Thursday, November 8, 2012

Default Assignment in Case You Don't Have Any Other Ideas



Comment on just one of these dilemmas

You are interviewing
·        * The longest surviving heart transplant patient in the U.S. When talking about the disability pay he receives, he mentions he does a little bookkeeping on the side the income from which he does not report.
·        * A beloved radio weatherman who is about to retire and who mentions in passing he has a
Down’s Syndrome child and immediately says, “Don’t print that.”
·        * The family of a teenager who has just died after a long battle cancer whose mother says sorrowfully, “Noah died a virgin, and it made him so sad.”
·        * A sex researcher who has done an extremely popular book on various sexual matters who says – when you jokingly ask her who should appear in the movie version – that it should be you.
·         *A  family living at a restaurant/motel in the middle of the Nevada desert, the eight-year-old daughter of which tells you when her parents aren’t around that on weekends dad likes to get drunk and blow up the wrecked cars out in back of  their isolated business.
·       *  An interracial couple – she is Filipino and he is African-American – who are having a June wedding. At the wedding reception, his father tells you he is disappointed his son is marrying “outside the race.”
·        * A rather famous movie star who has just written a rather New Ageish book in which she writes that whatever happens to people is their own fault. You consider asking her about the six million Jews lost in the Holocaust.
·        * A nun as part of a story about a neighborhood that is undergoing a rash of burglaries. One of the buildings in the neighborhood is a convent for nuns who work in the community as teachers and social workers. After talking about precautions any sensible homeowner should take, she pauses and then explains that she was raped some years ago and makes some suggestions about how women might avoid situations in which that might occur.
·         *Construction workers on a downtown highrise who explain in some detail how they like to “party hearty,” with considerable detail about how much alcohol this requires many nights after work.
What do you do?