This dude was about 30 feet from Carrie and I in Rocky Mountain National Park this past weekend. I gave him the steely gaze of death and he slowly backed away. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Update: One of my dad’s colleagues has a brother who happens to be Christopher W. Ryan, Ph.D.., supervisor of game management services at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, and he offered his analysis of the bear:
I think it is one heck (375-425lb) of a big male black (brown phase)
bear. It would have to be over 5 years old – If he was in WV I would
say at least a 6-7 year old if not older. I would say that with only one
picture and at that angle that I’m 95% sure of that guess.
I’ve just returned from an excellent fishing trip with my buds Mike and Dave. More on that later, but I thought I’d share this bit of action from Friday night.
PS: Pushing the hook back through the skin, clipping the barb off and pulling the hook back out the way it went in actually does work.
The series, Church Secrets: Abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Memphis, is centered around the lawsuit John Doe vs. The Catholic Bishop for the Diocese of Memphis, et al, which the diocese settled for $2 million last year. The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Daily News sought successfully to have the case unsealed. A judge granted the request on the condition court documents were redacted to protect the victim and other innocent people.
The documents show how an abuse Memphis priest was reassigned rather than reigned in, and that sexual abuse and misconduct allegations were made against more than a dozen local priests in the past 40 years.
I handled the online publishing of the documents themselves, of which nearly 7,000 pages of the original 11,000 or so we published. You can read them on the site, or download them yourself for offline viewing (but beware, some of the PDFs are quite large). Many of the documents’ contents are quite graphic.
The documents were redacted by attorneys for the plaintiff and defendant, but inadequately so on the first-go-round, so they were taken down from the site for five days until the attorneys could take another stab at it.
So I’ve begun the strange adventure of home brewing, under the tutelage of one Jeff Melvin and Michael Erskine.
Last Friday, a beautiful day for a homebrew and a DIY project, Jeff and I build a wort chiller.
Jeff procured 50 feet of copper tubing, which we wrapped around a 5-gallon bucket. We bent the 90-degree angles around a can of dog food to avoid kinking. We attached heavy-duty hoses to the copper with worm clamps.
Here are the results, and Jeff explains how it all works and why it is awesome.
Debora Halpern Wenger, of the University of Mississippi, has released her case study of The Commercial Appeal’s True Crime project that I worked on.
If you’re interested to read more about why we did the project, what went into pursuing it and what we learned head on over to thecrimereport.org.
You can find the case study there, as well as my guide to crime data analysis when dealing with mounds of electronic records that may not be in the greatest shape.
I snagged the PDFs, too, which I’ve archived here:
August 12, 2010 
Posted in random 
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