Change of seasons

Ahh, the passing of spring into summer. The crocuses giving way to the phlox. The barking of the geese giving way to the rattling of the woodpecker. The roadside detritus of Shrek 2 cups giving way to the summer’s crop of Star Wars cups and french fry holders.

Seriously, people, if you’re going to eat that McBurgery’s crap, have the decency to eat the wrappers, too, instead of tossing them out the window. It would be the healthiest part of the meal, and provide much-needed fiber.

The big Tour de Cure is coming up this weekend, one of the biggest fundraisers for the American Diabetes Association in the country. If you want to help (and some of you did, so I thank you!), or if you just want to see a ridiculous picture of a man past his prime stuffed into spandex standing in a graveyard, just click here and click on the “Sponsor Me” button. Normally I take this week off to train, but our schedule got a little funky, so I’m not sure how much I’m going to get in. Tomorrow, a long ride is mandatory; then I’m the parent-on* for Thursday and Friday, so I can’t really be miles and miles from home living the carefree, freewheeling life, just in case somebody throws up at school. We’ll work something out.

*Way back in my school newspaper days at The Daily Orange, we rotated which senior editor was responsible on any given night for the final production, for last checks on the pasteup, for answering any questions or solving problems, and for sticking the final sports scores into some of the stories. That person was referred to as the “editor on.” I’ve always had that awkward phrase in my head to refer to the person responsible on any given day, so when one parent is away, the other is the “parent on.”

Okay, so now I have to tell my favorite editor-on story, which involves a very sweet girl who edited the features section of the paper, and who happened to be the editor-on, stuck out at the printing plant late one night when a game went late. The story got called in (or perhaps faxed, though our fax then took 3 minutes a page), but headlines were typeset on different machines from the stories, so it was her responsibility to take the headline that was dictated on the phone and make sure it got set and pasted up. Our sports editor told her the headline on the phone, and she set it herself, dried it, waxed it, and slapped it in place. But she knew nothing about sports, and our sports editor was incapable of imagining such a condition, so his communication that the University of Connecticut’s team, commonly called UConn, was translated into a surprising headline that seemed to intimate that a pack of dogs had taken on the hometown boys: “Yukon Huskies defeat Orange.”