Criminals’ stories do not end when they’re put behind bars.
But with the little access South Dakota prisons currently offer to media, the parts of their stories we’re able to tell are often forced to end when someone is put under Department of Corrections supervision. While the DOC clearly has a responsibility to keep its facilities secure and keep close track of who is coming and going, it’s still a public agency, and it shouldn’t be able to be as stringent as it is with media access.
Read the original column here.
On Thursday, I drove about two hours to Gregory, spent three minutes in the Gregory School District office, and then drove the 110 miles back to Mitchell. Why? Because that’s the only way anyone in the district would give me the answers to three questions about school lunches.
The hardest thing for me to adjust to while living in Reading this summer has been learning all the differences between driving in Ohio and driving in Pennsylvania. Simply put, I’m not sure that one person in the entire state of Pennsylvania knows how to drive.
See the original story and video here.
I’ve always wondered why dogs like to stick their heads out of car windows.
After flying with the GEICO Skytypers, I get it: Your face might look a little silly while you’re doing it, but it’s so uniquely exhilarating that it’s hard to care.
One of the great things about going to college is getting the opportunity to meet lots of new people. This is very fun and exciting until you inevitably realize that many of these people totally suck. Most college campuses have student populations that are large enough to have hundreds or even thousands of permutations of ways to be the absolute worst, but five archetypical people can be counted on to stick to the classic ways of being super annoying.
I was going to put all of these people into a single blog post, but as I started writing about them I realized that that might be too much awfulness for anyone to read in one sitting. So, like members of a football team determined to wear down their opponents one by one, I decided to tackle them separately. Today I’m focusing on the first annoying person you meet in college: the person who lets their clothes sit in the laundry room long after they are clean and dry.
This year, I live in a building with its own laundry room in the basement. It’s nice because, unlike last year, I don’t have to drag all my clothes through three miles of terrible Ohio weather every time I need clean socks. However, because it’s only for people in one building, the laundry room is not very big and there is a limited number of washers and dryers (I guess there’s a limited number of washers and dryers in any laundry room. If anyone knows of a laundry facility that has somehow managed to procure an infinite number of washing machines, please let me know. The point is, this laundry room is small).
At any given point in my life, I have had at least one dog. Although they’ve been all different shapes and sizes and each had its own unique personality, each of my dogs has shared one common trait: all of them loved unconditionally.
This is one major difference I’ve found between dogs and other types of pets. Cats, for instance, usually seem mildly indifferent to their owners, regarding them as more of a roommate and food source than anything else. But based on my personal experience, it seems as if most dogs love their owners more than themselves. That’s a level of selflessness that even the most generous of people can never attain, but dogs do it automatically, willingly and happily, almost as if they believe that their purpose in life is to make their owners happy.
My dogs offered me the unwavering loyalty and friendship that it seemed people never could. Whenever I had a bad day, my dogs were always there to comfort me; even though they had no way of understanding what was happening, they would look sad simply because they noticed that I was sad.
ellen bardash 