Also, there was a moment in Popeyes Chicken that I have been regretting for a while now.  It’s a long story, which I will get to momentarily.

There are no statistics to back this up, but there seem to be more homeless people in Fresno during the winter. A lot more. In my mind, that’s because it is warmer here than in most parts of the country, and homeless people migrate to the West Coast* from North Dakota or Vermont or Russia. Somewhere cold. In downtown Fresno, there are little towns of people living in tents and boxes under the overpasses and sometimes I drive around down there and gawk. It’s unbecoming, I realize, but I justify it by thinking that I am at least aware of the homeless problem, which is something. It’s not helping, but it’s something.

*This could be because there are so many train tracks downtown, but I also figure people get to Fresno riding the rails from some exotic location. Do people still ride the rails? Do they carry their belongings in a bandana tied around the end of a stick? How many more of my cultural references are stuck in black-and-white movies from the 1940s?

It just amazes me that in the year 2009, so many people could be living like that. Although I have no idea why the passing of time or the advancement of technology would have an affect on the homeless population. It is not just the homeless who are asking for help, though. At intersections, boys and girls hold signs asking for donations to pay for funerals. Some have car washes. Others just want help. A mother and son were selling candy outside a grocery store last night and I was in such a hurry to get to a house to watch the national title game that I didn’t even find out what the money was for.

I’ve seen middle age men with signs that ask for help for a single dad, and women with signs who ask for money for an out-of-work mom. I don’t know if they are really single dads or out-of-work moms. There is an urban legend, I guess you’d call it, that there are panhandlers who make a great living begging for money. I’m not sure if that comes from movies or just our worst suspicions of human nature*, but I doubt there are many people dressing up in dirty clothes, writing desperate messages on cardboard and making $70,000 a year.

*I had two extra tickets at a college football game a couple years ago, and a man came up to me and said he and his son wanted to go to the game, but couldn’t afford it. I gave him the tickets and he walked back to the street corner and started to sell them for more than face value. There was no son. I suppose we all have stories like that, where our good intentions were taken advantage of, and I was more upset about having my trust eroded than losing two football tickets under false pretense.

In situations like that I am reminded of two stories, the first told by Joe Posnanski, the Sports Illustrated writer, who was sitting by the late Buck O’Neil at a baseball game. Buck was old by this time, in his final years, with many reasons to hold at least a little bitterness. He had seen racial injustice as a young man. He had been kept out of the Big Leagues as a player. He had not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame, even though everything about his life and personality and career made him a wonderful choice. Posnanski was writing a book about O’Neil and so they were sitting at a game together when they saw a man get a foul ball and not give it to a boy nearby. Posnanski was irritated, as many of us would be, but O’Neil told him, wait, maybe that man has a son at home. Maybe his son is sick and the ball will make his day. Who thinks like that? Buck always saw the best in people, even strangers. He was a rare human being.

The second story happened several years ago. I was writing about a blind Creighton University basketball fan. He and a friend went to the games and sat together so the friend could do play-by-play and he could follow the action. Yes, he could probably have listened to the radio broadcast on headphones, but it wouldn’t have been the same. He wouldn’t have been able to feel the crowd, or hear when the players changed direction on the court. During the interviews, I found out that it had been a medical error that blinded the man as a child, that too much oxygen had been pumped into his ventilator. I forget the exact details. But I asked him if his family sued the doctors, if he’d received some sort of settlement from the hospital, and I’ll never forget his response: Why? It’s not like they meant to do it.

Of course I never think of those two stories at the time. I get angry at the con-man stealing my tickets, but I hope that at some point in my life I’m able to have even a bit of that understanding, that I’m able to see light where there only appears to be darkness.

I think about beggars a lot. I saw a man the other day in a wheelchair in Merced, Calif. It was late at night and it was raining lightly and I could see him on a narrow median in the middle of four lanes. He was in a wheelchair and missing at least one of his legs. He had a sign that I couldn’t read. How did he get there? What happened to him? Was he a nice man? Were there no other options better than sitting in the dark and the rain at a remote intersection with no street lights? But I was in a hurry with two friends and didn’t give him money, or buy him food, or see if he needed a ride.

One of my favorite writers in the world, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, writes a piece every year about something he calls The Untied Way. That is not a typo. It’s really just an idea where he encourages readers around the holidays to go to the ATM and take out an uncomfortable amount of money and then hand it out in $20 bills to people who ask for money. Will some of them use it in unsavory and foolish ways? Sure. Have I spent money in unsavory and foolish ways? Probably more than most people who beg for money. Just this week I made a $50 bluff on a busted straight draw.

Here is the 2009 Untied Way column. His point is beautiful and simple. You don’t have time to figure out who might use the money to buy booze, or which person has a hard-luck story, or who is good or bad, and who are you to be deciding who is good and bad anyway? You either have compassion or you don’t. You either help someone else or you don’t. You either give or you drive past. I’m not saying The Untied Way is what you should do, or that you’re a bad person for not giving to beggars. You can’t give to everyone. I think about that sometimes. Well, what if I gave money to everyone who asked for it? My PG&E bill was $260 last month. I’d be broke. I can’t do that. So I should just not give to anyone, to be fair. Besides, don’t our taxes pay for homeless shelters and programs? I’m not even sure if I think about that stuff, or it’s just my justification.

I think we all get that way a little sometimes. There must be a reason I’m driving this Volkswagen and that person is on the corner holding a sign, hoping a stranger will hand them a dollar out of a moving car window. They must have taken some evil path, made some bad choice that led to this. It’s more soothing than thinking of the world as a big spinning ball we could all fall off at any point. If there’s anything good about a recession, it’s that the people in need aren’t just shadowy figures we can ignore. They aren’t just people with chemical imbalances who talk to themselves. We all know people who have lost houses and jobs, people who’ve had family meetings around the kitchen table to figure out bigger issues than voting on the summer vacation.

All this to say that one day in December, I was sitting in Popeyes Chicken, listening to a couple fight. I’m assuming they were a couple, because at several points they discussed whether “this” was really going to work, and the many issues with each others’ behavior. They were sitting in a booth and both talking loudly, but awkwardly, like they were performing in some sort of street theater and wanted everyone in the audience to be able to hear. But it was only the three of us there. At one point the man, with dirty overalls and a pony tail, went to the register and asked the girl with a headset if she would change the music to blues. The jazz they were playing was obnoxious and terrible, he said.

It was so distracting that I didn’t see a woman come in, didn’t see her until she walked up to my booth and asked for a piece of my chicken. And even though it was my last chicken strip, and I was already full, and I probably shouldn’t have been eating fast food anyway (especially not finishing fast food), I said no, I wanted to eat it. I’ll say that I was caught off guard. Maybe it was the brashness that surprised me, that someone would ask to eat my food from my plate in a restaurant. I’m kind of a push-over most of the time, and I got defensive there for a second, decided I wasn’t going to let someone’s forwardness pressure me.

But now I’m thinking how hungry that woman must have been to ask that way. I’m thinking she probably had children. I’m thinking about all the times I wondered what the person asking for charity might do with the money, whether they would buy food or drugs, and here I turned away someone who asked for the very item that I had predetermined was suitable for my charity.

I’m still thinking about the woman, a month later, still thinking about our chicken encounter, still thinking I’m the one who needed help.

The blog is back after some technical difficulties and some serious slacking, and so much has happened that it could take months to fully catch up. First off, my brother got married, which is awesome. Mostly because it was him and not me. That’s not the only reason it was awesome, but the most important. So happy for him. For both of us, really.

Seriously, though, it was a big deal our family. There are just two of us, my brother Tony and I. We are both in our early 30s now and my mother was threatening to go Kramer vs. Kramer on us if someone didn’t get his life in order, stop being STUPID, stop living like COLLEGE STUDENTS, and get married as the Lord had intended five to six years ago.

Luckily, my brother lost Paper-Rock-Scissors, and so he is the one locked up in holy matrimony and I am still going to minor league baseball games on Tuesday nights at the last minute without asking a single person for permission. In all sincerity, he married a great girl from the Oklahoma panhandle and I have never seen him happier. He was headed to the Bahamas on a honeymoon, though, so it’s hard not to look happy in that scenario. I played the role of Best Man somewhat flawlessly, although pretty much the only duty was to hold on to a ring for about an hour. It was a dry wedding at a Mennonite church near Turpin, Okla., so there were no drunk relatives to watch. No dancing. And since part of the reception seating was outside and part was inside, I didn’t even have to give a speech. This was responsibility tailored for yours truly.

I did have two thoughts and these are the same two thoughts I’ve had about pretty much every wedding I’ve ever been to …

No. 1: Do flower girls or ring bearers ever do their jobs successfully?

My brother’s wedding had two flower girls. One wouldn’t even come down the aisle during the rehearsal, despite her mom herding at one end and her dad in his groomsman outfit cheering at the other. Not a good sign. The other was a prancer, head high, ready for the big stage. So of course on the day of the wedding, the shy girl wouldn’t budge and the other girl marched to the front of the church and then whispered to the Maid of Honor, “When do I drop the flowers?” So the rose petals stayed in the basket.

I get it, of course. You dress little kids up in grown-ups clothes and do their hair and everyone oohs and aahs, and the grandparents have minor, but possibly dangerous palpitations, and everyone goes home feeling a happy glow. It doesn’t really matter if the flower girl screws up. It’s sometimes cuter when they mess up. The shy flower girl from my brother’s wedding sat in the back for a while and then during the vows told her mom, “OK, I’m ready to go now.” That’s damn cute. No doubt about it.

But tell me this: Have you ever seen a flower girl/ring bearer scenario that went smoothly? And yet we’ve all seen weird scenarios where the bride had to snag a sprinting child in mid-100 meter dash. Does the ring ever stay where it’s supposed to, or does it go flying when the boy stops to chat with his grandpa or heaves the little red pillow into the fourth row? It could be time to move on. Think about it. Societies change. Trends come and go. Would it be wrong to pre-sprinkle the rose petals? Have the bride drop her own, thus ensuring she is walking on the absolute freshest petals possible? These are just ideas. OK, they aren’t really ideas, but I’m trying. We are advancing as a people, and I’m trying to help the cause.

OK, issue No. 2 … Why can’t we throw something of substance at new couples?

There is a wedding-related urban legend that led to the demise of rice at weddings. You’ve all heard it. It states that throwing rice at newlyweds as they leave the church is irresponsible because birds eat the rice and then it expands in their stomachs and they die. The more glamorous versions say the rice-eating birds explode. And people actually believe that stuff, even though no one has ever actually seen a bird explode. Except for people who were at this game …

I’m 99 percent sure this exploding bird theory was started by the people who have to clean up after weddings. However it started, it was told and re-told and on some basic level it sort of seems to make sense, if you ignore the fact that birds feed on rice all over the world and the digestive system works a touch faster than rice soaks up water. As a kid, the rice throwing was the highlight of every wedding. After you’d sat in a hot church all afternoon with a tie on, sweating through the longest and most boring moments of your young life, rice throwing was the payoff. Someone said to you, “Grab a handful of rice and whip it at those people in fancy clothes.” I nearly threw my arm out of socket at age 12. I remember being at a wedding where the groomsmen got up on the roof and dumped a drum of rice on the new couple as they left the church. Classic. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a groomsman when I grew up.

Well then sometime in the early ’90s, rice started being phased out. Instead, people released doves or butterflies or balloons as the couple made the trek from the church to the getaway car. At some weddings, they handed out rose petals to throw. One of my friends had a wedding where everyone got a little dispenser to blow bubbles* at the couple as they went by. The point was no longer to strike fear into the newlyweds, but to make a beautiful scene for photography. As if there weren’t enough moments to capture at a wedding.

*I did, in a moment of brilliance, manage to pull the top off of the dispenser and toss a tiny amount of soapy water at the couple, and I’m told the bride got some in her eye. They are still married to this day. No need to thank me.

At my brother’s wedding, each person was given an envelope of paper hearts to throw, and I have to admit it did look kind of cool with all that red and pink flying and the couple strolling through. Not the point, though. It’s important not to get distracted by cuteness. I have written at length about my theories of American marriage and how its downfall is directly related to the wimpifying of the church-to-car-escape. For the non-religious, it would be courthouse-to-car or Vegas-chapel-to-car, or whatever. Although, if you’re already in Vegas, why would you need to get in a car?

I will save you the 5,000 word dissertation, but my half-serious theory is that if there were a bit of danger involved in the church-to-car journey, then people might not jump into marriage quite so quickly. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that everyone at the wedding got to throw one rock. I know, I know. It’s silly, but play along. You’d have to be IN LOVE to risk a stone to the temple. There’s potential here. Think of the places this could go. BB guns for everyone! A gauntlet, complete with gator-filled pits and booby traps and spinning swords. For the wintery weddings, how about an icy walkway?

You’d have to work as a couple to even get through it. You’d have to communicate, compromise, plan, deceive, run with a shield while screaming, all the things that make marriage great. The divorce rate is over 50 percent now. Turtle doves aren’t working. Let’s give this a shot.

It went over well, because it’s a classic and people know it. I always get sort of a melancholy feeling when I hear it. (”If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”) I mean, I think he really wants to stay with the girl. I think a lot of times people use the whole, “Oh, I’m a free spirit, I was born to run” stuff to let someone down easy, or escape a relationship that isn’t working, but I really think he loves her. He’s tortured by the fact that he can’t change. He’s singing about it, and that’s got to mean something, right? I could be over-analyzing.

Anyway, “Free Bird” has a good solo and this band I’m going to see has a teenage guitar player* who will be famous some day. I’m sure of it, and I’m not sure of much. Maybe he already has been famous and is on his way down. I’m not even sure about that. They will play “Free Bird” and this kid will absolutely destroy the solo and life will be good. But the song also brings me to a couple thoughts about Michael Jackson. You of course know that Michael Jackson died last week, sort of an odd and mysterious death at age 50, and really, what else would anyone have expected from the man’s death besides odd and mysterious?

*The guitar player’s name is “Blaze,” and he’s 15 years old. I really don’t know too much about him other than he’s really nice and smiles a lot. I’ve met him and his mother a couple times. I know they lived in Hollywood for a while and he played guitar in a kid band called Blaze N Young Guns. They live in Fresno now and Blaze is homeschooled. I will let a couple Youtube clips speak to his playing ability.

The first one is recent, Blaze on a local morning show. As a public service announcement, I can’t emphasize enough how lame local TV is. Don’t watch it. Read a newspaper.

And Blaze at age 14 …

And Blaze at age 12 …

The point I was getting to before I got distracted by Blaze was that people roll their eyes at “Free Bird.” They don’t storm out of the room in anger, but it’s a go-to-the-bar-for-a-drink kind of song. Same with “Stairway to Heaven” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Sweet Home Alabama” and 30 other songs that we’ve heard so many times that we’ve become numb to them.  Occasionally I enjoy some Creedence Clearwater Revival, but I couldn’t help but laugh during the most recent Die Hard movie when “Fortunate Son” comes on the radio and Justin Long says to Bruce Willis, “It’s old. That doesn’t make it classic.” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

But “Thriller” never got old. It never got cliche. The song or album. When they play songs from it on TV commercials it isn’t hokie. I could put that album on my record player right now and listen to it from beginning to end and never even think about moving, even though I’ve heard it 100 times. It has everything, driving beats and funk, soft ballads, screaming electric organs. And in honor of the great Dave Barry, wouldn’t the “Screaming Electric Organs” be a good name for a rock band? It is simply the No. 1 selling album of all time, not that being uber-popular guarantees immortality. How do people see “Titanic” now? How will they feel about “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” in a decade, even though it’s inevitably going to make $400 million? A lot of things seemed like a good idea at the time: Disco outfits, New Kids on the Block, Billy Ray Cyrus, Vanilla Ice, Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” You get the point. It’s a lot tougher to create something legendary than it is to take advantage of the fad of the moment.

Michael Jackson’s early stuff had it all, the hype, the innovation, the substance. His talent was undeniable. It is no wonder his music continues to thrive. Jackson believed he had a gift from God and it was his duty to share it with the world. And when you look back at those clips of him singing with the Jackson 5, how could you argue? He was a prodigy. He was a little kid with a big afro singing about adult love …

Tryin’ to live without your love, is one long sleepless night.

Let me show you girl, that I know wrong from right.

Not words you expect to hear from an 11-year-old. It’s easy to forget about those years because of the molestation accusations and the allergy mask and the dangling baby and the shrinking nose and the 100 other strange things that became Michael Jackson in the later years. Whatever it was that Michael morphed into.  But he was, well, he was once-in-a-lifetime. I’ve thought about that while listening to Blaze play guitar and I wonder how much being famous and talented had to do with Jackson becoming the circus side show, sleeping in beds with children, building his own fantasy park, believing he was Peter Pan. He didn’t want to grow old and in a lot of ways he didn’t. Fifty is too young to die.

Certainly other factors played into Jackson’s life, that whole nature versus nurture debate, not to mention his dad’s constant pushing and alleged abuse. But it also seems pretty obvious that child stars are inevitably going to have issues. Obviously, adults have problems handling fame and cash windfalls, so how could it not be worse for a child? Blaze will be fine, I’m sure. I hope. Watching a restaurant full of people stare at this 15-year-old kid rip through some incredibly tough and famous solos, you had to wonder what it must have been like for young Michael, to have the world watching.

I have to believe it was far easier and tougher than the rest of us can imagine.

Let’s say I promised to give you $20,000. You are good and basically deserving person and you really do need the money. You are thankful, of course, for my money and so you tell people about the generous gift. You tell people what you are going to do with the generous gift, the new hot tub and the boat and the bathroom renovation.

Keep in mind that this is a pledge, not a promise or a contractual obligation. I don’t have to pay you the money. You cannot take me to court if I don’t pay the money. It’s me being philanthropic and you being grateful, and geez, isn’t the world a lovely place?

My question is, What if I don’t pay $20,000? Or at least not all of it. Are you mad? Are you more upset with me than your friend Shane, who didn’t offer to give you anything? And if so, why are you mad? Because I got you excited for nothing, or because your friends want to know where the Jacuzzi is?

What about this: What if I only gave $19,900? Surely, that would be OK, right? No one would know. You could do without the rest, or find it another way. But what if I only paid $100? I think what I’m getting at is, somewhere in the middle there is an amount that is satisfactory. And there is another amount that is disappointing. Maybe those numbers aren’t even close to each other. Maybe there’s this gray area where you just sort of shrug and say, “Eh,” because it’s more money than you had before.

I’m not going to re-tell the entire story here. I’ve already done that in a Fresno Bee blog. If you have any interest in Fresno State sports, you’ve no doubt heard about Alphonso Bigelow and his $10 million pledge last week to Fresno State athletics. Here is that article, and here is my column about it. 

It’s a wild story that frankly doesn’t pass the Sniff Test or the B.S. Test or the S.A.T or whatever test you use for these sorts of situations. That doesn’t mean it’s a lie, it just means that if you want people to believe a story like Bigelow’s, you have to provide some sort of evidence. He hasn’t and I think it’s fair to say most people around Fresno think something fishy* is going on. On Friday, two guys in a golf cart drove across two fairways to ask me where they could find the Bigelow blog on their iPhone. It’s the story in Fresno right now. I’ve gotten more than a dozen blog comments already and many of the posters claim to know Bigelow from around town. A few comments I couldn’t approve because they were possibly libelous, and as you all know, the No. 1 goal of this blog and my Bee blog is to avoid lawsuits. Also, to save humanity, but that is a distant, distant second.

*I don’t really know the origins of the term “fishy,” but it seems a bit unfair to our aquatic friends. Are fish sketchy in some way I’m not aware of? Now a raccoon, that’s a fishy animal. Crawling in trash cans and spreading garbage all over the yard. Chameleons are definitely fishy, always changing colors, pretending to be something they aren’t. Nothing fishy about fish, though. What you see is what you get. I’m guessing it originates from the smell factor, but I really don’t think fish smell that bad. The moss and the lake don’t help. Rotten fish, sure, those smell bad. But what doesn’t smell terrible once it’s rotten? Besides, it’s not like fish can do anything about their smell. They live in stagnant water and mud and most likely human pollution. The term “fishy” implies something dishonest or dastardly is going on, and I don’t think it gets much more straight-forward than a fish’s odor. (I’m going to stop now before my head explodes.)

I’m trying to keep this blog as much about non-sports topics as possible, but what a story this could turn out to be. Really, no matter how it turns out, it’s going to be the local story of 2009. If it turns out Alphonso Bigelow doesn’t have anything and for whatever reason duped Fresno State because the administrators were either too inept or lazy to check this guy out, that’s a huge story. If it turns out Alphonso Bigelow is some sort of scam artist, that’s a huge story. If it turns out Alphonso Bigelow got scammed, and thinks he has a bunch of money coming in from this overseas business, that’s a huge story. If it turns out people at Fresno State administrators knew Alphonso Bigelow didn’t have this money, or even suspected he didn’t have the money, and held a big press conference anyway, that’s an enormous story.

It’s a weird place Fresno State finds itself, counting on someone with no contractual obligation, needing something, yet not wanting to seem needy. You wonder what would be OK. $5 million? $3 million? What if he makes the first payment? Would that be enough? Would that at least be enough to move any suspicion off Fresno State? Would they be upset? Would they renovate the bathroom or get the hot tub? It’s intriguing, no doubt.

And let’s not forget this possibility: If Alphonso Bigelow really does donate this money. If he really did start a mysterious company a year ago with five foreign partners, a company that already has the earning capability to give away $10 million, a company with no web site and no office and no telephone number, and all six owners of this company want to give away 80 percent of their profits to various philanthropic causes, then that would be the motherload of impossible feel-good stories. I would be writing congratulatory columns until my fingers bled.

At this point, I’m not even sure which scenario is the most unlikely.

John was the Bee sports columnist before moving to New York in 2005 to cover the New York Giants for the Times. I was hired as his replacement a few months later. I had heard that John’s kindness and his height were equally impressive, and it turns out both are true. I met him last summer at the College World Series, where he came into Omaha, wrote a wonderful piece about the Rosenblatt Stadium organist and was gone the next day. Oh the life.

I’m hoping he spent three days writing this email, but it probably took about 10 minutes. He’s that good. I’ve added a few asterisks, to give you a little more background.

***

 Matt,

Thanks for thinking to send me the link. You brought another dose of melancholy on a rainy day here in New York. But you also reminded me how wonderful those days were … I’m passing this link to some friends, many of whom never quite figured out what I was doing in Fresno, Calif. You explained it as well as I ever have.

Strange how many memories flooded into my brain just by looking at that picture. My first thought was: I left that Ralphie picture there? And it’s still up? And that chair. Why do the arms turn all the way inward? I never understood that. Who sits like that?

Part of my daily ritual was to barely adjust Jeff Davis’* chair, either putting one arm rest a smidge higher than the other, or lowering the seat, or changing the tilt. And then I’d wait for Jeff to notice and start talking to himself. Love Jeff Davis.

*Current Bee sports reporter, covers women’s basketball and softball. Famous chair adjuster and mutterer of things almost under his breath.

And that little adjustable tray for the keyboard? I never got that right, and I’d sit down and bang my knees into it. The Bee had an ergonomist who would come upstairs and find me sitting with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk. I hope, of the disgraceful number of jobs that have been cut, the ergonomist was one of them. Could you imagine: “We laid off a city hall reporter, but Bill here will make sure you have proper posture.”

I remember the first day I got there and found out that I’d be sitting in the back corner of the cave. I had previously worked in Colorado Springs, and you can see Pikes Peak from the large windows along one side of the sports department, unless they’ve shrunk that, too. And I thought, “I now get to face a wall? Actually, two walls? How depressing.”

But then I realized that the cave was a kind of club, and I started referring to it as the grotto, thinking a Hugh Hefner reference never goes out of style. People would come back and sit at that table, and it felt a little like the cool kids’ table in the lunchroom. It was the anti-glass office, the place where real-life decisions were made and meaningful sports and journalistic discussions took place.

It was a sort of Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park, devoid of management interference. Robert and Mike Braham* mostly stood on the other side of the half walls and never stayed long. If you did not have one of the four desks inside the cave but sat at the table, well, that was kind of like being invited over to Johnny Carson’s couch. Ken Robison** would come in, but rarely sit, because Ken has so much energy. David White?*** Good sitter. B.J.****, too.

*Former Bee sports editor Robert Zizzo (now metro editor) and former assistant sports editor Mike Braham.

**Former Bee sports writer Ken Robison, who is more excited on his worst day than anyone else is on his best.

***David White, former Bee sports writer, now covers the Oakland Raiders for the San Francisco Chronicle.

****Bryant-Jon Anteola, Bee sports writer and currently most hated in the newsroom because he’s running away with the fantasy baseball league title.

 Charlie Waters, being the executive editor, often came back to chat. That was fine, because he always had funny stories.

I mostly work from home now, or from the road, and I don’t have a desk in the office. And I just realized that I miss the camaraderie that comes from working alongside a bunch of interesting people, separated by funny little walls mostly used as bulletin boards.

Other memories kicked in. I can suddenly see Marek* spin around in his chair to take part in a discussion that he had tried to ignore. I can see Boogaard** talking Clovis sports, and the twinkle in his eye talking about camping with his son. I can hear all the debates — about Pat Hill’s schedule, about Ray Lopes’ phone calls, about Margie Wright and Stacy Johnson-Klein and Scott Johnson and John Welty and the Red Wave and Terry Pettis. About the civic meaning of the Save Mart Center or Grizzlies Stadium or the Fresno Falcons or Fresno City College basketball or Fresno Pacific volleyball. It isn’t often that one spot reminds me of so many people, and so many times.

*Marek Warszawski, Bee outdoors writer. Definitely someone you want in a discussion, even if he isn’t on your side.

**Andy Boogaard, Bee preps writer. Andy’s son and fishing buddy, Kevin, just graduated from Clovis High School.

I eventually got a custodian to open those mysterious locked doors in front (and to the left) of Jeff Davis, which hide electrical panels or something, and we attached a Nerf hoop there. Is it still there? We kept losing the balls, sometimes up on top of the fluorescent light fixtures. And there was always a football to zing around there, until something would get knocked over or Robert would give us a look. But Robert had good hands.

I loved your bit about the perception of the previous columnist. I heard the same thing about Canzano*, and I’m sure he heard them about Woj*. People would say, “At least you’re not as negative as that last guy,” and I would say that Fresno must not be quite as corrupt as it was back then.

*John Canzano, now sports columnist at the Portland Oregonian. With his own Wikipedia page. That’s how you know you’ve made it.

**Adrian Wojnarowski, now sports columnist at Yahoo.com, also honored with his own Wikipedia page. My jealousy rages quietly.

In some ways, I don’t know if I want to know what happens to that back corner. I’d rather remember it as it is, warts and walls and all — a vital, vivacious pocket of sanity in a sometimes crazy world of both Fresno and newspapers. We solved all of Fresno’s problems back there. Fresno just didn’t know it.

Nice work. Hope you’re well.

John

***

That’s John Branch. As talented as he is kind. I wish I’d been in Fresno to read his stuff, although I guess if he hadn’t left, I’d have never gotten here. And there’s your Catch 22 for the day.

OK, that’s enough reminiscing about work and desks and newspaper people. My apologies for all the asterisks. I think four might be the indoor record for one paragraph.

Don’t worry, John, a few of the fellas are still here, still having those same debates and discussions, still solving all of Fresno’s problems.

- The first in a series of outdoors columns is over at the Fresno Bee sports blog, complete with photos and distracting rants about hot sauce and pregnant women. Read that here. The first in what will hopefully be a long and non-lethal blog series, was a day trip to a trail in Kings Canyon National Park.

- I’m beyond irritated that I didn’t tell you about this sooner, but a television channel called Investigation Discovery had a recent show that I should have been on, and I’m not even kidding. Investigation Discovery is a relatively new network, a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, and it has a show on Friday evenings called “Call 911.” Last Friday’s episode featured the story of Philip Schuth. I think I can say with relative certainty, that I am the media’s leading expert on Philip Schuth. Heck, I might be humanity’s leading expert on Philip Schuth, because the guy doesn’t have many friends.

To turn a long story into a long paragraph, a few years ago, Schuth lived in a blue-collar part of La Crosse, Wis., called French Island, a few blocks from the Mississippi River. I was the metro columnist in La Crosse at the time. One weekend, Schuth shot his neighbor with a pistol, which led to a long police standoff, which led to the discovery of some pretty weird stuff about Schuth. Like he had some illegal guns, some homemade bombs, and oh, he pretty much hadn’t left his rotting house in five years. Also, there was one more thing. His dead mother was in a block of ice in a downstairs freezer. Without giving too much away, some aspects of the case were not nearly as creepy as they first appeared, and others were significantly more creepy than anyone would have guessed.

Schuth eventually started calling me from county jail. (I’m still not sure whether he intended to call me specifically, or I was just the one who picked up the phone.) And then he kept calling, and kept calling, and kept calling until I had hours of taped interviews with him, 15 police-approved minutes at a time. I wrote a series of stories about Schuth and his life, this one being the main profile piece. You can find it in the handy-dandy “RANDOM WRITING” section of this very web site. Eventually, they let Schuth out of jail to attend his mother’s funeral and I got to ride from the jail to the cemetary in an old minivan with Schuth and Schuth’s friend, and that friend’s common-law wife, the police following us in unmarked cars. It was easily one of the weirdest moments of my life, and there’s this super awkward Polaroid photo of Schuth and I standing next to each other at the cemetary. It’s in storage, but when I dig it out one of these days, I’ll be sure to post it here.

So Friday this “Call 911″ show featured the Schuth story — “Wisconsin Standoff, Part 1,” followed by “Wisconsin Standoff, Part 2” — and I missed it. Actually, I was at state track at the time, and I don’t even think I get that channel*, but still. I forgot to give you the head’s up. So far, there are no repeats of the show scheduled, but if there are, you’ll be the first to know. I’m on a mission to find it online somewhere, but as of yet have had no luck. But how good can it be if they didn’t contact the world’s foremost expert on Philip Schuth? I’m kidding. I’m sure it was great.

*Some fun programming notes: On Comcast, Investigation Discovery is channel 271, available for $76.90 per month on the preferred package that includes National Geographic, the Military Channel, Biography, Encore and the Science Channel. At least that’s what the helpful guy at Comcast said over the phone. On DIRECTV, it’s channel 285, although I don’t know all the package details.

Here’s a little YouTube preview of the Investigation Discovery channel itself, not that it has anything to do with Schuth …

My apologies again for not getting the word out on the show earlier. I’ll see if I can get ahold of someone at the Discovery Channel and beg for a re-run. Maybe my expertise on the subject will have some pull. Yeah, right. By the way, as far as I know, Schuth is still serving an 8-year prison term he got in a plea bargain deal. I’m still claiming that if Schuth had had any money for a decent defense attorney, he’d have never even gone to prison.

When I got to work Thursday, this is what my desk looked like …

Not the cleanest desk in sports journalism today, or any day for that matter. But if you look in the middle you will notice there is something important missing: A computer. No, I didn’t get laid off. Hold your tears or applause. It hasn’t happened yet. These days in the newspaper business, though, it’s disconcerting to walk in and see the I.T. people have snagged your work station.

The Fresno Bee sports department is moving from one end of the building to the other. We’re no longer hidden in the back corner, where no one could hear the cursing or see us throw plastic footballs at each other. It’s pretty simple as to why. The editorial staff is so much smaller than it was two years ago that they’re consolidating the newsroom. I assume this is happening at other newspapers, too. The area where the sports department was, is going to be empty. That entire end of the newsroom. I’ve heard rumors they’re going to wall it off. I’ve heard they are considering renting out the office space. I’ve heard they might put up a curtain, the way they do at the Save Mart Center when they can’t sell the upperdeck tickets.

 I don’t want to be mawkish here, but some remarkable people have sat at that desk. John Branch sat there. He now writes feature stories for the New York Times. To the right, you can see a Sports Illustrated article about the University of Colorado that he once taped to the wall. He left it and I’ve kept it up, hoping some of his ability would somehow hang around. John Canzano sat at that desk. He writes sports columns for the Portland Oregonian and was named the nation’s best sportswriter this year. It’s astounding the number of well-known sportswriters who’ve come through the Fresno Bee in the last two decades. Eric Prisbell writes for the Washington Post. Adrian Wojnarowski has authored at least two wonderful sports books, and writes NBA columns for Yahoo. Jeff Passan wrote for the Kansas City Star and now Yahoo. Andy Katz is at ESPN. Bill McEwen is the metro columnist at the Fresno Bee. I’m forgetting several more.

People who aren’t familiar with the recent history of the Bee sometimes ask how I ended up in Fresno, as if I arrived here by some misfortune. The truth is so many sportswriters have accomplished so much at the Fresno Bee, and went on to so many big things, it became an accomplishment just to get to the Bee. I wrote a column this week about Orlando Magic point guard Rafer Alston, one of the few guys who has been successful since coming out of the Jerry Tarkanian or Ray Lopes era of Fresno State basketball. All that corruption and chaos didn’t make many basketball careers, but it certainly launched a few journalism careers. There was always something new to write about.

The last few years I’ve met a few of those writers, Branch and Canzano and Passan, and they all have pleasant memories of their time in Fresno. Sorry fellas, the department as you know it is long gone. We have less than half the employees we once did in the sports department, and we don’t travel too much any more. And now we have a new home, down where the business section used to be. I walked down and found my computer on this desk …

It ain’t bad. The view is better than staring into a corner and you don’t immediately think, “I wonder what the Russian mafia was looking for when it ransacked this desk.” It’s nice once in a while to have a fresh start, a new perspective. And if you don’t move every now and then, you never throw anything out and the junk piles up. Do I still need the 2001 Silicon Valley Bowl media guide? Of course I do. But I’m not hauling it from one end of the Bee to the other. 

The first thing I did was put up the articles and helpful writing tips that had been left at my old desk by previous writers. It won’t be the same. I know that. The heritage just isn’t there. The broken down chair. The soda stains. The filing cabinet packed with the notes and stories and cobwebs of some pretty amazing years of journalism. But the phone came with me, the one that’s been called so many times by appreciative readers, thankful for an interesting story. The phone that’s been called by all those angry readers, wondering how some out-of-town punk sports columnist* could say such things about the Bulldogs. The phone that rang a couple years ago and a voice said, “Matt, how many starters does the Boise State football team return this year?” Jerry Tarkanian, is that you? And it was.

*Every now and then someone will stop me and say, “I’m so glad you’re not as negative as the last guy,” and I just chuckle. Every sports columnist here has heard that at one point or another. Thank goodness for the previous guy.

Don’t worry, guys, I’ll check on the old desk now and then. And if they do rent the space out, I’ll tell the unsuspecting new person he’s got a lot to live up to.

*It is, without doubt, a shame to live where I live and not experience the outdoors every week. I go outdoors all the time; a jog, the walk from the parking lot to the front door, but in central California that doesn’t cut it. I can start my car and be in Yosemite National Park within an hour. In Sequoia National Park in 80 minutes. In Kings Canyon National Park within … I’m really not sure how long it takes to get to Kings Canyon because along the way I seem to stop at every single lookout point, and there are roughly 120 of those per mile. And, there are giant sequoias that strain your neck and waterfalls at which to gasp and a gift shop with these goofy hats that have bear heads on them and is there anything funnier than watching foreigners try on goofy hats? The entire drive is heart-stopping. I made my way to Kings Canyon a couple weeks ago and thought I was in the park for three hours before I even got to the entrance sign. Seriously, where can you drive in and out of a glorious canyon, snowy peaks surrounding you, and you aren’t even to the national park yet? South Dakota, enjoy your corn palace.

A lot has been happening the last two weeks. A couple trips. (You can read a few of my thoughts on my recent Kings Canyon day-trip here in Wednesday’s column.) I’m trying to prepare for my brother’s wedding — COMING: SUMMER OF 2009 – of which I am involved to whatever extent a Best Man is involved. This is my first attempt at Best Man, after two somewhat successful roles as groomsman. I’ve been building my resume. First, I stood on the very end for my buddy Dave in some little town in Wisconsin. Then second-from-the-end for my buddy Mike in Seattle. I figure it’s a seniority type thing. Experience is factored in. You’ve got to pay your dues to be Best Man, and moving from second-from-the-end to in-charge-of-a-ring is a big step for me.  I’m nervous, especially considering my mother and the groom call every three or four days to pass along the new and updated bachelor party rules. I think we were all hoping for some sort of vague “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” but no, there are specifics, the first being no Vegas. More specifics to come in an entirely exclusive wedding blog.

What I’m getting at, is we have a lot to talk about here, and I’ve been slacking a bit on the blogs, so let’s get to a topic I’ve long been interested in: Why do guys’ apartments always smell like a hint of sweaty jock strap? I know guys who haven’t worked out since the mandatory mile run in eighth grade and I know guys who compete in ultra marathons, and their apartments all smell the same. No amount of cleaning removes this smell, not even actual cleaning, let alone guy cleaning, which is to throw all loose items into a closet, arrange magazines on the coffee table and wipe the counters with Windex and a bath towel.

It doesn’t make sense. Soap scum, now that makes sense. We use soap. Soap is scummy. We don’t clean our showers, because it’s not an area of the house that involves a TV or food. Thus, all guys’ bathrooms have soap scum. There is a direct cause and effect. But this apartment smell doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t go away and doesn’t wash off. Logic would say that it’s some sort of body-produced odor, but when you pass a male on the street, you don’t smell it. Occasionally, we even smell nice. And yet you could walk into a nice-smelling guy’s apartment, and it would have that same musty odor that leaks into couches and bread and hammers away at your soul. Women have for years referred to this phenomenon as “Boy Smell.” I knew girls in college who would only let their boyfriends stay over a maximum of two nights a week for fear Boy Smell would take over their apartments and they’d have to move mid-semester.

I once tried those plug-in air fresheners, which worked a bit like adding fresh strawberries to motor oil and then microwaving it for 7 or 8 minutes.

Living with female roommates always seemed like a good idea in your 20s — hey, they’ve have friends, and eventually they’ll come over, right? — but now I see how dangerous that was. A female could, theoretically, run over a male roommate’s car with a federally-funded armored tank and never get in trouble. She wouldn’t even need a lawyer, just simply walk into court with a Tupperware container, pry off the lid and say, “This air came from our apartment. HE made it smell like this.”  Any jury would not only equit, but require her to also run over his bigscreen TV and personal computer. Literally, a criminal case would morph directly into a civil one, the prosecution and defense would switch tables, and they would start awarding punative damages.

Of course I’m writing this from an apartment where three males live. That could be the deadly fumes talking.

The problem is, you can’t read the Q & A here, because I didn’t post it here, mostly because I posted it here … http://fresnobeehive.com/sportsbuzz/matt_james/

That’s my other blog, the Fresno Bee blog, the one entirely devoted to sports. The one I get paid to write. Or more specifically, the one that gets mentioned in my performance review should I not post enough on it. You will notice the button at the top of this web site called “SPORTS BLOG,” which will take you over there at any given moment. But don’t leave yet. I’m not done. Here, I write about sports, too, but lots of other important stuff like Rip Torn’s hair and why motorcycle sometimes don’t set off the traffic light sensors and the best places to skip rocks in the Sierra Nevadas.

At my other job, we have some rules about part-time jobs. If I started reporting for Channel 30 in my spare time, it would not go well. My car would blow up in the parking lot, or possibly I’d get a stern warning to knock it off. Either way, it would be bad. But I don’t want to work for a TV station, partially because stuff like this happens …

You’d probably seen that clip by now of the TV crew in Cleveland as LeBron James was hitting that absurd shot the other night. (Playoff update: If not for that shot, the Cavs would be out of the playoffs already.) That would never happen in our newsroom. It just wouldn’t. Sure, we love sports. We each have teams we cheer for and grew up following, but we report on the local teams with a certain level of detachment. Our job is to bring you fair and accurate articles, and can you really look at those four people* in that clip and expect fair and accurate reporting from them in the future. I get the idea that local TV gave up on that notion long ago.

Sure, there were people in the Bee sports department crowded around the newsroom TVs at the end of that Cavs game, but the reaction was stunned bewilderment, not people running around and clapping. Of course we aren’t a Cleveland newspaper, but the reaction would have been even less if we were. And remember, that’s with no one watching, not live on the air.

*Go back and listen again and tell me if you think the woman in red really has a “Sports Illustrated” issue to cancel. I know she was joking, but the way she said it was so unintentionally funny. I’d bet you $100 she read it off the teleprompter and somewhere her husband was sitting in a bar telling his buddies, “Yeah, she let my S.I. run out five years ago because said it cluttered up the ottoman.” … P.s. Here is the S.I. cover to which she refers.

I’m getting away from the point. At my newspaper, we have rules against working for competing media (don’t) and rules about part-time jobs (don’t ask), but when I asked if I could run my own blog, I was told it was OK. The internet is a tricky beast. Because of the internet, newspapers are being read like never before. We have access to articles and newspapers that was never possible. Did you know that yesterday U.S. senator Max Baucus, a democrat from Montana, had a listening session about health care reform at St. Patrick Hospital? It’s the lead story in The Montana Standard. I’m just saying.

But we haven’t really figured out how to make money on the internet. Or at least not enough. We give away our product for free there. The internet enables competitors to take advertising. It lets businesses do their own advertising. I’ve half-joked that my goal is for my blog to become the most popular site in the history of the internet, but what if it did take off? What if it got 10,000 hits* a month, or 10,000 a week, or 10,000 hits before noon. Could I sell advertising? I don’t know why not. And at that point, aren’t I at least some sort of competitor to my own employer? It’s tricky.

*No idea how many hits I get. Too scared to look. It isn’t many.

So for now, I worry about these things. I don’t want to use my work hours to blog here, but then again, I don’t even have hours. If I wake up at 3 a.m. and have an idea, I start typing. If Fresno State coach Pat Hill says I want to meet you on the golf course on Sunday afternoon, that’s where I go. And what if I do 300-word blogs for the Bee and 3,000-word blogs here? What if I post here three times a day and there only once? (I know, I know, three times a week would be a good start.)

There are so many questions I don’t want the answer to. What if I found a great story idea and wrote it for this site instead of the Bee because I wanted to build traffic here? I’m not saying skip out on work, but write other story ideas for the Bee and the better one here. And who’s to say it’s better anyway? I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen, or where this all will go. I’m 85 percent positive that at some point I will end up in a room full of editors and possibly a publisher and will get the answers to all these questions. Until then, we happily march on, well under the radar.

I love Minnesota. I really do. But it’s a strange place. And frankly, I think it has it out for me. Minnesota has produced more of my ex-girlfriends than any other state, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because I never really spent much time there. And the three months I actually did live in Minnesota – a lovely little town called La Crescent, in an apartment complex I almost burned down in a chicken/stove-related incident – I couldn’t get a single date. The Gopher State is cruel, and I’m not just talking about the winters or the fish recipes*. Oh, but Minnesotans, the people, are absolutely great. They will definitely dump you treat you to some good ol’ fashioned hospitality. I should know promise.

Speaking of food, did you know that in Minnesota no one uses the word casserole? You might have heard everyone there refers to a casserole as “hot dish.” Same thing. Different name. Only Minnesota. OK, technically, some people in South Dakota and North Dakota say hot dish, but honestly, in the winter with the snow blowing sideways, who can really tell if they’re in North Dakota or a Minnesota?

*If anyone ever offers you “lutefisk,” shoot them in the chest with a bazooka and drive as hard as you can for the state border. No jury outside of Minnesota would convict you on a bazooka-shooting, given the circumstances. I’m telling you, community service, at most.

 Did you know there is no “Duck, Duck, Goose” in Minnesota? It’s called “Duck, Duck, Gray Duck” there, which brings up a myriad of questions, starting with, Why in the world would I use the word “myriad?” That deserves community service.

But a better question is, Why a gray duck? Are they more aggressive than regular ducks? Andy why would you run around a circle to get away from a duck? Now a goose, sure, I’d run like Prefontaine from a goose. I have. Most people have. A goose will beat you half to death with its beak before you can scream, “MY COMFORTER ISN’T EVEN DOWN!” And they’re big. Really big. They throw those massive wings out and it’s terrifying.

And an even better question is, how do the people of one state have an entirely different name for a famous childhood game than the rest of the world? I’ve never gotten a great answer to that, other than Minnesota has some quirks. This is the state famous for its 10,000 lakes, but there are actually more like 12,000 lakes in Minnesota, maybe even closer to 15,000, depending on your size requirements for lake status. Point is, what state downplays its most prestigious fact? It’s on the stinkin’ Minnesota license plate. Can you see Arizona referring to the Grand Canyon as “Our good-sized ditch?”

What I’m working toward, is the most recent Minnesota phenomenon of weirdness. I was alerted to this by a Facebook post of a meterologist named Bill Graul*. Today, at 4:25 p.m., (CDT), it was 99 degrees in Owatonna, Minn. And at the exact same time, in Duluth, Minn., it was 39 degrees. I realize it’s a big state, but that’s 60 degrees difference and those two cities are only 200 miles apart. Unless Owatonna switched to Kelvin thermometers, that’s freakish, even by Gopher State standards.

*Bill and I were once in the same bowling league. Great guy. Really good bowler. I’m guessing about a 200 average. In case you’re wondering, I was most improved bowler three years in a row in that league, which should tell you where I started. Birthday party bowler.

That’s your national weather update, for May 19, 2009. Good people of Owatonna, you might want to dig around for the jacket you put away too early. Winter is just up the road.