Stories on the run

Well, that was cooler than I thought it would be.

Forty-thousand people lined up to run or walk through the Bloomsday course looks like way more than you’d think. At the start-finish line, Spokane’s Riverside Avenue was a sea of human bodies. This picture does it no justice.

I covered the elite women’s race for the S-R, riding in the bed of a pickup truck through the 7.46 mile (12K meter) course that winds around what is probably the hilliest part of Spokane. The top runners were mostly skinny, 90 lb. Kenyan women, which made interviewing slightly tougher.

If you subscribe to S-R.com, you can read my article here.

But the coolest thing about Bloomsday, I thought, was that as you meander down the race course, you pass at least a dozen garage bands just jamming along the side of the street. In driveways! On street corners! On those little islands in large intersections!

Anyway, for some reason I didn’t take a picture of any bands. But they were there.

And I had to take this picture on my drive back home to Pullman. It was such a nice day.

Lisa, Brian, Lonnie, Allison, Jenna, Melanie, Emily and 800 other students packed Beasley Coliseum on Saturday for the 11:30 a.m. graduation ceremony. Victor also graduated, but he did not walk.

It was a little eerie for Jacob (who visited this weekend) and me, since we were in the same place one year ago donning our own caps and gowns. And though it was hot at the top of Beasley, and though the ceremony got a bit boring, it was great seeing everyone on the big screen, finally receiving their much-deserved fake diplomas.

Saturday night, Lisa and I went to see rock-piano master Ben Folds at Beasley Coliseum. It was awesome, besides the fact he didn’t play an encore despite at least five minutes of cheering from the fans.

He played a lot of songs I didn’t know, which surprised me. I thought I knew his collection fairly extensively. But that means there are plenty more great Ben Folds songs I still must download.

LATE UPDATE: Added link

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I’m 23.

Woo!

After a delicious breakfast and an unexpected adventure to campus, I spent most of the afternoon working.

Woo.

Anyway, here’s what I finished — a video tour of the Martin Stadium renovation.

But now I’m done and have my birthday evening ahead of me. Lisa and I are going to go have a delicious (late) dinner at Swilly’s.

Woo!

I started out my news-consuming morning with this blog post on the NYT website, reading with interest what Virginia Tech is doing to move past the massacre that killed 33 students one year ago today.

Then I saw this picture …

… and it all flooded back.

One year ago today, I woke up at my last Pullman residence and checked the NYT website, like I did every morning. At that time, six students had died. Holy crap. Of course, a major news story.

When I got into the Evergreen newsroom and we flipped the TV to CNN, the death toll had risen. Throughout the day, that old TV updated us on what was easily the biggest such story since Sept. 11. Whenever we walked into the office, or simply past the TV, we couldn’t help but take a seat and solemnly watch another college campus go through hell.

We obsessively clicked refresh on the Collegiate Times‘ reserve website, after its main one overloaded from all the internet traffic. We watched our fellow student-journalists rise to the test, and we watched how much attention and respect the student newspaper received from the mass media.

At the Evergreen, Brian, Lisa and I worked together to coordinate our own coverage of the event. We had a certain responsibility, as the newspaper of a similar campus, to tell our readers what they needed to know. What happened in Blacksburg, Va.? How is WSU connected to Virginia Tech? The obligatory, “could this happen on our campus?”

Everyone in the newsroom came together — editors, writers, copy editors — to fashion our report on the incident. It was an editor-in-chief’s dream: Everyone was motivated. Everyone was helpful. Everyone was collaborative.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who helped us get through that day and put out an excellent newspaper. We really rose to the test.

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UPDATE: Lisa’s comment inspired me to mention the next day’s paper, when we printed the Cougar head logo in Virginia Tech colors — maroon and orange. That conjured up some harsh criticism from the WSU administration.

For those of you who don’t know, the Evergreen got in trouble for “violating” the university’s fair use policy on its copyrighted logo. Apparently, it cannot be altered, such as changing the colors. Lisa got the bulk of the university’s heat, for some reason, and we had quite the discussion with Al Donnelly, our general manager, about our manipulating the logo.

From left: The WSU logo, the Virginia Tech logo, the logo used on a Facebook group in support of the victims, and a version of the WSU logo we printed in the Evergreen.

The original idea was to print a version of the logo used on the then-newly created Facebook group, but at some point down the line that idea turned into printing the altered WSU logo and the Virginia Tech logo separately. The altered WSU logo is what got us in a bit of trouble — although we really didn’t care.

Lisa vehemently defended the logo we printed, whereas I was willing to bend and say that, in retrospect, we could have used the regular WSU insignia in the way we used the logos (pictured below). If we had printed the Facebook group logo, I also would have vehemently defended our manipulating the colors.

Anyway, this is all a moot point now. Just thought I’d bring it up again, for some reason. Any thoughts, now that the floodgates have started leaking?

He was here. And I was there. Elton John performed at Beasley Coliseum. And I had tickets (to the second show Sunday).

Freakin’ Elton John!

It was awesome.

He played just about every song you could hope for. “Benny and the Jets.” “Tiny Dancer.” “Crocodile Rock.” “Saturday Night’s Alright.” “Daniel.” “Your Song.” I would have loved to have heard “I Want Love,” which I really like for some reason, but I didn’t expect him to play it.

Anyway, we were up on the second level kinda behind the stage. The picture above is the view.

Another shot.