I'm Giving Away Five Dollars this Morning

HEY!  I'm giving away five dollars this morning on a live video broadcast on my Facebook page. All you have to do is call in and answer the riddle "What did Jack say to the Beanstalk?" 

The first person to give the correct answer will have five dollars mailed to them, no strings attached. 

I have posted the answer to this riddle on my Twitter account. What's my twitter account? Sorry, you'll have to look that up yourself.

What's my cell phone number? Sorry, I won't reveal that except on my live video on my Facebook page in two hours (9 a.m. Mountain Time.) So you'll have to find me on Facebook if you want a chance at that five bucks.

Hope to hear from you in 2 hours!  

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Well, this is humiliating. I stayed on for 13 minutes and nobody, not one single solitary soul, called me for the five dollars.  My social media sucks . . . 

Postcards

Hi -- thank you for your message. Please note I am out of the office until Dec. 3 and will respond to your email upon return.

I wish all 'out of office' notes

were eaten by a herd of goats,

and those that put 'em up were fried

in Crisco and then quick tie-dyed.

If you're not in and won't reply

please do not my slim patience try

with idiotic automation

that sends me such cold notation.

I gonna go back to postcards

when sending someone my regards;

at least they'll get it, wait and see,

sometime in this here century.

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Reporter Jennifer Maloney Likes Trains

Jennifer Maloney, of the Wall Street Journal

Jennifer Maloney likes trains. No, that's not strong enough. Jennifer Maloney loves trains -- she dotes on them. And why not? It was a train that saved her life and set her on the journalist's exciting and remunerative path.

On a hike across Lake Winnemucca during the dry season in Nevada as a teenager, Maloney was set upon by a herd of feral merino sheep. Just as they closed in on her, their fangs dripping with lanolin, she spotted train tracks, with a locomotive pulling train cars headed her way. As the rabid sheep made for her jugular vein, she leaped into an empty boxcar and was thus saved from a sheepish death. Exhausted with terror, she immediately fell into a deep slumber.

When the train pulled into Primm, a kindly conductor found her still asleep in the boxcar. Rather than turn her in as a vagrant, he took her to his home and fed her beetroot souffle to build up her strength before sending her back home. His parting words to her as he put her on the train back East were:  "Never trust anything you don't read in the local newspaper." 

Ms. Maloney never forgot that sage piece of advice. In a few years she was a star reporter for Newsday, and then came to the Wall Street Journal to report on book publishing, cultural institutions, and trains. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Xhosa and Michif. 

Today she limits her writing to stories about the liquor and tobacco industries (she lost a bar bet.)

She enjoys touring gypsum mines and eating at restaurants that still use flypaper. She is working on a history of cow catchers, which is already out of print.  

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Laura Stevens and German Banking

Laura Stevens, of the Wall Street Journal

Ms. Stevens is fond of telling her coworkers at the Wall Street Journal that: "The only difference between a German banker and an armadillo is armadillos have better manners." 

When the Wall Street Journal sent her to Germany to cover the banking industry there, she initially thought it would be a tedious and unfulfilling assignment. After all, how exciting or controversial can a German bank be? They're full of money and have honest burghers guarding it carefully and prudently. It'll be about as exciting as a Buddenbrooks sequel. Nothing more.

She soon learned how wrong her initial reaction was! Her very first week in Dortmund found her chasing down the details of an old banking family that had siphoned off funds to start a cuckoo clock factory in Zhangdao, China, using recycled water bottles and cheap willow bark to produce knockoffs of Hermle and Junghans models for the Russian black market. Her investigation ruffled Teutonic feathers far and wide; she became the target of an online smear campaign that charged her, falsely, with putting ketchup on her sauerbraten. When that didn't deflect her reporting rampage, a contract was put out on her by the Schwarze Gauner -- and her life became worth less than a plugged pfennig. 

Ms. Stevens had no intention of backing down -- she loves a good challenge, whether it be with German mobsters or on a Norwegian slalom -- but her editors back in America had no use for her as a corpse riddled with bullets and feeding the fish in the Baltic, so they recalled her to report on the fracking industry.

Unfortunately the trans-Atlantic communication to her was garbled, and she thought she was being reassigned to report on the Swiss comedy team of Frick and Frack. She canvassed dozens of skating rinks in Chur and Zug for background on the skating duo, and returned to New York with a fascinating article on their exploits during the Second World War, when they smuggled hundreds of chinchillas out of Romania into Liechtenstein. 

Today Ms. Stevens makes her home in San Francisco, where she entertains guests at her condo under the Golden Gate Bridge by exhibiting her collection of Victorian beanbags. She also likes to cruise the Bay in her ketch, christened "Mambo Sauce to Go", which she built by hand entirely out of s'mores. 

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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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