The Post's Andrew Marra, in our Story of the Day, tells us that domestic violence charges have been dropped against Yanni, which is welcome news at the Pulp. (Most people run his mug shot, but I prefer to remember him as he was).

The Pulp hates abuse as much as anybody, but this story never added up, as I explained on the original Pulp site a while back. Thank God he's got this off his shoulders.

Now he can get back to making that horrible, horrible music.

The King
In other Pulp news, the new site had its debut on Romenesko today, though in a rather osbcure spot. Try to find the reference here. Romenesko is, of course, the greatest blogger of all time. The Pulp aspires to be like him when it grows up. A friend of mine told me I should call this blog Normenesko. I thought about it, too. Here's a little-known Romenesko fact: He works all day in a Starbucks shop in Evanston, Illinois and, on the side, has a Starbucks gossip site. That's right. He knows Starbucks -- which he calls "America's favorite drug dealer" -- as well as he does the national media. It's staggering. The man must be hardwired to that laptop.

Someone Has To Die Tonight II
(Here's the second installment of my little tale for your weekend pleasure. First part is below)

When I turned around I saw that this guy was younger than me, probably about 19 or 20. About the same size as me. I got right to the point.

"Do you want to go, motherfucker?" I asked him, getting in his face. "Because if you want to go, I'm ready, motherfucker. I'm ready to fuck you up all over this fucking place. Let's go, motherfucker!"

I was gone. I truly didn't care. It was exhilarating, but I was still scared as shit this whole confrontation thing would backfire. It wasn't the guy. I was worried about a mob-type action. The guy looked at me and said:

"Hey man, I didn't mean anything by it. I've just been fucked over by the newspaper before. I don't like reporters. But you're alright."

I'd scared him. He told me his name and a couple days later I looked it up in the News-Press archive. The guy had been named by police as a suspect in the Rachel Nail rape and murder. He really didn't have anything to do with it — which explains his bitterness. Over the next year, I saw him a couple of times (at a drag race, I remember) and he treated me like I was one of his best friends. It was strange.

Anyway, Jim and I left that scene at four in the morning. And let me tell you something, there was nothing smooth about Travis in his double-wide at 4 a.m. after a night of serious chemical abuse at Timber Trails. He was a degenerated little bastard. I can't go into details here, but none of it was pretty.

Jim Greenhill

I don't think I ever went back to Timber Trails. But Jim, a tall British fellow who was so thin we joked that he looked like a Holocaust victim, did. And he didn't tell me about it, which was a no-no. He and I worked the crime beat together and were basically partners. We covered crack murders together all the time. Once the Fort Myers Police Department arrested the wrong man and we proved his innocence in two days. The charges were dropped. There was also the case of the Finley Carter Funeral Home, where a drug-abusing mortician failed to bury several bodies. They were discovered rotting in a storage shed, many of them melted in the summer heat all over their Sunday best. One exploded. Then police found the mummified bodies of four infants the back of the funeral home. Interesting place, Fort Myers.

Anyway, Jim drove out to the Trails a day or two after that night in a damn Lexus owned by his older girlfriend, who happened to be the Lee County Medical Examiner (and is now his wife). That's right, Jim drove out to the dark heart of redneck Florida all by himself. In a brand new Lexus owned by the county coroner, no less.

And the first thing he did was get stuck in the mud.

I saw him the next day outside the newspaper, where we smoked cigarettes every day. The side of his face had obviously been beaten. When I saw the black and blue I knew instinctively that he'd gone back to the Trails. And I was real pissed that he'd gone out there without telling me.

Jim reluctantly told me the story. After he got stuck in the mud, a kid named Anton just hauled off and punched him in the face. Probably for being a British guy in a shiny Lexus at Timber Trails. Jim stood there and took it. Didn't retaliate. Probably was the only smart thing he did — or didn't do -- that whole night. He was surrounded by punks and just when it looked like curtains, a friendly native intervened and helped him move the Lexus out of that mud.

That was Jim. When he went to get a story, he got the damn thing, even if it knocked him upside the head. It was a magnetic pull — and it made him one of the best journalists I've ever worked with.

So we kept working the Lords of Chaos thing on and off (Gannett wound up nominating our stories for the stanking Pulitzer), but Dick Clark's company dropped the ball on the movie. They kept trying to get Alicia Silverstone, who was supposedly hot at the time, for the female lead and she sort of toyed with the idea, went back and forth, before rejecting it. That killed the project.

Jim wound up in rehab and I left the paper in 1998, after staying at least a year too long. Jim, now married to the medical examiner, vacated the News-Press at the same time with a plan to do a book on the Lords of Chaos. He became a regular visitor on Florida's Death Row and became more familiar with Kevin "God" Foster that you would believe.

Jim was even enlisted in Foster's plot to kill a few witnesses.

(Okay, I thought I was going to be able to wrap this story up today, but it'll have to end in Monday morning's post. Thanks for tuning in).

Did you see on Romenesko that New York Times sports business columnist Richard Sandomir criticized the 60 Minutes puff piece on Tiger Woods that aired this past Sunday. Sandomir did a good job, but he missed two things.

1. Ed Bradley gave Tiger not one, but two jovial fist bumps during the interview. That's got to be a first for 60 Minutes -- and a second.

2. What makes the whole Tiger/Bradley affair near-scandalous is that the segment was used to promote a new deal between the news show and Yahoo. After the love fest ended, the show touted the Yahoo/60 Minutes deal on the air. The Tiger segment also served as the inaugural piece of footage on the Yahoo site (oh, and Buick is all over this thing, too). It's so obvious. CBS had this big deal to announce and who better to promote it than Tiger Woods, the biggest sports superstar in the world? It's win-win, with only journalism ethics taking a hit.

From the "What The Hell Do I Know" file, the Herald story about the FDLE chief's e-mails in the Bay County boot camp death case caused the special prosecutor to take the FDLE off the case. You may recall that I derided the story as overplayed and overstated, saying the e-mails, while newsworthy, were relatively harmless.

Still feel that way -- and still feel that the fact that FDLE honcho Guy Tunnell was a former Bay County sheriff who founded the boot camp was troubling enough from the get-go. That alone should have made the governor's office cut him loose from the case.

The proof, however, is in the pudding. What the e-mails did was illustrate Tunnell's conflict of interest, not so much in their content but tone. Though not damning, they made it understandable and tangible. And that is the latest reason why Herald reporter Carol Marbin Miller deserves all the Pulp's accolades.

But the impact may be negligible. The result is that Hillsborough Sheriff David Gee will step in to take FDLE's place. I don't know much at all about Gee, but I've covered Florida crime long enough to know that these sheriffs stick together like bad sushi. But hey, I could be wrong.

Kevin \"God\" Foster

Moving On
I'm tired of newspapers today. It's Friday, time to kick back a little. Thought I'd share with you a tale from the past. And it ties neatly into current events, namely this month's release of a mass market paperback Florida crime book.

It begins one night a decade ago. I was standing there at the bonfire after midnight in the middle of nowhere. Other than the orange-glowing fire light, it was pitch black night. I felt as if I were on another planet really, standing there in that deeply isolated maze of woods and sand and mud. I was also fairly intoxicated and surrounded by a slew of dangerous rednecks who were out of both their trucks and their minds. But I was getting along well.

And then I hear the sound of some guy talking into the back of my head.

"This one here is a fuckin' reporter," he said with hatred in his voice. "He's a piece of shit. I should kick his ass right now. Fucking pussy. Piece of shit reporter ... "

He kept talking like that until my face started burning with a particularly virulent hybrid of rage and fear. He was right about one thing — I was a reporter, working at the time for the great and venerable Gannett corporation, specifically the New-Press in Fort Myers. If the top editors would have known what I was doing, I would have likely been fired in a USA Today minute. But my colleague and friend Jim Greenhill, who was also there "working" that night, and I were beyond worrying about something like that. We were chasing a great story and, in this particular instance, the consumption of large quantities of alcoholic beverages was pretty much required.

It helped us blend into the woodwork and build trust. To hell with the rules of some pathetic newspaper corporation. We had a job to do, after all.

The place was called Timber Trails, a godforsaken maze of woods and sand and mud where these proud redneck kids bonded with the most important thing in their lives: their trucks. They stayed out there all night long, warping their little-used brains with all manner of booze and drugs. Sometimes bad things happened, like the unsolved rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl named Rachel Nail, which involved some backwoods form of Satanism.

We were there because a little group of white high school kids living in a redneck part of Lee County had declared war on Lee County, burned down a few local landmarks, shot-gunned their band director dead at his home, and planned a murder spree at Disney World. They called themselves the Lords of Chaos, and the comic-book name was no accident. The LOC was made up of a few nerds who followed a charismatic punk named Kevin Foster into the "vortex of bloodlust and arson," as John McDougall, the somewhat messianic and all-out weird sheriff of Lee County at the time, put it. All the kids had nicknames. Foster was "God."

The story got the attention of Dick Clark's film production company, which bought the rights to our work. The American Bandstander was trying to branch out from TV to feature films. Clark's boys paid Jim and me $7500 for an option, which seemed like big money at the time. The $3000-some-odd I got after the agent's cut was the first decent chunk of change I ever saw. And Gannett, bless it, let us have it all. Had the schmoozing producers in Hollywood made the movie, well, that would have been some real dough.

Anyway, we tracked these kids and their friends to Timber Trails. A friend of Kevin Foster's named Travis was our guide. He was a short 17-year-old with a mustache and struck me as a little smoother than should have been possible. He lived in a double-wide and had a pet monkey. Travis sort of reminded me of Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused.

We get out there and we're drinking and smoking and everybody's whooping it up around this bonfire. You have to understand: Our goal was to get into the intestines of this beast. We had to see what these lost youths did in the dead of night in their dark little kingdom of Timber Trails. It all had to do with the boredom and pathos of east Lee County and we thought it might help to explain the drastic actions of the Chaos bunch.

But it wasn't all youths. There were guys out there in their 30s, older than me. It was going okay, but you could feel the distrust. We told them straight-up that we were reporters. There was a kind of dance going on around that bear of an issue. Violence always seemed to be lurking in the shadows, but I was having a decent time. There were some funny characters and some decent roughnecks out there, it turned out.

Then this guy starts talking into the back my head.

He's daring me to turn around so he could beat my ass all over the Trails. And while this guy is calling me a pussy, the people I'm talking to start to smile knowingly as if to say, "I bet this guy is a giant pussy." And I'm starting to think that if the tide turned in that direction, I would soon feel some boots upside my head.

There was no choice. After telling myself that pain was only a state of mind, I turned around to face the bastard. It was time to call him out, come what may.

(I have to continue this in an afternoon post. I swear it's not pointless.)

Did anybody fail to notice the dominant art on the Sentinel sports page today? It's Maria Sharapova bending down after a serve. But what's she's really serving up is maximum cleavage. You know some of that plum, fair, privileged Sharapova cleavage that you don't come across every day (if you don't happen to have a copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, that is). And I'm not even mentioning the vertical splits action.

Camille

I certainly don' t have a problem with it. Photographer Robert Duyos -- who is an excellent sports photographer -- has a hell of an eye. But I'm not sure you can get anymore obvious. Unless you count this picture of model Camille Neviere, which clearly shows the outline of that which is forbidden on TV.

Speaking of which, did anybody notice the front page of the Sentinel's Lifestyle section yesterday? I may just be super-sensitive to these things, but you could see right through the bathing suit on the model on the right. At least in the newspaper, you could.

I've been meaningless shots of scantily dressed celebrities laced throughout the newspaper lately, but the Sentinel seems to be upping the ante on the local sex quotient. Again, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying.

Not Cool
A great reader followed me up on my request for a Nexis check on the number of times Leslie Gray Streeter has used the word "cool" in her copy. Beginning in November 2001 it turns out she's written the word 382 times. That's not cool -- that's a crutch (I know I recently used a variation of that same phrase recently, but hey, it works for me).

Ben Stein Is An Idiot
Stephanie Horvath's lede on herstory in the Palm Beach Post on Ben Stein:

"Ben Stein might be Hollywood's smartest celebrity."

Has Horvath ever heard this man yammer about politics? Did she know he called the Abu Ghraib prison abuses "fratboy mistreatment" (and, no, he wasn't joking). Did she know that he said that George W. Bush "is going to go down in history as one of the great peacemakers and democracy-builders in the history of the world?" Let's see if he's right about that one. Hell, just go down the Media Matters list of Ben Stein's idiotic, pigheaded comments to get a good picture of who we're talking about here.

This isn't to single out Horvath, who is a fine reporter. This kind of quick hero worship feature is done every week. Famous person comes to town. Famous person talks to a group of self-serving, ultra-rich corpo-goons (in this case it was "SunTrust Bank clients"). Famous person gets fellated by local newspaper. The editors expect nothing less and, God forbid, nothing more.

But it makes no sense. Wouldn't it make more enjoyable copy if you challenge these people a bit? Don't you think that people see right through this fluff and wind up respecting us a little less the next morning? All readers aren't brainless barnyard animals, you know. Just half of them and they don't know the difference anyway.

Newspapers have lost it lately over television. The fearless leaders of the industry seem to think it sells newspapers to talk about television and reporters are more than happy to oblige them by writing about it. Beats work, you know. There's nothing wrong with good TV reporting, but endless jabbering about who's going to win American Idol is just pathetic. And it's the kind of thing will only hasten the death of newspapers. Newspapers, ultimately, have to be a distinct alternative to TV, not a cheerleader.

But man is the Sentinel going nuts with the pom-pons. This week, while Sentinel TV writer Tom Jicha was exploring his strange fascination with the WB, Ralph De La Cruz got into the act. Seems the fellow discovered the Sopranos. A half a decade late. Okay, enjoy it Ralph, but for God's sake don't bludgeon us over the head with it. Hey I have an idea: Get that fat ass you're always talking about off the couch and do some reporting. Go out and meet somebody other than your own relatives or hamster or whatever other rodents you have caged up in your house. It's just an idea.

The day after Ralph went gooey on the Sopranos, Sherri Winston got all hot and bothered about Sanjay Gupta on CNN. "Is it just me, or does anyone else think CNN's medical expert Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a real hottie?" she started.

It's just not right. You shouldn't get assaulted by this kind of garbage when you open your newspaper in the morning. And it only gets worse. Winston goes on about a Gupta report on people who have sex while they're sleeping. Then she tells us about her tonsillectomy. And later mentions that her tonsils were "giant." Just what I needed to know. What the hell is going on here? Hey I have an idea, Sherri. Get your ass off the sofa for ten minutes.

Then you have the Herald, which has gone so far as to start a feature by Howard Cohen called the "Idol Watch." .

We can't forget about the Post's Leslie Gray Streeter, she of "yummy" Pulp notoriety. I'm not going to go crazy on her, but just look at her blog. Then turn away forever. It's American Idol all the time. Somebody forgot to tell her that American Idol isn't "cool," her favorite word. (How about somebody run a Nexis search on her use of that word). It's corporate whoredom played out in our faces, churning out horrible pop stars and bad music. They're just running these voices through the studio machine and cashing in on them before everybody realizes they're crap. Somebody's got to sell Ford vehicles, right? Might as well be the raw meat on American Idol.

Side-by-side with Streeter in the Post blogosphere is Kevin Thompson. The lede on his most recent post: "You gotta love The Trumpster -- most of the time." It's about The Apprentice and, yes, it's absolutely worthless. There are dozens of chatrooms on the Internet where people talk about this stuff. The Palm Beach Post isn't carving itself out a niche -- it's only adding to a flooded market.

The good news is that all of this is easily fixable. Just stop writing this crap.

That Wasn't So Hard, Was It?
The Miami Herald followed NT on the Mike Kirsch "BOLO" story and credited Jeff Stratton for having broken it. On top of that, Herald reporter Jennifer Lebovich (along with Wanda DeMarzo and David Ovalle) did a damn fine job on the story.

DeFede Didn't Leave The Building
Click on this for a blast to the past, back when the Miami Herald was a rocking newspaper. No, not back to the 70s and 80s, before Knight Ridder ground the Herald into the, um, ground. But to the halcyon days of Jim DeFede. Apparently, old icons never die at the Herald -- they just get deleted from the interface.

The Key West Citizen has an exhaustively reported story today by Chris Tittel about a weird murder that's got Pulp splattered all over it. Hard-luck factory worker Johnny Ray Holt in Alabama robs girlfriend's parents' house, drives down to Key West, kills a man in his house and steals his car. The kicker is that a homeless man practically witnessed the daytime murder. He saw the victim, Rodger Keller, walk into his house, heard the sound of a gunshot, saw a man matching Holt's description leave the house, and even saw blood in the house when he looked to see if Keller was okay. The homeless man told construction workers nearby about it and asked to use a cellphone to call 911. They blew him off. He knocked on the door of a neighbor who also told him to get lost. The neighbor: Circuit Judge Mark Jones. The homeless man gave up. Keller's body wasn't discovered for another three days later.

Fortunately for Smith, the good law enforcement folks in Crisp County, GA had Jones' back. They picked up Holt on an arrest warrant for the burglary in Alabama before the murder was discovered. He had Keller's driver's license with him and had used Keller's stolen credit for phone sex calls in Georgia. The ensuing investigation revealed that Holt and Keller had a history. A history that, according to Tittel in his Story of the Day, involved theft and naked pictures of the 24-year-old Holt in 63-year-old Keller's home.

These Florida tales in paradise just warm your heart, don't they?

Like Rats On A Sinking SunCruz Ship

Vermin and Pestilence

In the Sentinel's story on Jack Abramoff's impending sentencing we learn that Abramoff and his former partner Adam Kidan hate each other these days. Sean Gardiner quotes Kidan as saying, ""I was his best friend and his business partner. He wrote e-mails to people saying I'm more like his brother than a friend. I don't know why he's doing this to me. Clearly, he's completely controverting the facts of the case."

Can't think of two men who deserved each other more. Shame their beautiful bond had to be broken by a silly federal case that helped to reveal the dark underbelly of the Republican Party.

Sentinel Proves It Really Can Do Simple Math

After the Pulp revealed that a subject in its photo essay on the homeless, Invisible Lies, had duped them about his service in Vietnam, the newspaper kept the bogus information up for several days. This despite the fact that if what Larry Masters was saying was the truth, he served in the jungle as a "tunnel rat" when he was just 14-years-old.

Good news, bona fide veterans: The Sentinel finally excised Larry Masters' claims about Vietnam from its Web site. It may have taken a while, but the Pulp done good, ma, the Pulp done good.

Two of the South Florida-based Pulitzer finalists -- the Sentinel's FEMA stories and the Herald's hurricane tracking series -- went head to head in the prestigious IRE (Investigative Reporters & Editors) journalism contest and the winner is ...
The Sentinel's FEMA submission.
It won a certificate from IRE while the Herald was one of four finalists, which is a nice honor unto itself. Congratulations again to Sally Kestin, Megan O'Matz, John Maines, and Jon Burstein. Again.

Damn You, Sugar Ray Robinson

The Herald's Jay Weaver had an hilarious story about Jack Abramoff's plea for leniency in his federal fraud and bribery case. Abramoff and his lawyers, Neal Sonnett and Abbe Lowell, submitted a "sympathetic biography" in which they talked about everything from his parents enduring the Great Depression to his becoming an all-city football player in high school. The funniest line: ''Mr. Abramoff laughs at himself when he remembers how he would walk to synagogue wearing only his socks, wondering what was wrong with all of those people from his synagogue who would stop to ask him if he wanted a ride home,'' the memo said.

Yeah, if we was wearing only socks, I just wonder who these people were offering him a ride home. And did they offer him a towel to cover up as well?

The lawyers also basically pin the rise of one of the most corrupt figures ever to grace our nation's capitol on Sugar Ray Robinson, the great boxer. Read Weaver's story (of the day) to see how that happened. I always was partial to Jake La Motta anyway.

Carol Marbin Miller is moving on the Bay County boot camp death again, this time writing about FDLE director Guy Tunnell's e-mails about the investigation. The headline on the Web: "E-mails put Florida investigator in hot seat."

Now I may be jaded, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of explosive information in these e-mails. Sure, the fact that Tunnell is a former Bay County Sheriff himself, is friend of the current sheriff, and started the boot camp in question raises troubling questions about his (im)partiality. But the e-mails? Well, let's look at a couple of them.

The story emphasizes Tunnell's sending the Bay County Sheriff, a friend of Tunnell's who operates the boot camp, a couple of e-mails assuring him that the videotape of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson being manhandled at the camp wouldn't be released.

That's seems exactly the position you would expect an investigator to have. Give me a lawman who wants to release information before he's completed his investigations and I'll show you a lawman who isn't going to last in his job very long.

Then Miller goes into an e-mail he sent on his Blackberry to all Florida sheriffs regarding a state discussion about changing the way the state's boot camps are run: ''I know -- I'm singing to the choir -- just feels good to get it off my chest!,'' Tunnell wrote. ''For YEARS, we [the Bay County Sheriff's Office] asked for more equitable funding so as to allow us to expand the services, offering transitional phases, step-down, etc., only to be met with more bureaucratic red tape, frustration, etc. 'THERE . . . I DO feel better!''

Okay, Tunnell seems to be admitting that boot camps need help. That to me is a good thing. What am I missing?

All in all, the e-mails don't prove anything and certainly don't put Tunnell in any "hot seat." I'm not saying they aren't worthy of print (they do show that Tunnell has a bit of a bunker mentality) but to splash the story on the front page and act like these little notes are bombshells just wasn't responsible on the Herald's part. I know Miller has done good work on this and I know the Herald is on a crusade -- and I like that -- but overplaying things like this only hurts the paper's credibility and makes it look just as partial as Tunnell might be.

PBSO Goes Waco On Lady At Boca Pointe
The Palm Beach Post's Stephanie Slater has a well-reported story on the shooting of a 56-year-old schizophrenic woman in her home by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy yesterday. They say she came at them with a knife. They go into a crazy old(er) lady's house and kill her? This reeks of bad training and bad judgement on the part of the cops from the get-go. Way to make us feel safer, PBSO.

The Other Homeless Beating
Speaking of Palm Beach crime, the teenager in that other homeless attack has been charged with attempted murder. This is the one that happened in Riviera Beach that you probably haven't heard about. Why? Well, according to the "staff report" (yeah this didn't even warrant a byline, apparently), it was because the black youths who committed the crime weren't specifically targeting homeless men. They just happened upon him. Hence, it's not as big a story.

Hooey.

Latoyia Figueroa

We all know it's because of one simple fact: The perpetrators in the Riviera Beach attack were black. Society simply doesn't view that as much outside the norm. But when white suburban teens do it in Fort Lauderdale, it goes national. It's the same reason you know everything about Laci Peterson but never heard of Latoyia Figueroa.

While some of this is due to the simple nature of news, reporters are partly to blame. I guarantee you that if the Post put a team of reporters on the story of the Riviera Beach beating, they could find as rich a human story as Brian F-ing Hooks ever gave them.

What happens when you invesigate South Florida's finest? Well, for Channel 4's Mike Kirsch it meant having a BOLO put out his ass. "Channel 4 News is... setting up officers and instigating confrontations, then filing complaints with the various police departments," the Broward County Police Benevolent Association wrote about Kirsch in the mock BOLO that was published on its web site and sent to all of Broward's police departments.

It might have been funny, but it also included Kirsch's home address, birth date, and DL number. That sounds like an invitation to harrass, don't it? Kirsch thought so. The New Times' Jeff Stratton tells the full story here (a belated Story of the Day, btw).

Failure to Lampoon
When you see the previews of Failure to Launch, you just know it's bad. Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, romantic comedy ... it conspires to make you want to get away from it like that sweating and hyperventillating guy with black goggles from those Budweiser commercials. Not surprisingly, it's gotten soundly bad reviews from almost every newspaper -- except the Sentinel. Movie critic Phoebe Flowers, who usually isn't really bad at what she does, gave the picture a good review. "It's good. Not brilliant, not a future Oscar contender, but a perfectly sturdy, sweet, pleasingly non-formulaic production that should amuse a variety of age groups," reads her quote on the Rotten Tomatoes web site.

Amuse a variety of age groups? Pleasingly non-formulaic? How gross.

Her quote is near ones from Roger Ebert ("Oh, what stupid people these are") and a critic from the Boulder Weekly ("I thought I was watching the Challenger disaster instead of a romantic comedy") and Film Freak Central ("It's two things and both of them suck"). Phoebe, I still have hope for you, but I'm having flashbacks to Tom Sander -- and that's not a good thing.

What Would The Hell's Angels Do?

Think They Had Any Stones?

That congregation at the Church of Nazarene that beat up the burglar with baseball bats and hog-tied him is growing on me. It's good ol' American justice, really. But when I saw the pictures of the burglar, who sustained broken ribs and other injuries in the attack, I thought of another Church figure. Just imagine him with his arms spread back.

UF seems to be kissed by destiny in this years NCAA tournament -- but that ridiculous Corey Brewer shot didn't kiss off the glass.

Not So Lucky That Time

Did it?

You remember the falling-down shot Brewer hit to help seal the deal against Georgetown on Friday night? The shot that will probably go down as the biggest shot in Florida basketball history? Well, sportswriter Dave Curtis led his story in the Sentinel this way: "MINNEAPOLIS -- From his rear end, Corey Brewer watched the shot kiss off the backboard and drop through the basket on Friday night."

Curtis, who actually works for the Tribune Co.'s Orlando Sentinel, might be right. But I studied that unbelievable shot closely on the replays and I didn't see it hit the backboard. Look like he threw it -- and it was more of a throw than a shot -- right into the goal. I looked up the coverage of the shot and didn't find anybody else calling it a bank shot.

Somebody please answer this multiple choice question for me:
1. The Sentinel get the biggest shot in UF history wrong.
2. I am a dumbass.
3. All of the above.

Stop It

While I'm on Florida basketball, I have to ask that somebody give Joakim Noah a sedative. He's jumping all over my nerves with that chest-beating and gaped-mouth screaming he does ALL THE TIME. It makes you focus you look way too closely at that middle-aged lady's hair and "If They Mated" face. Joakim, you're a great player and obviously a good person, but try to find the line between "spirited" and "flat-out obnoxious."

Patti Deserves Better
There's nothing funny about what they did to Patti LaBelle Saturday night. As explained by Rochelle E.B. Gilken in the Palm Beach Post, she and thousands of fans were shafted at a show in Riviera Beach. Putting out a music legend in the cold after midnight? We treat our dogs better than that. For shame.

A Few Bad Sentences
Sticking with the Post, the Pulp got an e-mail from someone calling himself Carlton Conrad over the weekend. Conrad had a problem with Susan Spencer-Wendel's story on the sentencing of a Sgt. Michael J. Smith for his role in Abu Ghraib abuse. "You could do your aspiring-journalist readers a service by pointing out the intolerable prose in this story and the editors' inexcusable lapses. This sort of laughable writing should not appear in a big-market newspaper. No wonder people don't have much confidence in the papers anymore. And it's embarrassing."

My first thought was that Spencer-Wendel's story wasn't that bad. And I like the passion she brings. But the thing is undeniably riddled with bad sentences. I didn't mind the "thrumphs" so much and liked the way she tied it to hearts beating. But the noise wasn't coming from their feet but from their shoes. And you'd never see a "visceral reaction" since by definition those occur inside the body. There are terrible transitions ("So was the blunt ending to this court martial ...") and several grammatically disastrous lines ("The sentence is consistent with others sentenced for more minor roles captured in the photos.").

My thought: Spencer-Wendel traveled all the way to Fort Meade to cover this trial and it was disappointing. She tried to make up for it with great writing and that aspiration was her undoing. Trying to make a story sing like Patti Labelle can sometimes make reporters forget the simple things. Like coherence.

And her editors didn't have her back.