Florida's Number One!

Turns out that screwing up elections is not the only thing in which Florida ranks first.

The Sunshine State is home to the nation's top party school, the University of Florida. The Gators have won recent national chammpionships in football and basketball but now the school really has something to brag about.

Maybe the news is good for recruiting some kids. It didn't work on me back when I was searching for colleges way back when. UF offered me a partial academic scholarship and I loved the idea of living in warm weather. I considered the school seriously enough that my dad and I drove to Gainesville to look over the university in person.

I remember meeting with an admissions officer in a hopelessly cluttered office. Not an attraction. But my lasting impression came later as we drove around campus.

Going past a fraternity house, I remember seeing a shirtless fat guy on the roof of one of them. With him was a bottle of Jack Daniels so big I could read the label from the street. I didn't have a lot of ideas about my future but I knew that I didn't want to look that in four years.

I ended up doing my post-high school beer drinking education at the University of North Carolina.

It's 4:30 a.m.

And I should still be in bed. I thought a good workout -- 50 minutes of cardio! -- would tire me out enough to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Yet, there I was, at 10 p.m. lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

By 11, I gave up and got the Randy Wayne White novel that had gotten me through my stints on the stationary cycle and the treadmill and opened that. Sometime after midnight I finally fell asleep.

The 3 a.m. alarm came at what felt like 20 minutes later. Boy, is that going to grow old fast.

But I'm here at WTSP. Carry on.

Democrat's Nominee

I saw it written that way on a local newscast's graphic. The anchor on WFLA was reading a story as "Democrat's Nominee" stuck on the screen over his shoulder for what seemed like forever.

In the station's defense, I didn't hear the story. I was at the gym and saw it on a monitor as I was sweating my way through a cardio workout. It is possible that the story concerned an individual Democrat's nominee for something. That's what "Democrat's Nominee" means: one person, presumably a Democrat, has nominated someone for something.

But I doubt it. It's more likely that a grammatically challenged graphics person or newscast producer simply doesn't know how to use an apostrophe properly.

Crap!

I almost forgot my youngest brother's birthday. I never forget the date. I even know his wedding anniversary date. The trouble is that I rarely know what day it is.

I did send him a brief e-mail but it's too late to call and -- with my 3 a.m. wakeup call tomorrow -- too late to write a longer letter.

Ugh.

New Direction

I've mentioned that I'm not a candidate to become the permanent morning traffic reporter for WTSP. I know this because the operations manager at traffic.com, which provides the traffic service for the station, told me so. "They want to go in a new direction," he said.

This is the sort of cover-all statement that answers a question without saying anything, which, of course, is the whole idea. It usually means one of two things:

1. The station wants to hire someone who is younger, of a different gender or a different race. Or just blonder.

Hiring for TV news programs is essentially casting just like for any TV show. I don't blame them for not hiring me for this job. When I'm in good practice, I'm a decent on air talent but my skills are writing and telling stories with video. Traffic reporting requires little more than knowing the area, using the computer and being able to stand in front of a camera and speak reasonably coherently without a teleprompter. Even Don Henley's "bubble-headed bleach blonde" can do that.

This kind of discrimination is technically illegal, however, so when it's the basis for a talent change, the explanation is usually, "we want to go in a new direction." The resulting hire will usually tell you that the direction was almost invariably younger and whatever ethnic and gender mix fits best with the rest of the anchor line-up for a particular newscast.

2. The other reason for the "new direction" line: Station management doesn't know what it wants to do; it knows only that ratings are going in a bad direction and it's got to change something or management's own job status is going to change -- for the worse.

The talent is not the only reason for the ratings -- good or bad. The shows leading-in and following the newscast, the traditional viewing habits of a market and how well the newscast is produced all factor into it.

Reshuffling the anchors looking for a quick fix usually does more harm than good. The changes alienate anyone who has grown attached to the people now gone and the new talent hired in a panic will unlikely draw new viewers. But if you're a manager in a job whose average tenure is two years, you probably don't have time for a long-term plan. A station that makes changes for changes' sake will cover its own lack of direction by explaining the switches as "going in a new direction."

The "new direction" was the same reasoning given to the now-departed traffic reporter whom I have replaced for the time being. An oblique reference she made to it on the air Monday may have sparked her sudden ejection nearly two months before the scheduled end of her tenure. Someone complimented a new hairstyle and she said, "I'm going in a new direction." The WTSP bigwigs apparently did not appreciate the joke. Thus, the call to me in the bullpen a few hours later.

Good Morning

It's just past 7:30 a.m. and I've survived doing my first day of traffic reporting "until further notice" on WTSP-TV's morning news show. We still have the local news inserts into the CBS Early Show to do so maybe I shouldn't announce my survival just yet but so far no major mishaps.

I can report that I got out of bed on time, which is the first of the many potential horrors of the morning.

Doing the show itself is easier now than it was last year at this time. Then we had traffic reports -- some maybe only ten seconds long -- at the beginning and end of each news block.

Now I appear only four times an hour. That makes life a lot easier. I'm not getting paid by my screen time so I'm happy to go on as often or as little as they want.

Traffic To Come

Just got a call from the operations manager for the Tampa office of traffic.com asking if I can do the morning traffic reports for WTSP-TV "until further notice."

I knew that the current traffic reporter was being let go in October and stations often send people on their way (with a check for the remaining time on their contracts) but this comes as a surprise.

I didn't ask what the reason was for the sudden change. I'm sure if there's a story, I'll hear it when I go in to the station tomorrow at 4 a.m. I'm sorry for the woman I'm replacing (if only on an interim basis -- I've been told I'm not a candidate for the job) but the work will do me good.

Get Out of the Kitchen

I have to find a new place to shoot sunsets. "The Kitchen," the county-owned preserve area along Tampa Bay where I usually go, is simply too mosquito infested. I go there because it's the closest place to me where I can get an unobstructed view of the horizon.

However the mosquitoes seem impervious to bug repellent. The many stagnant pools of water provide perfect breeding grounds. And the time to shoot the cloudscapes that happen around dusk happen to be the time when the blood-sucking disease spreaders are most active.

At one point last night I thought they were simply going to lift me up and carry me back to their nest (or lair or den or whatever you call mosquitoes' homes) where they could pick at me at their leisure.

That's not the worst part. The worst part is that I got there just after the best shots were available, despite sprinting lumbering at top speed from the parking area to the berm that overlooks the bay (or the mosquito-breeding marsh that borders it, anyway), and I didn't get any shots that justified donating two pints of blood to the local mosquito population.

Safety Harbor PhotoWalk

I drove through intermittent rain to get to Safety Harbor then walked several blocks down Main Street through a steady downpour to the meeting place. But I made it to the Scott Kelby Worldwide PhotoWalk in Safety Harbor. Luckily for the 50 or so people gathered under the gazebo at John Wilson Park the rain stopped before we set off to document down Safety Harbor.

I had an idea in my head that there would be some guidance involved but the only instructions we got were to meet at Crispers restaurant at 7 p.m., that whining was not allowed and to take care not to get hit by a car.

I didn't shoot anything prize-worthy but I didn't drop my camera off the pier at the marina so I'm calling the day a success.