Grab bag

Random stuff we’d like you to know about this month…
 

New Guy: I want to officially welcome Guy Cipriano as our new Assistant Editor. Guy is a newspaper… er… guy by training but one of the things that caught our eye about his resume was that he spent a couple of years riding a mower at the Penn State Golf Courses when he was a young reporter for the State College paper. He claims that he often read GCI in the breakroom at the course and remembers being impressed. We call this “brown-nosing” and we liked it so much we hired him.

In addition to his duties on the print edition and website, Guy will be a lead player on our social media feeds, particularly @GCImagazine on Twitter. This gives me the opportunity to deluge you with even more useless crap from my new account @PatJonesTweets. Give me a follow if you aren’t already exhausted by me.
 

App Update: We screwed around for a while trying to figure out a way to ensure that our GCI app was exclusively available to superintendents and other qualified turfheads. We tried to make everyone fill out a form and register just to enjoy the juicy technology the app delivers every month. Well, this turned out to be a giant pain in the ass for everyone so we bagged it. The app is back to its old free and open self. You can now download any issue (current or back editions) in less than a minute with no endless registration questions.
 

A Dog’s Life: Kudos to our own Kyle Brown, the genius behind much of what you hear on our Superintendent Radio Network. He was awarded a best-in-show Gardner Award for most outstanding podcast at the recent Turf & Ornamental Communicators Association awards ceremony. The winning entry? The fantastic podcast he did with Bob Kohlstedt of Fox Bend GC in Illinois about Bob’s remarkable efforts to rescue his beloved dog during a severe storm. It’s called “Dog’s Best Friend,” and if you haven’t listened to it, you should immediately go to our website and find it on the Podcasts/SRN section. Way to go Kyle!
 

More TOCA Hardware: Congrats also to the real editor of this magazine, Mike Zawacki, for his Best Headline award for his clever “Southern Discomfort” head on a story about the challenges of warm-season disease and pest control. And, in an enormous error in judgment, TOCA gave me the Best Column award for “You Gotta Believe,” a thing I wrote about the importance of passion in a very crowded golf/turf job market.
 

Old-As-Dirt Award: Also during this year’s TOCA meeting, I was inducted into the group’s Hall of Fame along with my friends and fellow industry communicators Cindy Code and Jerry Roche. It was a wonderful evening and I was touched by the award, but I can’t escape the feeling that I have now reached the advanced age where they start to give you hardware to shoo you out the door. Never fear though… I decided that the award now makes me an “elder statesman” in the industry and I can hereafter say any old thing I want. Being old as dirt is awesome!
 

Mike Rowe Rocks: Finally, check out my column on the back page for “the rest of the story” that ensued after Mr. Dirty Jobs read what I wrote about him in our May issue and posted about it for his 1 million Facebook followers. It’s a funny, weird, ironic tale… which makes it perfect for GCI. Enjoy!