never.

Well, I’ll be a baby’s uncle

My sister-in-law, Kelly, gave birth at 7:06 this morning at St. Mary’s Hospital in Apple Valley, to a pink 6 pound, 10 ounce girl raisin named Kasey Kay. Mother and raisin are doing well.