(Here’s a post I put up last Thursday on my personal blog, when I was in the middle of getting the Trawler blog up to speed but it wasn’t live yet. Maybe it’ll give you an idea of how weird my life is.)
As you may or may not know, I’m working for Tucker Carlson now. He’s starting a new site called The Daily Caller that launches next Monday, and I’m the house blogger. I just moved to Washington, DC and I’m already hard at work. If all that sounds weird to you, just imagine how I feel.
So here’s a cool thing that just happened at work about 2 hours ago. One of my new coworkers, the lovely and talented Mike Riggs, got up from his desk with a huge smile on his face and said to me, “You want to go take a walk and see something really cool?” This isn’t the first time Mike has asked me this, but I went with him anyway.
We walked to Farragut Square, right down the street from the Daily Caller offices, to watch a police sting. Mike had just heard from a friend of his at the Washington Independent that the managing editor, Matt DeLong, lost his camera yesterday. DeLong then got a call from a guy who said he had the camera, but would only return it for $600. This is illegal, apparently. DeLong called the cops, and they had him agree to meet the bad guy in front of the statue at Farragut Square at high noon to make the exchange. They would then arrest the man for doing bad things.
So that’s what happened, and Mike and I watched it. Here are the cruddy cameraphone pics I took:
I don’t know if you can even tell what’s going on there, but the guy in the gray coat is being handcuffed by police officers for behaving very inappropriately. We watched as the cops pulled up and rushed the guy, bent him over that fence there, and slapped on the shackles.
I’m not a reporter or anything, so I’m sure I’m not following the right protocols as far as “facts” and “good writing.” But that was yet another amazingly cool event in an amazingly cool month, and it’s great to be able to blog it. A month ago, the only thing I had to look forward to was the season premiere of Lost. Now there’s all this.
Speaking of the Washington Independent, Dave Weigel has a story about the Daily Caller today. I think “conservative blogger” is kind of reductive, but hey, he spelled my name(s) right. And that picture of Tucker is great:
That’s like an Eastwood squint. “Go ahead… make my dinner reservation.”
P.S. Here’s a blowup of one of those pics:
The DC cops have taken some heat (no pun intended) over the snowball fight deal, but it’s good to know they’re on the job when somebody tries to extort you to get back something you left on the Metro.
P.P.S. One tidbit I forgot to mention, probably because I unconsciously screened it out for sounding too self-serving: As we were walking around Farragut Square and keeping an eye out for the unscrupulous knave to be arrested, I said to Mike, “What if a gun battle breaks out and a bullet nicks my aorta?” His reply: “Do you know what Tucker would do to me if I killed Jim Treacher??“