John Cook has always reminded me of Edna Buchanan*, the scoop-crazy crime reporter for the Miami Herald who once overheard a colleague grumble about his garbage cans being stolen, only to appear suddenly at his cube with the breathless question: “Empty or full?”
John had a similar reaction when he heard Avvo’s founders complain to us of being accidentally erased from the invitation list for the recent Naked Truth party. The rib John was gnawing fell to his plate; a drop of barbecue sauce hung from his chin so that he suddenly looked like a blood-starved predator.
As we noted in our post-party digest, John suggested going through the wiki history to find the culprits. We all laughed. But today he unveiled a major plot twist: the folks who had deleted Avvo from the list were in fact “the PR firm that represents Steve Berman, the Seattle lawyer who has filed a class action law suit against Avvo.”
John has been coming up with this stuff as long as I’ve known him, which has been almost exactly the extent of my professional career in Seattle.
When I first moved here with everything I owned crammed into a 10-foot U-Haul, I felt a little blue on walking into an empty house. But the first hopeful act in any move is to plug your telephone into the wall. Soon after I did, and well before it seemed anyone could have had my number, the phone rang.
On the other end of the line was John Cook, wanting to know what I was doing in Seattle. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I felt like I knew him already.
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*The title of our blog post was taken from the lede for an Edna Buchanan story about a man who was shot by a security guard at a fried-chicken stand for trying to push to the front of the line after the restaurant ran out of chicken: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”
**Several Redfin stories in the LA Times have been written by a colleague of Edna Buchanan.
*** Photo cropped via Picnik… what an amazing service!