Well, I thought it was interesting...

Checking Yahoo mail just now, I noticed that the top-headlines area currently had two different links to the Moscow roof collapse story, one from AP and one from Reuters. Since most news sources in the US use AP, you'll almost invariably get only one version of a story no matter how many different papers or online sources you check -- same quotes, same content, maybe a little repackaging or a different opening graf* (paragraph) to set you apart a tad bit from your competitors, but that's about it. So it's interesting to read two completely unrelated news stories on the same topic side by side.

The AP one:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060223/ap_on_re_eu/russia_market_collapse

And the Reuters one:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060223/ts_nm/russia_market_dc

The basic story is just the same, but it's interesting to contrast how two different journalists approached it: one story opens up with a basic "who what where when" approach, while the other opens with a human-interest angle, and so forth.

*I'm sorry, I couldn't help it. The traditional journalistic and typesetter convention is to deliberately misspell common layout words, when talking about journalist copy, in order to make sure that generic words from the layout don't get accidentally inserted into the final copy. So paragraph is "graf", headline is "hed", etc. This has been your typesetting lesson for today.

Penciling on Kismet...

Finally, we're starting to get to the meaty plot stuff. Next week something happens that I've had in mind (and been looking forward to drawing) ever since the beginning ... well, the beginning of THIS incarnation of the story, anyway. You'll just have to wait and find out what it is. Mwahahahaha. And tonight I wrote out the rest of this chapter -- we're actually very close to the end. After this, there is just one more chapter and then an epilog/wrapup. I might actually finish Hunter's Moon before I'm too old to hold a pencil ...

Speaking of aging, today is my l'il brother's birthday. Happy birthday, brother. He's 22.

I also have to brag on my little sister, who is now working in a genetic engineering lab at Cornell University. GO LITTLE SISTER! She's part of a team that is working on finding a gene to protect potatoes against a particular strain of potato-killing fungus. I forget what she said it's called, but it not only kills the potatoes but also contaminates the soil, which is disastrous in poor, rural areas that depend on the crop, so her lab's work could potentially save thousands of lives ...

Off to sleep. G'night.