I’ve heard so many people cheering on fall this week. We had a little bit of a cool spell, bright blue skies and low humidity, and people were jonesing for more.

Just stop! Listen to yourselves! Autumn is the ultimate bait-and-switch. We’re frogs slowly being boiled to death. This is the start of the long, slow, miserable slide into winter.

This deterioration of joy really started June 21, the first day of summer [as I noted here a few days later]. That’s another trick to get your mind off the inevitable. You’re duped into celebrating the start of “summer,” but the death sentence has been written. The days progressively get shorter from that point on.

In Raleigh, NC, we have 14 hours and 35 minutes of day on June 21. From that point forward, we lose a little each day — all the way to December 21, when we have a mere 9 hours and 45 minutes of daylight. The sun sets at 5:05 p.m. on December 21! It could always be worse. The sun falls from the sky at 3:47 p.m. in Presque Isle, ME. [For the record, the high was 12°F on December 21, 2008, in Presque Isle. They had a 24 mph wind gust at one point. The low temperature: -29°F.]

So, while you’re whooping it up at the beach, by the pool or on the patio, enjoying those wonderful summer evenings, the Earth is stealing your day!

Sure, the fall is delightful. Those first few crisp autumn days are refreshing. But this is like saying, “My goodness, the view was spectacular as my airliner went down.”

Enough is enough! Winter is coming! It’s three to four months of mandatory death and desolation, as far as the eye can see! A careless, cold wind lays waste to the landscape. From the dead ground, twisted, gnarled, bare tree limbs claw at a dead sky. The teeming air, once filled with the calls of cicadas and crickets is silent.

You would go out and try to look for some kind of life on that deadscape, but you can’t stand being out in that miserable weather. A sunny winter day in Raleigh probably is due to a good cold front that just blew through. It’s 38 degrees with a enervating 25 mile per hour wind. If it’s not sunny, then it’s raining for four crummy days. The temperature, again, probably is sitting at 38 degrees.

If it does drop below freezing, it’s likely going to be an ice storm, and you’ll be unable to leave your house that lost its electricity three days ago.

You fall-lovers — you people are sickos! Check back in February to see who’s right.

The trees have hit that point in late summer where they just look tired.

Summer is now entering it’s senior years. It’s still active. It still has life. But it certainly doesn’t get around like it used to. Summer can still crank it up into the 90s, but the days of withering heat are in the past.

It’s like an empire that’s in decline. Yesterday, it was 68 degrees and raining. No doubt, this flagrant imposition of fall really knocked summer for a loop. It’s probably panicking — scrambling for a response. People who love summer know it won’t be long now.

I was heading out for my walk around the block Friday when I saw Sky 5 floating over the trees, coming in for a landing. I headed back to the newsroom, grabbed my camera and walked out in time to get some HD video of Sky 5 taking off.

It never, never gets old.

Kanye West (somewhat) famously wrote in all caps, “EVERYTHING TWITTER OFFERS, I NEED LESS OF.” I was feeling some of that when his anti-Twitter outburst made news back in May.

Well, finally, we have something in common.

I’m over Twitter.

Last fall, I thought Twitter had a lot of potential, and maybe it does. But several months later, my Twitter gears are stripped. I followed the advice of the “social media experts” (who are these people, anyway?) and followed back everyone who followed me — to build stronger relationships, they said. Well, I soon learned that I shouldn’t follow everybody who follows me.

I had to get out the digital cleaver and start hacking away at all these followers. My first decision was to ignore people who didn’t speak English. Easy enough. Once the waves of Spammers started hitting me, I decided not to follow anyone who sold anything. The porn spam taught me not to follow anyone with a female name followed by three digits.

Eventually, I pared down the list to include only people in North Carolina. I then cut it down to people who may be viewers. I was still following about 270 people.

Recently, I had to stop following all but 11 of the people/entities I followed, because the signal-to-noise ratio was too high. I saw everything, but I saw nothing. Eventually, it all felt like Spam. Sometimes, Twitter would have valuable information — a link, details on a breaking news story, a funny observation. But because of it’s nature, the Twitter experience serves up so much junk, it’s hard to find the valuable stuff.

At first, I thought that maybe I don’t have a beef with Twitter itself. Maybe it’s the people who are the problem. It’s like blaming the radio for bad programming. But I think there is a big problem with Twitter as a medium: It is of the moment. You have to be there, actively participating, for it to work. It’s a big time-sucker. There’s no good way to tell who’s going to be an interesting Tweeter and who’s going to blah, blah all day. You have to sit down and really comb through a lot of material to find the diamonds. Of course, I suppose I could have all of this sent to my mobile device so I could sit around in restaurants and Tweet back and forth all the time, but no, thank you.

Now, every business is trying to get in on the fad, spending a lot of time and energy to staff Twitter. Sears is hiring someone to be their Twitter moderator. A full-time job! But is the return worth the effort? Nielsen says 60 percent of people who sign up for Twitter don’t return the following month. When I was slicing up my list of followers, I found that most of the real people on there (not the SEO marketing social media guru spam crap-buffet) Tweeted once or twice (“Here i am on twitter!”) a few months ago and that was it. I suppose it’s possible they still receive and consume my content, but I think it’s unlikely. Of the 40 percent of users who do come back, how many are seeing Tweets and responding?

I should point out that I’ve corresponded with interesting, intelligent, nice people on Twitter. I’ve enjoyed it overall. But I just don’t need Twitter. I think it’s telling that younger people are not into it. They use Facebook and texting — and what more do you really need to communicate electronically with the people you know?

I’d love to hear from anyone who wants to send me an e-mail or add me to Facebook, but I’m over Twitter.

It was 5:30 p.m. on a hot Friday in August. The young woman sitting on the bench was wearing a knitted hat, thin dress and sandals.

“Are you guys going to the drum circle?” she bellowed as we crossed the street.

This is Asheville.

I’m about to leave after my first visit to the city. It’s fine. The restaurants are wonderful. The views are spectacular.

But drum circles, impromptu political protests and head shops really aren’t my scene. I felt like Captain Kirk warily surveying an alien planet whose inhabitants had gone insane.

I’m thankful we’re not here when UNC-Asheville is in session. Downtown already was crowded enough. It’s like they’re trying to cram 50 percent too much city into the existing infrastructure. Driving through town at night was harrowing, with constant lane changes, narrow streets, drunken kids falling out of bars and clubs and people who crossed the street whenever and wherever the mood hit. I could feel my brain quivering.

Asheville is a great base from which to set out and explore the Blue Ridge Parkway and places like the amazing Mount Mitchell. That was one of the better vacation experiences I’ve had in a while.

I’m detecting a pattern in vacation enjoyment — the farther I am from people, the more fun I have.

I’m on a crossword puzzle kick. I worked on two puzzles in moving cars during the past couple of days and had to stop before throwing up.

This little thing started on our June trip to Maine. We had some healthy layovers and delays, so I worked on a crossword puzzle. The time passed quickly. It was a satisfying, somewhat gainful way to pass the time. It’s satisfying, in that completing a crossword puzzle allows you to feel on par with the people who you believe create crossword puzzles. I think they’re wildly knowledgeable and clever word players. It’s gainful because you learn things from the crossword. Here are three things I’ve learned in the past month, all because of crosswords (answers below):

1. How miners get inside
2. What a marigraph measures
3. Immature salamanders

I do as much as I can without help, then I start looking up things. I want to learn the material.

I also do Jumbles in the paper. They’re supposed to be “ordinary words.” Today, for instance: DONKEY, PANIC, GROUP and HAMPER. Ordinary, indeed.

Earlier this week, they had SHOMAN as a clue. I tried and tried to solve it. I gave it 15 minutes, which is my limit. I’m not going Captain Ahab with the Jumble. Finally, I turned to the Internet Anagram Server, into which you can type a group of letters and it with spit out all possible arrangements. I typed SHOMAN, and it spits out HANSOM as the only real word. An ordinary word? Maybe in 1850, but how often have you used or even read “hansom”?

I’m now paranoid. I fear every Jumble has some archaic word, which I’ll never be able to solve.

Answers:
1. ADIT
2. TIDES
3. EFTS

There was a time when a lot of people didn’t have cable or satellite. We all watched the same four or five channels, CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, eventually Fox, and an independent station.

We’d be deeply engrossed in some television show when this happened:

This was back in time, before everything was “breaking news.” When you saw “SPECIAL REPORT” on the screen, your heart would sink. You knew that when they interrupted a show, it was important news — and in that split-second, some part of you prepared for word that the Soviets had launched the missiles and you wouldn’t make it to dinner.

The LA Times has one of those big, gassy, navel-gazing capital-J journalism blog posts wondering what would have happened in the media if TMZ had been wrong about Jackson’s death. Of course, TMZ reported it first and reported it correctly, so the LA Times is reporting about hypothetical scenarios.  (Some ideas for the folks at the LAT: “Analysis: Bipartisan response likely after space-alien invasion,” or “How would Loch Ness Monster endorsement affect ’12 primaries?”)

At any rate, they quote a Jeffrey Seglin, who writes an ethics column for the New York Times Syndicate (make your own jokes at home). His quote:

“A curious thing is at play here,” Seglin continues. “Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high. If CNN, Fox … got such things wrong, the consequences would likely be higher. That said, Fox News didn’t take as big a hit as it might have after it was revealed that the reports it filed on Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent were based on a hoax.”

On a related note, I heard some news reporter amid the Jackson coverage refer to TMZ as a “Hollywood gossip site”.

Have these people ever been to TMZ?  It’s news, albeit Hollywood news, so it sounds like gossip, but it’s mostly fact.  They have an incredible track record in the (admittedly inconsequential) world of entertainment news. It has been my experience that when TMZ reports something about Hollywood, it’s accurate.  I can’t stand entertainment news, and I don’t know who 90 percent of the subjects are, but I always cheer for TMZ.  They’re a great example of a start-up operation that knew exactly what they were doing and became an instant standard-bearer in their market.

And Seglin’s comment about Drudge — I suppose he’s referring to the minute amount of original reporting Drudge does. I remember a couple of Drudge stories that didn’t pan out, but he usually was reporting on a rumor that’s floating around the media.  Drudge’s site is 99.9 percent news aggregator. There’s almost never any original reporting.

Has Seglin never been to these sites?  Or is this some kind of old-media territorialism?

Eh, who cares?

My brother didn’t want to go all the way to Maine with us on vacation, but he wanted to be there for my mom’s first airplane flight. So he flew with us to Philadelphia, where we had a layover. I suggested he take the train into town and get a cheesesteak at Steaks On South, which we really enjoyed when we went to Philadelphia a couple of years ago.

He did.

He is a big guy — 6 feet tall and about 230 pounds — and I wasn’t sending him through bad neighborhoods, so I wasn’t worried. But he was wearing a button-up shirt with palm trees on it, and he thinks it it must mean something in Philly. He says several drug dealers approached him on 5th Street and offered him a chance to look through the merchandise. Basic pot, an assortment of mushrooms, you name it.

As he refused, he said the dealers were very nice. He had a great sandwich at SOS and took a cab back to the airport.

A reporter working on a story at a local middle school found a note on the ground.  It was written on a sheet of notebook paper, front and back.  It’s written chat-style, back and forth.  The bold copy is written in a nondescript print.  The normal portions are written in the fat, bubbly letters of a middle school girl.

Here’s the transcript. I’m redacting the names to protect the ignorant.

***

People keep sayin B—–a gon break up wit me kuz we not talking IDKY.

K—y, yew dnt got nuftin t2 worry bout bkus she was talking bout yew all day in klass and she didnt say nothing t2 me bout breaking up but idk…..but yew dnt be saying nothing t2 her 1st.

wut yall was talkin bout.

she just asked did me and S—–n go out and i was lyke yea den she said dat it wood be cute on a double date LOL.

Yea it would B. its crazy how yall R like bf’s and me and S—–n R 2.

i know right. but dat probley will never happen bkus yall be acting so damn scary!

im not scary she is
and wut do you mean by scary?

i mean lyke yall dnt be talkin and yall been talkin for a while.