The Three Pound Burger

Back in the summer, Rick Elissa and I took the Buford’s Pancake Challenge. We figured it would be a one time thing, but we started receiving all kinds of suggestions for other ungodly amounts of food that we could attempt to eat. The most awful of them was the three pound “Hall of Famer” burger at Michael Jordan’s 23.sportcafe.

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John Wong: A Passion for English Education

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New London Quarterback Josh Clements

This is the first of what will hopefully become a regular high school sports feature profiling athletes that we cover on the weekend.

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Winery Fulfills Daughter’s Dream

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Rick Koster declares Fort Trumbull a success

The latest edition of our video column.

Two amazing fourth quarter plays to open football season

The thing I love most about shooting football at local high schools and colleges is that you never know where the story is going to come from. Last week at New London High School, the game had reached the fourth quarter, and I was struggling to put together a storyline in my head. The first half had been sloppy, with a few botched plays leading to the scoring. There were no big offensive highlights to center the piece on. New London seemed like they were about to score when the Bacon Academy defense made a stop on fourth and goal. The next play was a 98-yard touchdown pass, that I was kicking myself for being on the wrong side of. I figured at least I had my big scoring play. However, it was immediately topped on the ensuing kickoff. The return man was a sophomore who was touching the ball for the first time in his first varsity game. All he did was take the return straight to the end zone.

The next week at Coast Guard Academy, I was looking at an ugly 5-0 game with one minute to play. Again, I was having trouble formulating a game story in my head. I knew that Coast Guard’s no huddle offense had the potential to be explosive, so I positioned myself downfield in case of a big play. That big play unfolded right in front of me as a pass was tipped right into the arms of a Coast Guard receiver. Two plays later, Casey Paris, the freshman tight end who had tipped the pass and dropped a fourth down pass earlier, caught the game winning touchdown.

Wizards of Weekend – How’s this for convergence?

Rick Koster, our A&E writer and online columnist, does a weekly radio appearance with our buddy Lee Elci at the radio station across the street, WXLM-FM. They use the appearance to talk about what’s going on at the paper, and to preview the local entertainment events for the upcoming weekend. A few months ago, the idea occurred to us to re-purpose the radio content for the Web. I or a member of our video team shoots the final “weekend picks” segment, about three to five minutes. Within half an hour, we have a humorous guide to weekend entertainment posted on TheDay.com and on WXLM.fm. They’re not the most popular of our videos, but they’re quick and easy to produce, and provide an alternative to the text-based events calendar on our Web site.

Fire at L&M Hospital

I had just returned from four weeks off after the birth of my son, and was supposed to be working in the office for the day, but when the executive editor comes in to tell me that the hospital is being evacuated, I have little choice but to jump to it. It was one of the hottest days of the summer, and of course I didn’t have a change of clothes in the car. By the time I was back at the office, my clothes were soaked through with sweat. It was nice that I cleaned my car during my time off, but I need to remember to put everything back in.My response was a little slow, so it was surprising to see such big flames when I arrived.

Behind the Scenes at The Movies

I’m currently in the middle of a four-week leave for the birth of our son, so I haven’t had a whole lot of recent work to post. Before I left, I was slacking on keeping this up to date, so here’s a quick dump of the the last three projects I worked on before taking this time off.

This video is part of an occasional series called Behind The Scenes that I do with Rick Koster. It’s a simple premise, take viewers somewhere they can’t normally go. Both Rick and I have a great love of the cinema, and thought it would be cool to see the inner workings of a movie theater.

Hostage Taker Calls The Day

This was just a bizarre day at the paper. There was a hostage situation happening half way across the state, but it involved a couple who had been involved in a notable arson case in our area. A reporter had come to grab a video kit to head to the scene. Another reporter popped in to pick up a second kit, and told me that the hostage taker had called one of our reporters. Suddenly, she had become part of the story. I had to figure out on the fly how to capture the audio of the phone call without screwing with her connection. The hostage taker called back three more times from inside the house, leaving me with about an hour of raw video to combine with another hour worth of tape from the scene. Segments of this video ended up playing on several local and national news shows.