Space and time continuum?

Saturday night, I tuned in to the last half of the NCAA men's ice hockey championship game between the University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs and the University of Massachusetts Minutemen.

In and of itself, watching the game is not news- or blog-worthy. I’m not one of those people to write about every little thing I do, see or eat, so what I watch on television wouldn’t rank up there, either.

But how I came to be encouraged to watch the close game in progress (it was 1-0 Duluth when I tuned in), who I “watched” the game with and how that was accomplished is blog-worthy or, at the very least, a fun topic to write about.

My friend Lois Backscheider sent me an electronic message: “Are you watching? Bulldogs up by 1!”

After a few more messages involving the score and period, she implored me to find a television on which to watch the “nail-biter game.”

When I had located the channel and found the game, I let her know I was with her in spirit and would cheer on her beloved Dogs, since she’s an alum of the university.

University of Minnesota Duluth Pep Band. Photo by Clint Austin /Duluth News Tribune.

But here’s the background you need to know about Lois and how we came to know each other.

Known to me at the time as Miss Moline, Lois was my Journalism I teacher while I was in 10th grade at Overlea High School. She taught journalism and English classes and also served as the school newspaper advisor.

After finishing her career with Baltimore County Public Schools as the assistant principal at Lansdowne Middle School, Lois and her husband Denny in 1994 moved back to her home state of Minnesota to help care for an ailing parent.

Thanks to the connectedness provided by Facebook, Lois and I became FB friends after not seeing each other since I was a 15-year-old sophomore and she was a rookie teacher. 

Since we reconnected, we have discussed the changing face of journalism and the general delivery of news content. At the time, I was the education reporter for the Frederick News-Post and was long used to digital photography, writing stories on a laptop and filing the finished product to an in-house server where editors had the access needed to do their thing. 

I appreciated not having to go to a library to do research, nor did I have to go to the court house to view trial files or the police station to view charging documents, thanks to the Internet. Frederick County also streamed most of its government and Board of Education meetings online as well as aired them on the Frederick County cable station, which made life much easier on many reporters who needed to double check a quote from someone or verify some little factoid.

But as that sophomore during the school year of 1972-73, I could not have imagined a future with the world at our fingertips and the instantaneous delivery of not only news and photos but also the real-time personal communications that could take place.

So it was one of those awakening moments Saturday night when the gift of what was happening with my former high school teacher struck me.

Over the chasm of nearly 1,200 miles (to say nothing of nearly five decades), Lois and I were watching the same hockey game (thanks to satellite TV) and communicating in real time via Facebook’s Messenger service. She was nestled in her Hermantown home, cuddling with her two dogs after her husband abandoned the game to watch the NASCAR race, and I was watching from a neighborhood pub.

We cheered together when the Bulldogs scored their third and final goal, watched the kids representing her alma mater embrace the national championship trophy after finishing off the Minutemen, 3-0, and then bid each other a good night.

There’s a lot of negative things to be said about the Internet in general and social media networks specifically, and they are definitely tools that need to be used carefully, judiciously and safely.

But it’s moments like Saturday night that make me smile and appreciate the way social media lets us connect and build memories that couldn’t have otherwise happened, short of a well-planned and expensive vacation to make it happen in person.

A little journalism fun at the expense of local man

I realize this is a nerdy journalism thing, but I’ve been having a lot of fun watching the online responses to the challenge of Googling “Florida Man” and your birth date to come up with the story of your life.

Journalists have long made jokes about the ubiquitous presence of “local man.” Used in headlines across the country, Local Man and Local Woman manage to get themselves in more trouble than any one individual could or should be able to handle.

We’ve joked about Local Man’s apparently endless supply of cash that allows him to freely travel the country and how we think he would begin to learn from his mistakes.

While Local Man makes headlines in every little berg and hamlet across this expansive country, his antics always seem to ramp up in states like Texas and Florida, where his activities seem to be a little more creative than those in most other states.

So I laughed when Florida journalists recently felt the need to straighten the record regarding a man who had himself filmed as he baited and attacked a pelican while vacationing in Florida. Original headlines apparently referred to “Florida Man,” but as it turned out, the culprit was actually from Maryland. 

Social media posts immediately decried the identification of the pelican-attacking man as a Florida resident and made sure the world knew the man hailed from the Free State.

With a lot of the nation’s media focus on Maryland, Florida and the now widely hated man, a social media challenge was issued encouraging the Google search of Florida Man along with your birthday and the challenge went viral.

The results were hysterical.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Googled his Sept. 14 birthday to find “Shirtless Florida man is back to take Hurricane Florence because the Internet made it so.”

Meh.

It apparently doesn’t take much to de-escalate a police situation involving Florida man, as evidenced by the headline of “Slice of pizza convinced Gulf Breeze man to end police standoff.”

But some Florida residents will put themselves at peril trying to escape police, as proven by “Florida man jumps in canal of toxic blue-green algae fleeing a traffic stop, say police.”

Florida Man has been accused of exposing himself to an exotic dancer, putting semen in a coworker’s water, and hitting his pregnant girlfriend with a bag of tortilla chips during an argument over the unborn baby’s paternity.

The ambitious guy  has fought huge pythons, been attacked by a bear, and won a $451 million Mega Millions jackpot. He’s a busy, sometimes brave, sometimes belligerent but always entertaining sort of guy.

The Florida Man challenge took on a life of its own and became the subject of many newspaper articles explaining the popularity of the task and printing some of the results. Many reporters took to creating lists of the top headlines involving Florida Man, knowing that editors like writers to stay on top of trends and create “clickable” articles.

An online search of the challenge brings up a huge lists of articles, as well as the occasional advice to not participate in searches that reveal personal information like your birth date.

To give equal opportunity, I discovered a headline about the Florida woman who thought she had food poisoning after eating bad Chinese food and ended up giving birth to a healthy, full-term baby that she supposedly didn’t know she was carrying. The Pensacola News Journal ran the story under the headline of “Pensacola woman mistakes 37-week pregnancy for bad Chinese food.”

My birthday search brought up several wild and crazy Florida Man headlines, including “Florida man says he only grabbed his mother by head to kiss her,” from the Brevard Times; “Florida man stood in fire chanting gibberish,” from the Bradenton Herald; and “Teens who laughed and recorded a drowning man in his final moments won’t face charges,” from CNN.

But my favorite headline I found in my search was “Florida man wasn’t drinking while driving, just at stop signs.” Those born on July 12 can claim it for themselves.

Please feel free to share your results if you have taken (or now will take) the Florida man challenge. 

Have fun!