Sunday, January 03, 2021
Dad is gone
Dad died on December 26, 2020. Fitting end to a shitty year. Now I'm trying to figure out how to acutally post about it on Facebook. I want to attach the essay I did about him while posting his on-line obit.
How funny technology is.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
More Updates on Outhouse Diaries
I know that nobody reads this anymore.. but help us get more fans.. Please visit http://www.outhousediaries.com and also friend us on facebook!
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Sunday, July 04, 2010
New Blog
This is wonderful. Just starting out it appears, but hilarious so far.
http://www.outhousediaries.com
http://www.outhousediaries.com
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Minus a Mammal
I miss Donna. I miss my best friend. I'm not lonely. I'm not forlorn. I just wish she were here. Her absence makes it all for nought.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
I’ve Worked In TV And Radio, But I Bleed Ink
(Originally published in the Bristol Herald Courier on June 28, 2008)
By David Clark
Bristol Herald Courier
I didn’t choose newspapers. Newspapers chose me. Much like our first beagle, Hambone.
Neither my wife nor I had decided to get a dog. One day the beagle-soon-to-be-named-Hambone trotted up our neighbor’s driveway. He smiled at us and walked on over. A week later, after posting signs and a classified ad, he officially had adopted us. We were hooked.
Five months later, another stray beagle, Dixie, adopted us. Curiously enough, she had been dropped off in front of our sister paper, the Washington County News, in Abingdon, Va., but I digress.
I FIRST sat foot in a newspaper as a Cub Scout in Tuscaloosa, Ala. I can still remember the smell of the ink and (what I would later learn to be) fountain solution. The noise, the activity, the purpose, the pure energy running through that press room was astounding. I had no idea what I was really looking at – what I was really seeing – but I knew I never wanted to leave.
The press at the Tuscaloosa News didn’t have fur or a wet nose, but I was hooked.
I held two jobs during my high school career. I worked for an AM classic-hits/news-talk radio station and a local Apple Computer dealership, both in Anniston, Ala. The newspaper industry – especially smaller papers – adopted Macintosh computers early, so I was often sent to various papers around the region to troubleshoot or install computers.
Every paper I visited was always in some degree of glorious chaos. Especially if they were on deadline. Older men stood above waxed layout sheets with X-Acto knives (sharpened down to within a millimeter of their fingers), capable of putting Benihana chefs to shame. Cameras the size of my car were photographing whole pages with lights so bright it made my teeth hurt to look at them. Reporters were calling out verb tenses and the names of local politicians. Editors were running around behind the men with the X-Acto knives yelling about ‘Dog-legs,’ ‘Rails,’ ‘Bonkers’ and ‘Agate.’ Photographers were usually cussing about Dektol and Nikon (and anything else, really – if you know photographers).
FLOCKS OF pressmen were grabbing copies off the press (an acquired talent, believe me).
They’d yank one page out of the whole edition, drop the rest on the ground, and then climb up on the breathing monstrosity, getting what I surmised to be dangerously close to running machinery that would not have thought twice about making any one of them front-page news.
They’d adjust knobs and levers that did who-knows-what, jump down, grab another copy, and go through the whole process again.
Sales reps with arms full of ad proofs and Day-Timers would be answering five different questions from 10 different ad builders. Mailroom folks were dancing a ballet around an inserting machine with fork lifts and pallet jacks. Circulation employees were putting different color sheets of paper on top of the stacks of paper the inserting machine spit out. Carriers were loading their trucks or cars and grabbing boxes of rubber bands or (if it was raining) plastic bags.
OFF IN THE distance, someone yelled at someone else that they didn’t have color on A3 for tomorrow unless they could use spot-red. From what my young 16 years could tell, the only people who weren’t in a monumental hurry either wore a bow-tie or worked in Accounting.
I absolutely, positively had to be a part of this.
When my dad would read the Tuscaloosa News, he was usually sitting in his recliner after getting home from work. I’d be watching “3-2-1 Contact” on PBS. He’d be relaxing in his chair. My mom was usually fixing something in the kitchen. It was quiet. The only sound above Mark and Trina explaining the solar system to kids everywhere was the occasional clink from the kitchen, or my dad turning a page. Quiet.
The newspaper offices were never, ever quiet. They were decidedly noisy. Really noisy depending on how close you got to the press.
HOW ON EARTH did these people do this every day? How was something that I had always associated with quiet thought and contemplation produced from what can only be described as chaos?
In college, I was the associate news producer at a TV station. I was also on the college radio station. After college, I returned home to Anniston. Home to newspapers. Newspapers have been my home ever since.
If you ask my wife what I do, she’ll say, “He does computers for the paper.” Indeed, my profession may be the eventual undoing of the industry I love. Even as the Internet and computers in general advance to points we can’t imagine, I don’t believe that newspapers will ever completely disappear in my lifetime.
But we all know they will never be what they once were. That makes my heart hurt.
I HAVE never found a more diverse, unique and wonderfully integrated group of outstanding souls as I have known at newspapers. At each paper, I have witnessed passion for one’s work I never knew existed from almost everyone.
From newspapers with circulations of only 1,200 copies a week to more than 300,000 copies a day, each paper is completely different – and yet remarkably the same.
Every day they start from nothing. Every day they provide a common bond to their community in a way I don’t believe TV, radio or the Internet will ever be able to duplicate.
Everybody can have their picture on the Internet, but I’ll bet every one of you would buy extra copies of a paper for friends and relatives if a photograph of your child playing in a fountain made the front page. Or any page.
IT IS VERY sad to see any paper disappear. However, I feel I am so much the better for having known the joy, passion and devotion of those that help produce the so-called “daily miracles” across the country. I loved working in radio. I loved working in television. But I bleed ink.
David Clark is the regional IT/prepress manager at the Bristol Herald Courier.
By David Clark
Bristol Herald Courier
I didn’t choose newspapers. Newspapers chose me. Much like our first beagle, Hambone.
Neither my wife nor I had decided to get a dog. One day the beagle-soon-to-be-named-Hambone trotted up our neighbor’s driveway. He smiled at us and walked on over. A week later, after posting signs and a classified ad, he officially had adopted us. We were hooked.
Five months later, another stray beagle, Dixie, adopted us. Curiously enough, she had been dropped off in front of our sister paper, the Washington County News, in Abingdon, Va., but I digress.
I FIRST sat foot in a newspaper as a Cub Scout in Tuscaloosa, Ala. I can still remember the smell of the ink and (what I would later learn to be) fountain solution. The noise, the activity, the purpose, the pure energy running through that press room was astounding. I had no idea what I was really looking at – what I was really seeing – but I knew I never wanted to leave.
The press at the Tuscaloosa News didn’t have fur or a wet nose, but I was hooked.
I held two jobs during my high school career. I worked for an AM classic-hits/news-talk radio station and a local Apple Computer dealership, both in Anniston, Ala. The newspaper industry – especially smaller papers – adopted Macintosh computers early, so I was often sent to various papers around the region to troubleshoot or install computers.
Every paper I visited was always in some degree of glorious chaos. Especially if they were on deadline. Older men stood above waxed layout sheets with X-Acto knives (sharpened down to within a millimeter of their fingers), capable of putting Benihana chefs to shame. Cameras the size of my car were photographing whole pages with lights so bright it made my teeth hurt to look at them. Reporters were calling out verb tenses and the names of local politicians. Editors were running around behind the men with the X-Acto knives yelling about ‘Dog-legs,’ ‘Rails,’ ‘Bonkers’ and ‘Agate.’ Photographers were usually cussing about Dektol and Nikon (and anything else, really – if you know photographers).
FLOCKS OF pressmen were grabbing copies off the press (an acquired talent, believe me).
They’d yank one page out of the whole edition, drop the rest on the ground, and then climb up on the breathing monstrosity, getting what I surmised to be dangerously close to running machinery that would not have thought twice about making any one of them front-page news.
They’d adjust knobs and levers that did who-knows-what, jump down, grab another copy, and go through the whole process again.
Sales reps with arms full of ad proofs and Day-Timers would be answering five different questions from 10 different ad builders. Mailroom folks were dancing a ballet around an inserting machine with fork lifts and pallet jacks. Circulation employees were putting different color sheets of paper on top of the stacks of paper the inserting machine spit out. Carriers were loading their trucks or cars and grabbing boxes of rubber bands or (if it was raining) plastic bags.
OFF IN THE distance, someone yelled at someone else that they didn’t have color on A3 for tomorrow unless they could use spot-red. From what my young 16 years could tell, the only people who weren’t in a monumental hurry either wore a bow-tie or worked in Accounting.
I absolutely, positively had to be a part of this.
When my dad would read the Tuscaloosa News, he was usually sitting in his recliner after getting home from work. I’d be watching “3-2-1 Contact” on PBS. He’d be relaxing in his chair. My mom was usually fixing something in the kitchen. It was quiet. The only sound above Mark and Trina explaining the solar system to kids everywhere was the occasional clink from the kitchen, or my dad turning a page. Quiet.
The newspaper offices were never, ever quiet. They were decidedly noisy. Really noisy depending on how close you got to the press.
HOW ON EARTH did these people do this every day? How was something that I had always associated with quiet thought and contemplation produced from what can only be described as chaos?
In college, I was the associate news producer at a TV station. I was also on the college radio station. After college, I returned home to Anniston. Home to newspapers. Newspapers have been my home ever since.
If you ask my wife what I do, she’ll say, “He does computers for the paper.” Indeed, my profession may be the eventual undoing of the industry I love. Even as the Internet and computers in general advance to points we can’t imagine, I don’t believe that newspapers will ever completely disappear in my lifetime.
But we all know they will never be what they once were. That makes my heart hurt.
I HAVE never found a more diverse, unique and wonderfully integrated group of outstanding souls as I have known at newspapers. At each paper, I have witnessed passion for one’s work I never knew existed from almost everyone.
From newspapers with circulations of only 1,200 copies a week to more than 300,000 copies a day, each paper is completely different – and yet remarkably the same.
Every day they start from nothing. Every day they provide a common bond to their community in a way I don’t believe TV, radio or the Internet will ever be able to duplicate.
Everybody can have their picture on the Internet, but I’ll bet every one of you would buy extra copies of a paper for friends and relatives if a photograph of your child playing in a fountain made the front page. Or any page.
IT IS VERY sad to see any paper disappear. However, I feel I am so much the better for having known the joy, passion and devotion of those that help produce the so-called “daily miracles” across the country. I loved working in radio. I loved working in television. But I bleed ink.
David Clark is the regional IT/prepress manager at the Bristol Herald Courier.
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