{"id":42390,"date":"2014-03-14T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42390"},"modified":"2014-07-15T09:38:11","modified_gmt":"2014-07-15T14:38:11","slug":"its-donor-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42390","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Donor Season!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not to joke about the death of young Anand Baskanan, a Long Island transplant who came to Minnesota to work at 3M, and brought his passion for very fast racing motorcyles with him&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;to I394 this past weekend, where he apparently dumped it while racing at 100-120mph one night.\u00a0 Baskanan died at the scene.\u00a0 My condolences to his friends and family.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I bring it up not so much to point out that riding racing bikes on highways that have just gone through a brutal winter has about the same outlook as being an Iranian human land mine detector as to point out the immense culture clash among different types of &#8220;journalists&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Compare <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/local\/minneapolis\/249682451.html?page=all&amp;prepage=1&amp;c=y#continue\">the rat-a-tat just-the-facts-ma&#8217;am of Tim Harlow and Paul Walsh<\/a>, two news department guys&#8230;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A motorcyclist with a passion for fast bikes was going at least 100 miles per hour when he struck a pothole or a crack along a winter-worn stretch of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/topics\/places\/minneapolis.html\" target=\"_blank\">Minneapolis<\/a> interstate and thrown to his death, authorities said Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>Anand \u201cAndy\u201d Baskaran, 30, of the Long Island community of East Northport, N.Y., hit the road hazard along eastbound Interstate 394 near Theodore Wirth Parkway about 9:50 p.m. on Tuesday, according to the State Patrol.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;with the almost-poetic account byStribdrama critic Rohan Preston, who witnessed the aftermath with is daughter on the way home from the Orpheum:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cWe drove slowly by it, taking in the horror with silence. There was no one near the bike,\u201d said Preston, who described the motorcycle as being a racing-style bike. \u201cThat bike lying on its side in the middle of the highway, the police officers walking around the scene, and all the lights flashing into a surreal blur told us all we needed to know.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I hope if I ever buy it in a spectacular accident that the first people on the scene aren&#8217;t sports writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not to joke about the death of young Anand Baskanan, a Long Island transplant who came to Minnesota to work at 3M, and brought his passion for very fast racing motorcyles with him&#8230; &#8230;to I394 this past weekend, where he apparently dumped it while racing at 100-120mph one night.\u00a0 Baskanan died at the scene.\u00a0 My [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42390"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45775,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42390\/revisions\/45775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}