Guest speakers and good grades

I'm not sure why CIMBA paid for a journalist from Oregon to be a guest speaker in Italy, but he was much more enjoyable than regular classes so I will keep my questioning to a minimum.

Paul Linnman is a journalist in Portland. Around 30 years ago he covered a story about a dead whale that washed ashore. Authorities didn't know how to rid the beach of the whale so after much consideration they used dynamite to blow it up. We watched his story during our first week of school during our Kepner-Tregoe Decision Making Workshop (two 8-hour days of group work hell). Once the whale was blown up, chunks of blubber, guts and blood flew miles up and started hitting people. A few minutes of whale guts and this guy is still famous.

I was a bit skeptical of a man reaping the benefits of a whale that was blown up on a beach, but he was a great speaker. He won an Emmy (not for the whale story. But another journalist did win an Emmy for his story on the 25th anniversary of the exploding whale.) He was in tv for 30 years and now has his own radio show, similar to NPR.

He spoke about telling stories about ordinary people, doing what you enjoy and working hard (things more universal than a dead whale...) and about run ins with famous people (he met Mike Wallace on a plane and after a few drinks, Wallace offered Linnman a job at CBS). He also could've taken the job Charlie Gibson ended up with on Good Morning America but his wife won't leave Portland so he had to abandon that offer.

In other news from the CIU campus, we had night class on Monday (guh) but Lori just handed out our final paper assignment and returned our midterms. Before she returned our tests, she explained reasons she deducted points. I was a little worried because it seemed easy when I was writing all the essays, but I started to doubt my confidence. I waited until I left the classroom to check my score, and it turns out I got 100. A perfect score on a midterm. If I were back home, this would definitely constitute a mini-shopping excursion, but since I have no where to go in Paderno, I will conserve my euros and energy for a better location like Paris :)