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Not to wear out the subject, but the San Francisco Examiner — the
former Monarch of the Dailies — yesterday published a somewhat different take on the Paul Dean shooting. The biggest difference: The story explicitly raises the question of whether the shooting was justified. Also important: It names the officer involved in the incident and gives some background on him. I think the Chron must have had that information; I’ve never understood why it would be withheld.

So after the shooting outside my office the other day, the ambulance came and left without taking anybody away, and it was apparent that the driver who’d been shot was dead in the front seat of his truck. He was killed about 1:55 p.m. — everyone who watched assumed it was a man; and I thought briefly about what the percentage of police shooting involving women might be; 5 percent or less, I’d guess. His body stayed where it was for about three and a half hours while police investigators went over the scene.

Our office was buzzing. One person who walked into the newsroom said, “Cool!” when they heard why everyone was clustered at the windows. Standard cheerful post-tragedy newsroom fare (I’ve said a lot worse myself). Down the hall, where people had a slightly better vantage point, maybe 15 people were taking in the view, and one of our photographers was zooming in on the truck cab with his camera; he said he could see the driver slumped over in his seat.

One thing I started thinking about was just who was the dead man, how he’d arrived at this point, who might be waiting to hear from him or waiting for him to come home, who was in for the worst news they could ever hear. The first-day newspaper and TV stories didn’t say anything about that. I missed the morning story on day two that identified him and gave his resume as a car thief:

Dean, 32, a Mission District resident and former parolee, had two
convictions for auto theft. He had a failure to appear warrant stemming from an auto theft at the
time of the incident. The $20,000 warrant was issued Jan. 12.

That’s all the personal information about Mr. Dean (or his like — ne’er-do-wells who wind up catching a police bullet in the midst of apparent lawbreaking) that most news stories will ever give you. And that’s a not-so-subtle way of coloring the news — giving nearly absolute initial credence to what the authorities say and reducing their suspect to a rap sheet — that you see in almost all police reporting. Every suspect starts out guilty in the media — that presumption of innocence happens inside the walls of the courthouse
only, if there.

But I found out a little more about him when I walked past the scene of the shooting yesterday. I came: across a little memorial. A bunch of flowers at the base of a telephone pole. The remains of a couple dozen candles burned down to the ground. A black ribbon. A farewell note from someone talking about how crazy and fun and out of control and larger than life Paul was (maybe I’ll go back out there and copy it down). And also the poster pictured above (shot with the phonecam) — Paul Dean and his kid, and a bitter message to the police. I mentioned seeing this to a colleague, and she told me she had seen about eight or nine people out there the night before holding a vigil. Those were the people who got the news.

Now that we’re into the official birthday period — see previous post — it’s time to unveil the official birthday slogan.

Ready?

Here it is.

“A half century of excellence.”

I think it’s just grandiose enough without going too far.

Hey! I went to bed nearly 50, and I woke up really 50 (the official moment is still 13 minutes ahead, at 9:21 CST).

At work the other afternoon, about 1:55 p.m., I  heard a series of quick gunshots. An opening shot, just a blink of a pause, then four very rapidly. Several people commented on the shots, and after a few seconds, I climbed up on my desk to look through the blinds. My window has a view to the south overlooking a construction site on Townsend Street; beyond lie a series of streets that lead up to Potrero Hill or toward a commuter railyard. It wasn’t clear where the shots were coming from, but someone exclaimed, “Look at that truck,” and said something about a cop. Across the way, maybe 60 or 70 yards from us, we saw a white pickup-type truck (others recognized it as a Toyota 4Runner) with smoke or steam coming up from the front. Also, a motorcycle policeman who apparently had fired the shots; can’t remember exactly where he was when I first saw him — behind the truck, I think. Within 30 seconds or so, other police units started arriving; in a couple minutes, about 15 or 20 squad cars and police motorcycles had arrived, and officers clustered around the truck. It looked like there was a figure in the driver’s seat — but given the distance and the angle we had, it was hard to tell. After another five minutes or so — or about seven or eight minutes after the shooting (2:02 or so), a San Francisco Fire Department ambulance arrived; paramedics went to the truck with some kind of hand-carried case while others got a stretcher out of the back of their vehicle. Within two or three minutes, they took the stretcher back to the ambulance. Everyone watching knew whoever was in the truck was dead.

About 2:07, or 12 minutes after the shots were fired, the first news cameraman appeared on the scene, and lots more cops kept coming, too — the uniformed people supplemented by a variety of guys in suits and crime-scene technicians. The picture above, shot at about 2:25, shows the white 4Runner to the left, the ambulance to the right, and the cop onlookers and investigators (I mean, I don’t see how they all could have been investigating) scattered around the site.

Here’s The Chronicle’s first-day story on the shooting, from Wednesday’s paper; a followup published Thursday; and a picture of the scene published Thursday on the Chron site.

Say you’re headed someplace with the kid. The kid gets bored and demands a story. Doesn’t want to hear any of the slop you’ve got on CD or tape — heard all of it a thousand times. Wants you to read something from the new story book, now. So you pick up “Finding Nemo” and start reading — at 50 mph while negotiating a construction zone and busy Saturday evening traffic on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. You’re so engaged in entertaining the kid that you don’t notice the van driving alongside
with a driver who is (also somewhat crazily) trying to record the scene. Click here or on the pictures for larger versions of the images; in them, you can see that the kid was standing up in the back seat, in prime position to get hurled through the windshield if mom lost control while turning the page.

On the eve of the two-week-iversary of my last post, let me ask, where was I?

I can’t remember, really. There was something going on before our German exchange student (Gregor) arrived (from Darmstadt); and before Kate and I spent a week painting our dining room and hallway and bathroom; but I forget what.

Two observations, though: It’s no wonder that so many people start these damned things and then quit them after just a few months (that’s the conclusion of a widely quoted software company study. If you care to write something that might please your nonexistent
audience, this takes time. And life is sure to intervene with its niggling little demands. I’m in a state of constant minor, irritated awe at people who appear to lead lives and accomplish something more than the usual breathing/eating/working/sleeping that most of us struggle to get through — and still post about 12 times a day on their blawwwwgs.

On the other hand: As far as starting blogs and quitting them, is there really anything at all unexpected about that? There’s a pretty good trade in paper diaries and journals; plain ones, fancy ones, lined ones and unlined ones. But how many of them are ever opened more than once or twice for the painful self-conscious scrawl before the would-be diarist remembers that watching “Green Acres” reruns is less demanding or maybe even more fulfilling? I don’t have the abandoned journal stats at my fingertips, but I’ll bet you could fill several world-class libraries, or landfills, with the barely begun daily musings of John and Jane Q. Doe, deeply reflective citizens of the world.

Which means there’s nothing about blogs that makes them tough to keep up, and lots about the press of daily life and the awkward reality of running into your own thoughts while you’re staring at an empty space just waiting to receive your musings, tales, insights, prose mastery — heck, your all-around brilliance.

And with that, I have now filled my empty space for the day, and the “Seinfeld” rerun about the loaf of rye bread is on. Good night.

First, you have the head of the CIA telling a Senate committee that on some number of occasions over the last couple of years — he named three and hinted there might be others — he has contacted the president and vice president and corrected them when they were misrepresenting intelligence about Iraq, terrorism or both. Still, the CIA chief says that, despite the utter lack of evidence to back up Bush and company’s insistence that taking out Saddam was a vital U.S. interest and not just a family whim, he doesn’t believe the administration stretched the truth to justify the war.

And then you have this story: A Wisconsin kid named Jason Frey answered the phone one day in 1976, when he was four years old, and won a big radio-station giveaway: A donut a day for life from a local bakery. And 27-plus years later, he’s still collecting. As told, kind of poignantly, in the Fond du Lac Reporter:

“Frey was awarded an official certificate stating that he had won a doughnut a day for the rest of his life at Everix. He also got to tour the bakery with Dick Everix Jr. himself and learn how the doughnuts were made. From then on, Frey made sure he got the most out of his prize. A frequent visitor of the YMCA throughout his childhood, Frey would almost always stop by Everix on his bicycle before or after a basketball game to pick up his doughnut for the day.

“If he came later in the afternoon and there were no doughnuts left, the clerks would give him a cookie instead, he said.
” ‘They used to serve me right away,’ Frey said. ‘I didn’t ever even have to take a number.’ “

What do those stories have in common? Nothing.

People are saying “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” is the first fantasy film to win best picture. Yes, but:
–In the first place, it’s a stretch to call the story a fantasy. Sure, there’s lots of imaginary beings and the whole quest thing going on. But I think Tolkien really invented his world not to spin stories about elves and wizards and talking trees, but to create a setting against which he could explore some basic themes about mythology and events in the real world.
–In the second place, a short list of Best Picture winners that could also be considered fantasy — if you buy one dictionary definition of the word as “literary or dramatic fiction marked by highly fanciful or supernatural elements”: “Chicago” (2002), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “Titanic” (1997), “Forrest Gump” (1994), “Amadeus” (1984), “The Sound of Music” (1965), “My Fair Lady” (1963), “Tom Jones” (1963).

That’s a headline I always wanted to get into The Examiner, especially when a predicted deluge turned out to be an hour of drizzle. But the last few days, the National Weather Service forecast a big storm, and this morning we got one. But it was of the “fast moving Pacific” variety: We had a big blast that started just before dawn and was pretty much spent by 10 a.m. Streets in the Greater TechTV area were flooded by a combination of heavy rain and high tides that overwhelmed storm sewers. The top picture was taken by another TechTV guy across the street from our building about 9 a.m. The bottom photo is a phone-camera shot I took about 3:30 this afternoon.