Rachel Leah Siegel, Historian of Business in Dallas

Rachel Leah Siegel, of the Washington Post

Yale graduate Rachel Leah Siegel, while working as a reporter for the Washington Post, is also engaged in a gargantuan project that might take a lifetime to complete. She is chronicling in detail the history of business in Dallas, Texas.

A scion of the Lone Star State, Ms. Siegel grew up amidst the mesquite and oil derricks as a quiet and observant child. She looked on in wonder at the way businessmen ran things throughout the state, and was puzzled by the lack of women and non-Caucasian business leaders. As a teenager she vowed to dig deep into the red scrabble soil of Dallas to find out what made commerce tick in her neck of the woods. 

And so by day a mild mannered business reporter for the Washington Post; but by night a sleuthing juggernaut that rolls over all obfuscation and resistance as she rattles the skeletons in the Neiman Marcus closet, or inventories lenker rods at Elliot's Hardware. 

Her magnum opus, tentatively entitled "The Decline and Fall of Dallas Business", is now up to three hundred pages -- and has reached the year 1814, when one Athanase de Mezieres, a French soldier of fortune in the pay of the King of Spain, set up a flea market on the Trinity River. But since all he could attract were earwigs he soon retooled his business plan and opened a grit store. Settlers, stragglers, native Americans, and Mexican soldiers all needed plenty of grit to survive the broiling summers and soggy windy winters around Dallas, and so Mezieres' store prospered -- until it was overrun by the Caddo, who emptied all the grit into the river and forced Mezieres to construct a water slide for their children. The soldier-of-fortune-turned-entrepreneur died soon after of a broken heart.

Ms. Siegel likes to let off steam by occasionally dancing barefoot on a wooden floor sprinkled with Grape Nuts. She is also noted for her charity work with indentured denture wearers and parking meter addicts. Her favorite color is yesterday. 

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Reporter Ben Mullin Believes that Art is the Test of the Artisan

Benjamin Mullin, of the Wall Street Journal

An artisan with words since his early youth, California State University at Chico graduate Benjamin Mullin has mined a rich and varied vocabulary for the Wall Street Journal and for Poynter since he was knee high to a katydid. 

Family chronicles indicate that his first spoken word as an infant was "Boo-bah." And speculation has been rife ever since as to what exactly he meant by that. Was he trying to pronounce 'pooh-bah'? Or was he making a financial reference, as in 'moo-lah'? There are those who insist his infant lips were trying to frame 'Mee-Maw' to gain his grandmother's attention. But all such speculation was cut short recently when Mr. Mullin revealed to Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation" that "Boo-bah" was his hyphenated critique of the British television show Teletubbies. This revelation devastated the CBBC to such an extent that the British network changed it's format completely and now shows only static views of wallpaper. (Their ratings, by the way, have skyrocketed, and it's rumored on Fleet Street that Rupert Murdoch is about to buy the network lock, stock and barrel.)

Mr. Mullin likes to dress up as a fenugreek plant during the Holidays to visit lazarettos along the Mediterranean coast and pass out mochi cakes. He calls his character 'Mr. Gumwater', and is in great demand with Interpol.

An avid sportsman, Mr. Mullin has won numerous Korfball trophies in the Netherlands. He also likes to indulge in yukigassen during the winter months. 

His native tongue is pickled. His preferred form of communication is wangling. And he never strikes in the same place twice. 

Ben Mullin messaged me back on Twitter about his new profile, thus:

1. Omg

    
2. 

   This is great! Thanks, Timothy :)

    
3. 

   Happy Black Friday!

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Bob Davis: The Wall Street Journal's Financial Crisis Expert

Bob Davis, of the Wall Street Journal

The planning and execution of a financial crisis takes a great deal of organization and money. You don't pull down an entire economic system overnight just by whistling for it. Bob Davis, of the Wall Street Journal, knows all about the care and feeding of an economic crisis, and has been covering them for the past twenty years with both relish and empathy.

Mr. Davis explains the origin of his singular feel for economic disaster:  "My family has a history of dedication to bad investments and poor planning. It was a Davis who convinced the Ford Motor Company to invest so heavily in the Edsel; and a distant branch of the family back in Germany was granted a royal patent by Kaiser Wilhelm for a process that untwisted pretzels. It made them both paupers and pariahs overnight."

 Wishing to honor the Davis family heritage Bob has often taken his own salary down to the racetrack for double parlays, and advanced seed money for cold fusion projects and parking lots in Antarctica. Unfortunately, a surprising number of his hunches have paid off handsomely -- leaving him to deal with an ever-growing embarrassment of riches.  

Still, Mr. Davis does not allow his own financial security to cloud his judgment when it comes to reporting on the monetary peccadilloes of the Russians or Chinese. When a stock market melts down anywhere in the world, you can be sure that Bob Davis will be there to chronicle who's to blame and who actually pays the price -- usually two completely different sets of people. He roams the tawdry Beltway bogs and plunges into the stews of Georgetown to discover new species of flim flam. 

At his hobby farm in rural Delaware Bob breeds soft shelled tacos which he then sells to herpetologists. He has the largest stand of giant bonsai in the Mid Atlantic region, and distills a heady liqueur from prickly pear leaves. 

He has authored seventeen books, several of which are used as doorstops at the Library of Congress. 

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Scott Calvert and Urban Decay

Scott Calvert, of the Wall Street Journal

Scott Calvert grew up in a family of dentists. His uncle was a dentist. His maternal grandmother was the first oral hygienist west of the Dolomites. And he had so many dentist cousins that they had their own in-house Tooth Fairy. So it's only natural that Scott would grow up concerned about decay -- but not tooth decay. In his case he became intrigued with urban decay -- the metropolitan caries that beleaguer so many Mid-Atlantic landscapes today.

At the Wall Street Journal whenever there is talk of the Blight of Baltimore or Senescence of Schenectady the editors cry out: "Get Scott Calvert on the story, post haste!"  And he obligingly heads to the city in question to root out the latest municipal scandal or chronicle another crime-riddled neighborhood.

His stories resonate with a fin de siecle nostalgia for the departed glory of great cities now gone to wrack and ruin. Hard boiled and cynical, he yet can give utterance to a yearning for simpler times and gentler people. But no one sees this softer side of Calvert when he is on the trail of a corrupt city poobah or exposing an adulterated fluoride scheme down at the water works. At such times he is a literary Javert, remorselessly running down the facts and figures of another sad example of urban rot and then writing it up with diamond-sharp prose.

His hobbies include vestibule watching, collecting antique wing nuts, and cultivating salmagundi in marble ramekins. 

He has been awarded the Order of Saint Stephan of Hungary, the Heisman Trophy, and the Key to the City of Zanesville, Ohio. And he recently won a Wendell Wilkie Look-Alike contest. 

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Don't Eat the Romaine Lettuce

The warning came just as millions of Americans were preparing for the biggest food holiday of the year. People should not buy or eat romaine lettuce; restaurants should stop serving it; anyone who has it on hand should throw it out and clean the refrigerator immediately.

The stern and sweeping advisory, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, caught many people off guard. But the agency said it was acting out of an abundance of caution after 32 people in 11 states fell sick with a virulent form of E. coli, a bacteria blamed for a number of food-borne outbreaks in recent years.  NYT

Don't eat the romaine lettuce; just throw it out instead.

If you insist on serving it your guests may wind up dead.

E. coli is the culprit; it gets into the leaves.

And if it does not kill you, you can still come down with heaves.

Of course, if Uncle Charlie must smoke his foul cigar;

and maybe Cousin Shirley treats your house like some cheap bar --

If that's the case then serve it, in salads and rolades.

And you can watch them writhing in agonized charades.

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WSJ Reporter Tweets Wish to be Fired and Handed Huge Cash Settlement

David Pierce, still unfortunately with the Wall Street Journal

On Tuesday November 20th the personal tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal tweeted this portentous message:

"Someday I hope to get fired from MY job and handed $30 million on the way out." @pierce  

David Pierce, a journalistic wunderkind, had touched a raw nerve among Millennials all over the world, and his apparently whimsical tweet went viral in a matter of hours, spawning the hashtag #Pierceisabsolutelyright 

Today thousands of disgruntled Millennial reporters and tech workers from Silicon Valley to the Rift Valley are working feverishly at making Pierce's dream of a premature and wealthy retirement come true for them.

They show up late, spill coffee on their keyboards, have taken up vaping in the bathrooms, wear novelty neckties that read "Up Yours With Hiawatha's Canoe" and otherwise are working hard at being a disruptive, unproductive and demoralizing influence at their company. Of course, nobody has really thought through just how they will manage to be awarded an obscene cash settlement on their way out -- but Millennials are not very detail-oriented. "Something that MIGHT happen WILL happen" seems to be their motto. 

When polled by TIME/LIFE about this sudden upsurge in Millennial discontent and revolt, a group of 100 office managers all replied, in essence, "They're no different today than they were last week. What's the big deal?"

Pierce himself, unfortunately, has been unable to get fired from his job at the Wall Street Journal and then awarded a sumptuous amount of cash. But he assures his adoring public that he is trying his best to be his worst. 

Rupert Murdoch, putative owner of the Wall Street Journal, is quoted in the London Times as saying "That young pup Pierce? Not bloody likely we'll be letting him go anytime soon; and if we do the only thing he'll get on his way out the door is a set of Pentel Graph mechanical pencils!" 

In his spare time, when he's not plotting to be ejected, Pierce enjoys collecting wooden nutmegs, and refurbishing elevator cables. He drives a vintage 1933 Stutz Bearcat and is grooming an army of thrips to take over the world. 

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Timericks. Tuesday. November 20. 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump defied his intelligence agencies and ample circumstantial evidence to declare his unswerving loyalty to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, asserting that the crown prince’s culpability for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi might never be known.   NYT

Since Trump doesn't like to place blame

except when he's losing the game,

he'll back the crown prince

with barely a wince,

no matter the alibi lame.

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Canned pumpkin filling tastes better, Ms. Parks says. But it has a dark secret. It is made from a sweet gourd with yellowy orange skin known as the Dickinson pumpkin. Ms. Parks and others argue that the Dickinson is no pumpkin, however. They call it a squash.   WSJ

My pumpkin pie is made of squash?

That is a felony, by gosh!

When you can't trust a pumpkin can

it's time to quit and move to Cannes.

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No matter what you call it — overtourism, overbooked or a foreign invasion — it’s the same squeeze: A handful of destinations around the world are under siege by too many tourists. The stampede is having a deleterious effect on the culture, environment and spirit of these places. Locals are getting pushed out. Foundations are crumbling. Tourists are complaining about other tourists.   WaPo.

A tourist who went to Paree

was treated like a detainee;

so Venice he tried,

but "scio!" they cried  --

he drowned himself in the Dead Sea.

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"In my day we called it codswallop."

Mayor Michelle Kaufusi's Search for the Lost Danite Mine

Michelle Kaufusi, Mayor of Provo, Utah

Michelle Kaufusi comes from sturdy pioneer stock. Her forebears crossed the plains on Parcheesi boards during the dead of winter, determined to find a new home where they could work, worship, and juggle chainsaws in complete freedom.

As a child, Kaufusi displayed natural ability as a leader. Instead of just playing with dolls, she lined them up and harangued them on the importance of self confidence and encouraged them to study the hard sciences at their doll schools. She herself became a dab hand at Recombinant Memetics by the tenth grade, and spearheaded a NASA program that sent mint-frosted brownies into space to see what effect weightlessness had on their calorie count.

A successful entrepreneur, Mayor Kaufusi opened the first organic plectrum shop in Provo, which she later sold for an obscene amount of money to the Mirisch Company.

Running for Mayor of Provo in 2017, her platform included a promise to bring more wealth to Provo through prudent, sound financial management. Consequently, as soon as the polls confirmed her as the first woman Mayor of Provo, she set off into the mountains around Provo looking for the Lost Danite Mine. 

This rich deposit of silver ore was supposedly discovered by one Jacob Jacobson back in 1867 while he was lost in the mountains during a blizzard. Seeking any shelter he could find, Jacobson allegedly stumbled into a cave full of gold nuggets the size of savoy cabbages. After the blizzard passed, he packed his mule with a dozen or so nuggets, which he brought to the assayer's office in Provo, where a gang of rowdy Danites seized him for spitting on the sidewalk and trussed him up. He pleaded with the Danites to let him down and he would reveal the whereabouts of his fabulous gold mine, but before they could unloose him he was carried off by a fit of the fantods. To this day, no one really knows if there really is a mine full of giant gold nuggets, or where it might be.

But Mayor Kaufusi is confident she can find it. She intends to turn over the entire contents of the mine (minus a modest finder's fee) to the city of Provo for a new water filtration plant, the eradication of Chinese chestnut trees, and to build dozens of fountains throughout the city that squirt lime jello all year long. Since taking office she has led dozens of expeditions up into the mountains, providing everyone with picks and shovels -- and she has usually returned with just as many people as she went out with. Not always, of course; but you can't make omelettes without losing a few eggs along the way. 

She plans on publishing her autobiography this coming spring, tentatively entitled "The Hand Lotion's Tale." 

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Elizabeth Dwoskin and the Elusive Algorithm

Elizabeth Dwoskin, of the Washington Post

A graduate of the Colombia Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Dwoskin went to work for the Washington Post several years ago specifically to hunt down the elusive Algorithm. 

Up until she began her determined quest, the fabled Algorithm was merely an urban legend, a bogeyman to scare children away from their smartphones. But now, thanks to her remorseless research, we know that the Algorithm is out there -- and plotting against us.

Ms. Dwoskin has tracked down the facts needed to convict the cagey Algorithm of several crimes against humanity. Such as its role in the rising tide of robocalls that inundate our cell phones to such an extent that -- excuse me, my phone is ringing: Yes, hello? What? Send ten thousand dollars by Western Union or I'll go to jail? Is this a real person? Thought so. Dammit.

Now, where was I?  Oh yes. Crimes against humanity, such as pushing so much fake news on social media that it makes Trump look like Honest Abe. And unleashing Twitter bots to inflate the number of followers on certain flim flam accounts into the hundreds of thousands. Yo mama, Katy Perry. 

Thanks to Ms. Dwoskin, it looks like the Algorithm's days are numbered. Soon as it can be tracked down and brought to justice at the Hague (assuming it doesn't seek asylum at the Embassy of Ecuador) the world will undoubtedly breathe a collective sigh of relief. And Ms. Dwoskin will add a Nobel Peace Price to her already substantial collection of awards, citations, and rainbow scrunchies. 

When Ms. Dwoskin is not saving the world from algorithms and AI, she likes to whittle cream cheese into chess pieces, and mend broken Tinker Toy sets for orphans in Lincoln, Nebraska. 

She likes to bring homemade Norwegian krumkake into the newsroom every Tuesday and Thursday to share with her colleagues. 

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The latest polls are all a sham

The latest polls are all a sham;

statistically, who gives a damn?

I'm sick of numbers thrown about

as if they somehow conquer doubt.

Statistics don't prove anything;

they're simply scientific bling.

Interpreting their connotation

is confusing our poor nation.

If you want to prove your point

and not put my nose out of joint

just say that Trump is all agin it,

and I am for it in a minute!