$3.70 = a huge slice of pizza and a bagel
So we had a break from our NYPD RNC briefing for about an hour before Jack Shafer of Slate fame (who interestingly seemed to dismiss the concept of j-school in this Slate article circa 2002) and I headed down Broadway to supplement my two-hour-old lunch of a single small apple.
I came upon Absolute Bagels today, the best bagels in the city (according to Pacific Time on KQED) and had a $0.95 cinnamon raisin bagel with butter. It was firm enough, but also chewy and full of bagel goodness. The butter was almost like cream cheese, white and somewhat thick, so I don’t know what kind of butter that was. Plus, they dug me because I was wearing a t-shirt of the Thai alphabet (it’s a Thai-owned place) that Martin gave me.
When I went up the street, still hungry, I popped into Koronet pizza at 108th and Broadway, just south of Columbia and about a block or so north of Absolute Bagels. Slice wrote about them, saying how huge their slices were (see the picture). I made the mistake of getting it to go and trying to eat and walk at the same time back to campus. I paid my $2.75 for a freshly-cut slice straight outta the oven and headed out.
Perhaps for weight distribution reasons, they put the crust in at the bottom of the bag, so that it can be carried relatively easily. However, given that I wanted to eat and walk, this posed a problem. Hot pizza is quite hot, and when the bag constrains you from reaching in and grabbing it by the crust, I was forced to tear off bits from the tip and stuff them scalding hot down my throat before I could create enough room in there to pull it out and eat it with my hands. Verdict?
Koronet is quite good, and for $2.75 is a feast. A bit dough-y compared to say, Sal & Carmine’s, but still a very solid slice. I’d like to try and get one sitting down so I can really savor it.
OK, so I’m live-blogging this
Ed: Jack Shafer of Slate fame came to talk to the J-school today. He challenged the audience to live-blog this at the beginning, so I did. This is a rough account of his talk.
The joke is on the people who aren’t new media people.
In the last 10-15 yrs, we’ve seen a convergence of media all into one. It begins at a New Media project. They’re weaving a new media before they rebroadcast it as a newspaper. That’s really new. that’s a totally big deal.
If you look at the history of media, you have 3 or 4 different vertical enterprises, broadcast against broadcast, what happened with the personal computer, they were reduced to one lingua franca: bits. Today’s NYT at its bedrock nature is a new media. The same with broadcast. All broadcasts assemble in digital form, ultimately the things that used to be separate can now be stored on magneto-optical media and sent through the air or through wires. I don’t think people think about this enough. If you have a successful career, your job and your role is going to change. I can’t predict that. I’m not in the prediction business. The digital storm that
I think the two of you who have declared new media are the sharpest and the others are dullards.
The media that I work in now is at least 10 years old. I first saw the web in 1994.
Most people maybe saw this when they were seniors in high school or in college, it’s a native media to you. If we were to compare it to TV we would be in the year 1958. Broadcast TV really gets going in the post-war era. 10 years later there have been huge strides.
There were whole documentary units, and they developed a new grammar.
Day one of broadcast news is a newsreader. There’s no pictures. There’s no inflection. Plain-rat presentation. 10 years they developed a grammar. I’m very dissapointed as to what the Internet has accomplished in its first 10 years. So in that sense this New Media has not been creative or as much as it could be. I think it’s left the people who are coming in the second or third wave the great opportunity to shake this thing into something new. All of you are fundamentally going to be Internet journalists. It’s going to be created and available in a web fashion.
What sort of ideas do I have? Watching the Matrix, one of the ways I thought would be to put a data port in the back of everybody’s head. [Shirine: “Is he serious?”] Another idea was to have robots perform them as musicals.
I want to encourage people to think of the Web as their natural media. I know that history is a big part of what they teach at Columbia. When you’re studying history, look at ways that old ways of conveying information were disturbed and uprooted and transformed and think about doing that with the Web. Thought I’m dissapointed with what the Web has done, I’m pretty happy with how the Web has assembled and created a brand new audience.
Newspapers were traditionally local. Likewise broadcast were mostly local. But since its founding the Web has been an international medium. I would not underestimate how important that is. The good news for journalists is that you have a potential audience of 6.5 billion. [Ed: Not true.]
Reuters recently announced that they were going to offshore various journalism jobs to India. So that’s sorta the downside.
Which sorta brings me to the vocational part. Everybody here is of average age 27/28 and you’re about the age I was when i decided that I was going to be a journalist. I packed groceries, drove trucks, moved furniture. I don’t know if any of you have such a distinguished background. What’s differrent from you is that when I entered journalism boundaries were much harder to crack. You could get an internship at a newspaper or radio station. You couldn’t be a sole proprietor. What we’ve seen is the success of people being sole proprietors.
Matt Drudge with very little education but lots of chutzpah created a tablod sensationalism and rumor mongering and gumshoe reporting to create something brand new. The real pioneers in journalism tend to be these outsiders. They don’t have the constraints of the profession binding them. That gives them sort of leverage over their career.
He’s taken the gossip forum and the snarky observation and he’s applied it to Washington politics and city living in NY and products of Gizmodo and Hollywood. You would never find a major media company saying that we could use this technique to use this new enterprise. Time Magazine would spend 3 years and $15 mil, Cond� Nast would take a year and half to launch it. Nick Denton has taken a simple idea with great execution with a valuable new kind of journalism.
I would encourage people once again to breaking those rules. Bob Woodward: “All great moments are when defying authority.” He had to struggle and fight his bosses.
My background and my qualifications for doing what I do are nil. I was no more of an expert on the press than anyone else. What qualified me to be a press critic was that I had a strong interest in journalist and I liked answereing questions on how it was put together. I wrote this press column mostly out of interest. I started in 1986. At first I tried to get other journalists to write about the Times and the Post critically. They were worried that they would alienate people. Because I thought it was a fluke I thought that maybe I have no career beyond this job maybe I should burn all the bridges before I encounter them.
What the Press afforded me was to do something no one had ever done, which was real time criticism of the press. So much of what has been appeared is months or years old.
I think that this would be like writing about the World Series six months after the fact. That’s what the New Yorker was doing, with Roger Kahn. When we got started at Slate, we had just come to a time it was possible for me to have access to hundreds of newspapers that have been published that day.
In a fast-paced world, I’m addressing and criticizing the performance of my peers much as a theatre-critic would, someone who appeared in a play that day.
one of the things that I wrote about in the column today is about, that we’re at this age now where press criticism is easily accomplished if you sit down and read those newspapers. Why don’t more newspapers avail themselves to this? No press critics. I tried to figure out why that is. Though I’ve been practicing this, it wasn’t until yesterday that I ran across this great quote. There is this enormous blind spot that newspapers and broadcasters willed upon themselves.
You almost never read the NYT criticize the Post or ABC take on CBS. The New Yorker rarely slashes and burns another publication. They want to vilify politicians. I think that my success has been a function of the fact that I’m the only person who seems to be that willing to do it on a regular basis and in real time. The others are at Vanity Fair and Tim Rutton at the LA Times.
Talk about how I form a column and where ideas come from.
I read in April 03, Judy Miller encountering this mounds of dirt where the precursors to WMD are found. I couldn’t believe that a pile of bullshit that it was. I ventured that 90% of the people in this room could analyzed this thing. She won’t name what the precursors are. She hasn’t spoken with this Iraqi scientist. What’s more is that she has submitted this article to the army for vetting and censorship before it’s published. I was astonished that it was on Page 1. I continued to follow the journalism of Judith Miller that summer and found that she had published piles of bullshit before and continued to do so. This is from what I consider the best newspaper in America. Anybody who looks at her stories would say “you’ve got to be kidding.”
I kept a campaign against the NYT arguing that the Times owed it to its readers to correct the record. We have a right to get it wrong because you can wait four or five years for a PhD dissertation. It took the NYT almost a year to acknowledge what I said and what other writers on the Web to finally go back and take a look at her reporting.
It still strikes me as very bizarre that a handful of people writing on the Web in a profession that’s as large as ours were criticizing Judith Miller and the NYT. One of the reasons that I think that my writing and the writing of William Jackson were able to make a difference was that the NYT could not ignore what we were saying. If you go back 10 years ago, if I was a Washington City Paper it would be very easy to ignore. It’s a newspaper that’s printed 100,000 a day. Journalists and policymakers aren’t going to be alerted to it.
Jim Romenesko’s site at the Poynter institute. Romenesko has made our profession much more accountable than it’s ever been. CJR and American Journalism Review do great work. If you’ve thrown a turd in the punchbowl and it takes three or four months, a lot of people are going to drink it and get sick from that. He has a very ecumenical view of the press. I have a lot of respect for him.
This isn’t part of my talk but there’s another current controversy which newspapers are turning their eyes away from. Newsday and its sister paper Oy! and the Dallas Morning News have committed huge circulation fraud. In the case of the Chicago Sun Times they’ve exaggerated their numbers by 25%. The press has largely reported this in brief things in their business pages. These aren’t just accidents. There are people in these newspapers who basically told lies about their circulation so that they can command a higher advertising rate so that those corporations can make more money. If this had happened in natural gas or airlines or the making of Barbie dolls there would be well-sourced journalism coming out of all papers. The newspapers are ignoring this. I think that this is because this is one of the great uncovered frauds.
My email is pressbox@hotmail.com
I’m getting close to the 45 min mark.
One of the rules that changed with online journalism is that online journalism are able to harness the wisdom of their readers in a way that newspapers can’t. 15 years ago if you had the phone number of a journalist you could call them at their desk, today you have caller ID. Journalists have closed themselves off and have insulated themselves from the greater culture. I get so many great ideas from publishing my email address. Or they bring me down when I get too full of myself. That doesn’t happen to newspaper or broadcast journalists. Right down to the Letters to the Editor now. They’ll cut out all the vibrant exciting and telling words and will reduce it to monosyllables and destroy your argument. No strong opinions need be stated unless the editors want it stated.
I want to give a bright parting sun-shining optimistic send-off and that is to really praise Russ Kick who is the Matt Drudge of the early 21st Century. Russ Kick is a guy with not much journalism training. He started a website called the Memory Hole. It’s paradoxical. In a time where all information are being digitized, has been week by week been pulled down. The reason why he is one of my heroes is that he and others have recorded this and have put it up on mirror sites. I’m sure everyone’s followed that the war dead need not have a photograph of their caskets. Laws really are on the side that the dead person has a right to privacy. That’s been our government’s desire.
Only one journalist had the balls to FOIA that information. Something that any journalist or me could do.
I really urge you to go to his site. He’s shown that there is a dark side to the Web and the Web visionaries thought it would be sweetness and light, that it would be obliterating evils and turds in punchbowls but what we’ve found is that the govt can co-opt the Web to reduce the amount of information. He’s a guy who is bringing a kind of enlightenment.
Thank you.
Dr. Hammer update
Ed: “Doc” refers to Dr. Frank X. Ford, the theatre director at Samohi.
Talked to Doc today, and he seemed really sweet and pleasant for the first time in ages. I asked him about Carl Hammer, and he said that Mr. Hammer and his wife had taken in an abandoned, fucked up girl who didn’t have a proper home, to live with them as sort of a foster child. Apparently, she confused herself with who the “enemy” was and accused Hammer of commiting all sorts of sexual acts with her. So of course, she’s a lying little cunt, and I’m hoping that because there’s no real evidence, that he’ll come out innocent. It’d really be awful if he lost his career over this. I feel bad for the guy, he’s really kind and respectable. This is something he would never do.
Dancing as Protest
Guerrilla Dancing Update (from John Perry Barlow, of the Grateful Dead and EFF fame):
Along with fifty or sixty others, I’m going to dance at them. Dividing ourselves into several platoons of guerrilla dancers disguised as ordinary pedestrians, we are going to roam the sidewalks in Republican rich zones, periodically erupting into wild and inexplicable explosions of dancing. We will sustain these for a few minutes before melting back into the crowd and heading off to strike someplace else. I believe this will throw them off their game just slightly, since most of them don’t or won’t dance and are unsettled by those who do. (Q: Do you know why Southern Baptists don’t make love standing up? A: Because someone might think they were dancing.) In addition to being the most genial form of protest I can think of, I’m also convinced that when you’re dancing, you’re at least not part of the problem…
“He shouldn’t wear a kippah, he’s not Jewish!”
First things first. My Wired story is now online here.
Last weekend: On Saturday morning, we left for Montreal from Hartford through upstate New York at about 7:30 am. There’s not a lot to see en route, except for that at Saratoga Springs, we found a cool coffee and bagel shop which provided great respite from the pounding rain that we encountered nearly the whole way. Once we got north of Plattsburg, we approached the Canadian border — and I was surprised to see some of the “Exit” signs marked also as “Sortie” on the American side.
Once across, the best sign was a friendly reminder to Yankees that “Our Signs Are in Kilometers!”, and then pretty much after that most everything was in French. The radio was full of Québecois and English and some were in some strange combination of both (like the ad for “Le Show-Biz Show”) and the guy who was switching between English, Spanish, and Québecois. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Montreal, is aptly named for the hill that it stands before (“Mont Réal,” or Royal Mount) between it and the Saint Lawrence River. Coming through the city, the large buildings loomed, but a summer clear air pervaded through. I quickly realized that the Quebecker rules of having dual language in all signage are somewhat of a double-standard, in that English all but disappears from Montréal street signs and so forth. Entering Montréal some of the signs are dual language and repetitive, like “Pont Richard Bridge.”
We got Nena settled. She lives in a sixth story apartment on the corner of Rue Coloniale and Rue Sherbrooke, a few blocks from McGill. I also met her Egyptian boyfriend, Ali, who is a very cool kid who grew up in Bahrain — and speaks English, Arabic, and French.
While Ali and Nena and Heidi went off in search of a mattress, Martin and I hit up a place on Rue Saint Laurent called Frite Alors!, where we had La poutine à Vladmir. When we asked what the “à Vladmir” referred to, our waiter asked one of his colleagues and came back with the answer — “You know, Putin, Vladimir Putin.” [Explainer: If you said “Putin” as it’s written in English with French pronunciation, you’d come awfully close to the French word for “whore” (putain). So a few years ago they decided that in French his name would be Poutine (poo-TEEN)., which is also the name of the Québecois dish.]
Very funny.
Poutine, for the uninitiated, is a big bowl of fries, with fresh white cheddar cheese curd chunks over it, and then gravy all over that. Artery-clogging goodness at it’s finest. Martin and I agreed it’s the kind of thing that you can only have about once a year. It’s probably best around midnight in the dead of winter, though.
Sunday, we had breakfast with my Aunt Alenoush, her husband Behrooz, and my Iranian grandmother, Zarijoun, who ended up giving me a set up of dishes for my new apartment which was very nice. It was good to see my aunt and uncle again — I hadn’t seen them in several years.
We made it back without a hitch, and I hit up a Chinatown bus from Hartford to NYC. I was home by 11:30 pm, where I was greeted by a package from Boyk of some small things I left in Berkeley, including my wireless router, and my box set of Star Trek: TNG Season 7 (!) .
This week, I’ll be visited by lots of friends and family. Byron was in town yesterday, and Martin comes to NYC to check out NYU on Thursday, and Dallas on Friday, and Heidi on Saturday, where Sina will join us from Boston for a Dodgers vs. Mets game. It’s cool to have visitors, as it gives me an excuse to get away from my laptop and out in the city. I am much more reluctant to go out when it’s just me on my own — I just enjoy it a lot less.
Today I didn’t have any class, so I went out on my beat in Crown Heights, and spent some time wandering through the Lubavitch neighborhood in and around Kingston Ave. First I met up with a fellow student who is covering Crown Heights, Sara Hassan, who is Bangladeshi, but was raised in South Carolina (?!?!) and went to Columbia College in SC and we headed to the Crown Heights Youth Collective where we met up with a couple other Crown Heights J-schoolers and did a q-and-a with Richard Green, the director.
After that we split off and went our own ways and I wandered about through the Jewish neighborhood, often seeing seemingly contrasting things, like a Lubavitcher teen with tefilin, dark coat and pants, big black hat — zooming down the street on roller blades. I popped into a bakery and had a great black and white cookie (superior to the ones at Nussbaum & Wu’s) and then had whitefish on a poppy seed bagel.
I had a great short chat with some guy who was waiting for a friend, and then with two women who were there with an elderly bearded man who were having lunch. The first woman said to me: “So who are you?” meaning that I obviously looked out of place. When I explained that was a journalism student covering Crown Heights and so forth, she said that the next time that I was in the area that I should wear a kippah to garner people’s trust, as she went to go order her food.
Her female companion turned to me and asked, “Are you Jewish?”
“No.”
“Well then you shouldn’t wear the kippah.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
Then the first woman came back.
No. 2: “He shouldn’t wear a kippah, he’s not Jewish!”
No. 1: “How do you know?”
No. 2: “I asked him.”
No. 1: “Are you sure you don’t have a Jewish grandmother or something?”
Me: “Yes, I’m sure — but I have a Jewish girlfriend.”
No. 1: “No, that doesn’t count. But I still think that people would trust him more if he wore a kippah.”
No. 2: “But he’s not Jewish!”
I laughed and returned to my notepad.
Canada is really big
The new issue of Wired is out, the one with the Governator on the cover — I have a short profile piece on this kid called Aaron Swartz. Go buy a copy, cause it’s not online yet.
I was in Canadia this weekend, taking my cousin Nena back to McGill in Montreal. What a cool town. Lots of French stuff, and lots of stuff I didn’t get a chance to explore. I came back with a bellyful of poutine, and a bottle of Havana Club, that I proudly smuggled across the border. More on all of this later.
Things I learned this weekend:
– Upstate NY, if you’re driving through, is really boring
– Poutine is great, but you can only enjoy it occasionally
– Canada is really big
– Vermont, if you’re driving through, is also really boring
– Vermont has no T-Mobile cell service
– The US Border patrol is now conducting checkpoints inside the border. We got stopped somewhere in Vermont, asking myself and my cousin Martin if we were US citizens. When we said yes, we were allowed to continue.
Dinner with Byron tonight. I’m thinking cheap Korean down Broadway.
“Cut a class, kiss a frog, get drunk, get a life.”
That was the sage advice from Bill Gorta, of the New York Post, a former cop turned journalist, who offered it up as his main tip to us — or in other words, don’t live and die amongst other journalists — get out and experience other things.
This week has been plagued by more repetitive lectures, orientations, drills, et cetera. So far, (and at least one student agrees with me) I’ve found that we have a great deal of exercises about writing short stories, headlines, and all that. I think that’s it’s pretty rudimentary and that you probably wouldn’t be in the school if you couldn’t do this already. I’ve been kinda bored with it, but this is only going on for another couple weeks and then we get into a regular schedule. Good for us, we have the convention to cover — each of us have a story assignment. Mine will be interesting (keeping the subject under wraps for now), I promise.
There was a photo taken of our RW1 class, so you can see what we all look like. I’ll point out some of the more noteworthy characters:
Moises (on the far right, with the shaved head) : A Puerto Rican Jew, graphic designer turned journalist.
Abeer (bottom left, red shirt) : 31 year old Egyptian journalist, who has been writing for The New York Times for the last six years from Cairo.
Denise (second row from the bottom, far left) : From the LA area, covered community news for the LA Times recently.
Prof. Gissler (top left) : Our fearless leader.
Channing (top center, big hair) : From New Orleans, has written for Publisher’s Weekly and a few other pubs.
Angus (to the right of Channing) : A Montrealer who has written for the Toronto Star, and lived in Thailand for about 18 months.
Sarmad (just below me in the blue plaid) : The Baghdadi.
Cyrus (above and to the left of Sarmad) : Some crazy Californian who probably spends too much time in front of his laptop.
Shirine (the one with the big hair near Prof. Gissler) : Lebanese, via Monaco and Montreal. Is into “planning parties” and has worked for Elle in Montreal.
Josh (far right, near Moises, red shirt) : In the dual degree program in Religion and Journalism. Is a professional classical singer. Wants to be a “better asker of questions.”
Today we had a couple of lectures, including Gorta. Following him was Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a pastor in Brooklyn, who talked about African-American issues and churches, and covering religion and the role of religion, et cetera. One thing that he said that I took issue with and wanted to raise as an honest question without causing a ruckus was that he said that the number one problem facing the African-American community was racism. While I acknowledge that racism is probably a problem, I just don’t believe that in 2004 America that this is the number one problem facing this community. It’s certainly not my place to say what is and isn’t important to them, but it would seem to me that there would be other issues, like jobs, or family issues, or AIDS that would be more important. One thing that he said was “I want to know why there aren’t more black everything” — meaning politicians, journalists, or whatever else. While I agree that minorities should be encouraged to take up whatever position and path that they choose, just because the majority of journalists at The New York Times in 2004 are not African-American doesn’t make it racist. Perhaps that may have been true in 1954 or 1904, but I can’t imagine that this is still the case. I fundamentally believe that most of these issues that people attribute to race are more associated with socio-economic status, and are not attributed to race. Rev. Youngblood said one of the first things that people should do when dealing with the African-American community is to not blame the victim, but I think that you should also not attribute blame where blame isn’t due — in this case the blanket “racism” is keeping people down. I just don’t buy it.
Following that lecture, I had about 6.5 hrs to kill, and so I headed back out to my beat in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. The first stop was a Guinean restaurant that I’d read about on Chowhound called Fatima’s, where I downed a hearty plateful of beef stew and rice (in Senegal this would be called ceebu-yapp, or rice and beef). Pretty tasty and hearty for six bucks. The owner, a Pulaar/Fulani, was a guy called Ibrahim Diallo, was surprised that I knew something about African food and that I spoke French. I’ll have to go check that out again sometime. After that I strolled south on Franklin Ave towards Eastern Parkway and popped into a Malian cloth shop. I chatted up (and ended up interviewing) the owner of the store. He happened to sell Malian mud blankets, like the one I have and gave out to a few select friends — he was selling them for $45. I got them (after some hard bargaining) in DjennŽ for $5 apiece.
He was my first interview of the day, followed by seven more, on the topic of “living under the shadow of terrorism in NYC” — our first formal assignment for RW1, due Saturday morning. I’ve done the reporting yet and will write the story tonight or tomorrow. Basically, the verdict is that people are more cautious (a few refusing now to take the subway, for example) but that people are resigned to the fact that they have to keep going on with their lives.
Following the encounter with the Malian, I headed down, in search of the remnants of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I had looked up the old address, 55 Sullivan Place and went to see what now stood in its place, and to see if there was any kind of marker or plaque or whatever. When I did find it the spot, I discovered that it now was an apartment building, and there was an adjacent school, called Jackie Robinson School (Pre-K through 8), which apparently was Jackie’s home when he was with the Dodgers — and who did I find but the principal, Bruce Copeland standing on the steps, who became my second interviewee. He was a kind man, very willing to talk, with long tied-back dreadlocks, but dressed in nicely pressed slacks who seemed to assume command of the space — and spoke of being on “hallowed ground” in the shadow of Ebbets Field.
Tomorrow, Martin returns from Thailand, and he and Heidi and I drive back up to Hartford, and we all move Nena back to McGill on Saturday.
SAMOHI Band Teacher Charged with Sexual Misconduct with Minor
Ed: I was in the band from August 1995 to June 1997 and from August 1998 to June 2000. As far as everyone I knew was concerned, Dr. Carl Hammer was something of a no-nonsense teacher, but overall was a good trombone player and cared deeply about the marching band. I’m really shocked.
Surf Santa Monica ; August 18 2004
By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer
August 17 — For the second time in two months, a Santa Monica High School employee has been charged with alleged sexual contact with a teenager.
Carl Stephen Hammer — a 37-year-old SAMOHI band teacher who has worked at high schools and middle schools in the district for nearly nine years — turned himself in to authorities August 6 and was charged with two felony counts of allegedly performing “lewd and lascivious” sex acts with a minor, police said.
Hammer — a Santa Monica resident who is married with children — posted $40,000 bail and will remain free while he awaits his next court appearance, scheduled for October 8, police said.
The charges — which come in the wake of a months-long joint-investigation between local police and the California Department of Children and Family Services — apparently stem from a July 6 encounter with a 14-year-old girl, according to police officials.
Information on whether the student is enrolled in the district has not been released..
The school district placed Hammer on paid leave indefinitely, per his contract, said John Deasy.
�He is on paid leave until the matter is investigated and resolved,� Deasy said.
A support team comprised of counselors and psychologists will meet with SAMOHI band students Monday, Deasy said. Meetings will also be held with parents and teachers.
�When students realize there is misbehavior, they share it with students,� Deasy said.
This is the second time in two months a SAMOHI employee has been rocked by sexual misconduct allegations.
Mike Hearn, 37, a part-time assistant football and basketball coach, was arrested in June and charged with sexual relations with two girls — a 15-year old and a 17-year-old — as well as sharing pornographic materials with another 15-year-old, according to prosecutors.
The two younger girls were both students at SAMOHI.
Hearn — who is no longer employed with the district — pleaded not guilty to the nine felony counts last month and is under house arrest until his next court appearance on August 30.
Anyone having additional information should call Leslie Trapnell of the Youth Services Division at 458-2256 or Sgt. Mohamed Marhaba at 458-8457 or the watch commander at 458-8426.
Callers who wish to remain anonymous may also call the We-Tip national hotline at 800-78CRIME.
“Genial Mop-Top”
If you know my friend Rachel Rosmarin, you might also know her brother, Ari, who has been immortalized in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. We ran into each other on campus today.
Ari Rosmarin, a nineteen-year-old Columbia junior who mans the front desk, gave Ezili the telephone number for one of the protest organizers. A little later, a fabric importer who works in the area popped in to say that he thought the civil libertarians were misguided. “After 9/11, this is not the time for protests,” he said. “If you take a hundred cops to protect protesters from getting out of line, that’s a hundred cops not doing what they should be doing, which is protecting me.”
Rosmarin, a genial mop-top from Santa Monica, greets most of the walk-ins. “A construction worker came in and said he wanted a political sticker to put on his helmet,” he said. “It turned out we didn’t have anything except one that said, ‘Marriage for Everybody.'” The hardhat politely declined. His buddies on the job, he said, “already give me enough trouble for wearing a Red Sox T-shirt.” Someone else came in to report that he agreed with one of the signs in the window. It was the text of the First Amendment.
