I had no idea Roseville was so famous...

So the other night I'm flipping through channels when I came upon this History Channel rerun. And right at the perfect time, too, when the program--which details famous incidents when toxic or explosive cargo went awry--was showing footage of pretty much the biggest thing ever to happen in Roseville: on the morning of April 28, 1973, a train carrying U.S. military bombs exploded in the Roseville switchyards. Eighteen boxcars blew apart. The blasts rained debris on houses up to two miles away and, according to the Roseville Historical Society, "destroyed" the nearby town of Antelope.

Somehow, apparently, no one died, though 48 were injured.

Wanting to know more (the program dealt with Roseville for about three minutes), I went online and found this really cool photo of the blast and this really scary AP story saying rail officials were still finding unexploded bombs from the incident as late as 1998.

Still hungry for more information (I sometimes patronize this bar, which overlooks the switchyards), I visited the Carnegie Museum, which houses the Roseville Historical Society. And I wasn't disappointed: inside I found a big, highly detailed N Gauge scale model of the switchyards at the time of the blasts, complete with a column of gray cotton smoke pouring from the pile of boxcar rubble. Near the model were the remains of the one of the exploded artillery shells.

The museum, like Roseville, is pretty small and quaint, so I walked around a bit. In addition to tons of toy trains, the museum also displays many, many models of World War II aircraft (your guess is as good as mine as to why--Roseville played no discernible role in aviation during the war, and there were no displays explaining why the museum housed so many model warplanes), a bunch of small, upright pianos, a whole display case full of old, moldy medicines that would have been sold at the Roseville Drug Store during the 1950s, shelves crammed with old video cameras and a silver model of the Starship Enterprise.

So yeah. Roseville has an explosive past. Cool.

Court is in session

Spent part of an otherwise lovely afternoon today watching arraignments over at Placer County Superior Court's Department 13, located in the less than lovely Auburn Jail in Auburn, California. I was there to see if I could get an update on this kid, but as is typical in these types of criminal matters, all I ended up scrawling in my notebook was a new court date that's more than a month away.

Getting that new court date took about three minutes--a tenth of the time I'd just spent watching more than a dozen of Placer County's most recently accused listen to the charges against them and answer Judge J. Richard Couzens' questions about whether they wanted him to appoint a Public Defender to handle their cases. The men were all clad in the same orange jumpsuits; the two women wearing dark red.

A few asked polite questions, but most were quiet as the judge mentioned drug abuse, assault, petty theft and drunken and disorderly conduct charges. One man said "thank you" a lot, even after the judge said he'd be alerting Contra Costa County as to his whereabouts, since that county's justice system already had a warrant for him on another matter entirely. One woman, her shoulder-length hair now mostly gray, sat there silently with her eyes closed as Judge Couzens repeatedly asked her questions. Eventually he put her down as "non responsive" and postponed her arraignment.

It was while watching all this that a wave of depression washed over me. The few days beard growth, unkempt hair, fatigued faces and orange jumpsuits were all powerful images. Every last person getting arraigned looked guilty--guilty as all hell, even though I knew and respected the fact that they were all presumed innocent. Then I found myself imagining what it would be like to sit there with them, royally fucked, adding their names to a long list of clients already represented by the desperately overworked Public Defender's office.

Once I was done, I hurried outside into the bright afternoon sunshine. For a moment I had the urge to run around and call every friend I had, just because I could. But then I remembered that I had no story update, so I'd now have to find something else to write about, and that feeling of giddy freedom evaporated again.

My dilemma

Blogging when you're a journalist can really mess with your mind. Case in point is what I should or should not do with this Sacramento Bee article, covering events at yesterday's Sacramento County Board of Supervisors hearing, which I watched online from the comforts of my home.

As the story notes, a great many residents packed the Board chambers, watching how the supes would react to Sacramento Sheriff John McGinness' draconian proposal to balance his budget by sacking 200 deputies. Many of those who spoke out against the cuts were current or former Sheriff's deputies. What's more, a lot of the testimony (including that of McGinness himself) was vivid and colorful and, at times, emotionally charged to the point of hysteria.

In other words, I got some great quotes--the vast majority of which, for whatever reason, did not appear in the Bee's story.

So what do I do with them? Give them up for free here, to my tiny but loyal blogging audience, or horde them like little nuggets of gold I found in a stream, waiting for a much larger story to come around that I can sell to a paper for actual money?

If I had a gigantic blogging audience, I don't suppose this would be much of a dilemma, but I don't. Then again, how do I build up such an audience unless I put real meat on my blog?

Apologies for such a long absence...

... But blogging is an altogether different thing entirely when you get back into being a working journalist. Or semi-working. Whatever, the point is I'm on assignment again for a newspaper, and it feels really good–like having a cast cut off from your arm, freeing it for the first time in months.

It's funny how writing and reporting for money really saps the desire to blog, which, at least as far as I interpret it, is doing journalism without pay. What was it the Joker said in The Dark Knight? Something like, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."

Anyway, I'm headed off to court right now to cover a case I'm working into a story for Sacramento News & Review. That story should be done next week and, if all goes well, published the following week. I will, of course, provide the appropriate links when completed...

An American documentary

Had a curious experience watching television the other day. I was sitting there on the couch with a friend, switching through the channels without any real interest when we stopped on an HBO documentary called Hard Times for an American Girl: The Great Depression, though we didn't know that was the title at the time. 

The program was a thoughtful and quirky look at how the harsh economic conditions of the 1930s and 1940s affected people's lives. Basically, the program followed children around as they interviewed (sometimes in endearingly scripted ways) senior citizens (at least one was more than 100 years old) about their experiences as children during the Depression. The program was alternately funny and heart-breaking, and we were riveted.

But then we started noticing the dolls. Some of the girls doing the interviews or talking later about what they heard were holding dolls. One girl held a doll wearing exactly the same dress she had on.

"That's an American Girl doll," my friend said. "Each doll is tailored exactly to the girl. They're quite pricey."

It was only at the end of the program, when we finally saw the complete name of the documentary, that the whole thing made sense. Turns out the whole thing was just an advertisement for the American Doll company. In fact, according to this February 21, 2007 Time Warner press release, American Girl and HBO are making all sorts of stuff together.

"HBO and American Girl, one of the nation's top direct marketers, children's publishers and experiential retailers, have entered into an overall relationship to develop a variety of multi-platform ventures including theatrical films, series, specials, and documentaries," the release stated. Further on in the release, HBO Films President Colin Callender offers this gem of corporate stooge-speak: "This is an unprecedented opportunity to align the forces of both the HBO and the American Girl brands in a groundbreaking collaboration that will enable us to take advantage of the rapidly expanding, multi-platform, multi-faceted promotional opportunities spanning all areas of distribution."

Experiential retailer? Overall relationship? Multi-platform ventures? Multi-faceted promotional opportunities?

Yeah, I'd guess I'd spout euphemistic nonsense like that if I was turning 16 years of unimaginable hardship and misery into advertisements for expensive dolls.

More thoughts on Roseville

Having lived here now two weeks, and having seen a lot more of the burb since this recent blog post (which was constructively criticized by a longtime resident), I can definitely say my thoughts on Roseville, California have moderated. I still think the whole place is a model of the auto-centric, gasoline-addicted urban sprawl that's plastering over so much of American territory and is going to be absolutely unsustainable once the era of cheap oil ends, but it definitely offers more public space than I first noticed.

The Roseville Library is a large, roundish building swathed in recycled railroad ties. It's located downtown and it's quiet, comfortable and packed with books. Trains are a recurrent theme in Roseville, (the train station in Old Town is, though relatively new, a clear and welcome throwback to the 19th century) and the town sports one of the largest rail switch yards in the entire state. Anyway, next door to the library is Royer Park, a wonderful mix of meadows and woods that borders a beautiful stream (though you'd never guess that by looking at this, the city's official webpage for the park).

But that's all downtown. Closer to home, in the maze of cookie-cutter four- and five-bedroom houses that all seem to include three-car garages, there are public options far in excess of the tiny parks I alluded to in my last post. While out walking the other night, I discovered a clean and well-maintained bike trail I had never even noticed from my car that, once again, follows a wooded stream (I also saw two horses and one garter snake, which tells me the place isn't as completely developed as I originally thought).

There are ecologically sound reasons for living in an urban area these days, but Roseville does offer a few environmental advantages that city living lacks. I just had to look harder for them.

Awesome!

Congress is trying to make it legal once again to carry a loaded gun into national parks! Isn't that fantastic? And by gun, I of course mean pistol, revolver, automatic, hunting rifle, shotgun, whatever. You know, there just aren't enough places in this great nation of ours that allow a person to carry a loaded weapon. 

And yes, as this Sacramento Bee article on the move points out, the Democrats are still in charge of Congress.

USA! USA!