Newspaper stuff, a question for bloggers, and how AC/DC let me down

My monthly SJ-R column celebrated International Newspaper Carrier Day by harkening back to my days as a paper boy. Here’s just a sample of what at-home subscribers were asked to stomach while sipping their morning coffee last Sunday.

It was the ability to consistently answer the early-morning call that separated us paperboys from our contemporaries, who chose pampered pursuits such as store clerk or burger flipper to earn a little spending money. While the rest of the town lay snuggly in their beds, we were setting the day into motion by greasing the wheels of civic life through the delivery of the local daily, the lifeblood of the community.

There was a special camaraderie among paperboys in those days. A few of my fellow carriers and I occasionally would gather on the corner after completing our rounds. Here we would swap stories of bravely facing down vicious dogs and espying comely housewives as they attempted to stealthily retrieve their paper while still in their nighties. Old man Fishburn, our district manager, would drive up to say hello while suspiciously eyeing our bags to see that all of our papers had been delivered.

So it turns out that detectives in trouble aren’t a temporary thing, as I so cleverly and erroneously opined last summer. I’ve kept quiet as more and more published reports have questioned their ethics and practices in carrying out their duties. The Bloggers Code of Conduct dictates that I now speak.

Although I never defended the detectives beyond the fact that no charges were ever filed against them, I did suggest that a certain weekly publication was slanting their coverage to disparage the duo. After reading parts of the report that the SJ-R has posted online, it seems that the IT was on to something with their renegade cops angle. They’ve earned the right to gloat a bit in the comment’s section, but I suspect that they won’t.

I had some down time this weekend so I decided to look-up the lyrics to AC/DC’s “Givin’ the Dog a Bone.” I was appalled, nay, sickened at what I discovered. That song’s not about forced child labor in third world Asian countries. It about advocating the teachings of the Crawlin’ Kingsnake John Lee. Just when you think you know a band.

Call it vanity if you will, but I occasionally Google BlogFreeSpringfield to see what blogs and other Web sites are referencing or linking to my work here. Most bloggers will tell you that such searches will occasionally result in a surprise or two. Someone unknown to them will have stumbled across something on their blog and found it compelling or ridiculous enough to mention on their own site.

I was fortunate enough to find something that I wrote here about Barack Obama on the Chicago Tribune Web site. They didn’t credit me personally, but they did mention BFS. What’s more, I must have been making sense at the time I wrote the passage because it wasn’t listed under a category called “Idiot Ramblings of Downstate Bloggers.”

A question then for all of you bloggers: where was the most surprising place you found a link or a reference to your blog?