Blog Archives
Tea’s Weird Week: A-well a-doncha know about my surfin’ article a-werd? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
Hey there Surfin’ Birds, I’m glad to say that I won a GOLD Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism Award (in the “Best Sports Story” category) for my article “Surfing the Fresh Coast,” from the July 2023 issue of Milwaukee Magazine. This is my third gold and fourth overall Press Club award. The article examines the local scene of people who surf the waves of Lake Michigan.
As always, I want to take a moment to thank some people and speculate on the win.
Thanks: This article idea was brought to me by my editor Chris Drosner, and I immediately knew this would be a good fit for me. I appreciate Chris’s faith that I’ll dig in and find a good story. The rest of MilMag’s editorial staff is great to work with, too. Magazine articles need to be visually appealing in addition to being well written. It’s not surprising that MilMag also picked up gold for their design team. Incredibly talented photographer (and surfer) Andrew Feller provided the fantastic photos for this article.
And, of course, thanks to all the surfers who kindly made time to talk with me.
Why I think this one was a winner:
A couple things– first and foremost, I’m a sucker (and I think a lot of readers are) for stories of people following their dreams, whatever that might be. Take for example Jake Bresette, who was working as an insurance claims adjuster in Madison– a job he was good at but had no passion for. Jake would dream of surfing the lake, and I like this paragraph describing his dilemma:
To feel a little bit alive, some days Bresette would wake up at 4 a.m., drive to Milwaukee, get in a little surfing, then drive back, take a shower and clock in at work by 11 a.m. It wasn’t enough to satisfy him. While voices would drone on into his earpiece about deductibles and liabilities, he’d pop open a window on his computer. “There are webcams on the beaches in Sheboygan, Port Washington, all over the lake. I’d be on calls assisting people, looking at the waves. I called it cubicle torture,” Bresette says. Sometimes he’d see people surfing. “I wished I was there.”
This led to a pretty big leap of faith for Jake– opening up a surf shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lake Effect Surf Shop is now the hub of the local surf scene. In addition to Jake, I got to round out the story with an eclectic cast– Eric “The Teacher” Gietzen, Ken Cole, Jennifer Vice-Reshel, and Keliana Licup. I think one skill I have as a writer is an ear for a good quote, but that only works if the person you’re interviewing has something interesting to say. Well, the surfers shredded in the good quotes department!
I’m a fan of a well-placed sidebar, and this article has a couple on Milwaukee’s surf band The Exotics, and I talked to surf legend Larry “Longboard” Williams about Sheboygan’s legacy as the “Malibu of the Midwest.”
It was a fun and interesting assignment, and I greatly appreciate this recognition. You can read the article here: https://www.milwaukeemag.com/all-about-milwaukees-surfing-scene/
See also: My other three Milwaukee Press Club Awards:
“Reporting Live from the Street,” Gold, Short Hard Feature, 2020
“The Last Frame,” Gold, Short Soft Feature, 2022
“Wanna Buy a Famous Tugboat?” Silver, Soft Feature (online), 2022
Please donate: Time is running out on our QWERTYFEST MKE fundraiser. We’ve still got a long way to go. QWERTYFEST celebrates the typewriter and QWERTY keyboard we still use today, invented here in Milwaukee. It also celebrates history, innovation, writing, and the arts in general. Our fundraiser includes great perks like tickets, merch, and a subscription to out publication, QWERTY Quarterly. With your help, we can make it happen. Any donation amount helps us reach our goal: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/qwertyfest-mke-2024/#/
Tea’s Weird Week: I can’t even write about these dang scooters without it getting paranormal
I put it forth to Facebook to ask what I should write about in the column this week, and the subject of scooter chaos came up. They do seem to be everywhere and opinions are mixed. Some are saying they’re just stupid fun while others are quoting J. Jonah Jameson and shouting that they’re “a goddamn menace!” After a failed trial attempt last year, the Bird scooters returned and Lime and Spin appeared too, filling the sidewalks with 1,050 scooters.
Image via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/8ql8kd/the_birds_2018/
My own opinion is a little mixed. I’m all for public transportation options. And they do look fun– just last night I was riding the bus and we passed by a group of about a dozen teenagers riding scooters together in the bike lane, and it looked like they were having a blast, laughing and talking. It reminded me of my youth, when me and a group of friends would ride skateboards or bikes or just walk around, often with no particular destination in mind.
But I’ve also seen some reckless scooter driving (Urban Milwaukee reports over 100 complaints of scooter violations, including collisions with pedestrians, were reported within a couple weeks and Marquette and UWM recently banned them from campus). I think a couple of the problems here is that the training and test ride on these things is live and in public. You just jump on and learn how to ride it while you’re barreling down the sidewalk or street. You learn to drive a car in an empty parking lot, you learn to drive a scooter on Water St. and Wisconsin Ave. With a max speed of 15mph, the scooters are too fast for a sidewalk and too slow for a street…or at least too slow for I-94.
On Monday three were fined for riding Lime scooters on I-94 near the Marquette interchange.
CBS 58 reports: “The scooter riders told deputies they were visiting from Texas and were using their GPS to navigate to the Harley Davidson Museum on the scooters.”
But what if there was a way people could have their scooters without running over our toes? [hippie voice] What if we could, like, ride our Lime scooters through the cosmos, man? Wouldn’t that be faaaar out?
Coincidentally (or was it?) my friends at the Singular Fortean Society issued a report on Wednesday of a man they interviewed from Springfield, Illinois, who said he had an encounter with a “humanoid flying a scooter with no wheels” in the night sky as he walked home in the woods on some railroad tracks.
The witness, Mike, told Singular Fortean Society (you can read the whole report HERE) described what he saw in the night sky:
“It looked like a person, like a big person, on a scooter; I swear I could almost see the handlebars on the thing. That’s what my recollection was. A scooter, with no wheels, with some big guy, probably six foot, 250 pounds or something like that. It looked like a little Honda scooter, and it looked like it had a little light on one side of it. I remember seeing something shining, like on the front of it—kind of like a headlight,” recounted Mike.
I know what you’re thinking. This is amazing and we need to capture this ET tech, reverse engineer it, and franchise it ASAP to cash in on the scooter craze. But what should we named the company? Here’s the poll:
Winning name will be announced in next week’s column!
#ClownWatch2019: Continuing our reporting of strange clown sightings– outbreak in New England!
07/21/2019, 2:46 pm: Brookline, Massachusetts police blotter report of “a topless woman wearing clown makeup and an apron, standing in front of a building.” [via brookline.wickedlocal.com]
08/19/2019: USA Today reports that a New Jersey woman witnessed a plush doll of Pennywise (from It) fall into her yard. The doll had letters and numbers written on the forehead, which, according to the witness, “looked culty.” The police were called, the doll burned, and the frightened woman slept with a knife for protection.
Looks like a kid with a good throwing arm is patting themselves on the back for a prank well done. [via USA Today]
—
My book Apocalypse Any Day Now is available here: http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/ApocalypseAnyDayNow
Twitter: @TeaKrulos Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheTeaKrulos
Please don’t tweet and drive scooters.
teakrulos.com 