Ever since adding the official Welland Tribune RSS feed to the aggregator section there has been a number of people jumping back and forth between my site and theirs. I've got some news about news (which does not divide by zero). The Welland Tribune articles with the greatest crossover to KurtisMcCartney.com happen to be those of my former classmate Maryanne Firth.

It does seem strange, since the two of us were probably the most responsible for the better sections of the "Eagle Flyer" a short lived news journal printed at Eastdale Secondary School. I'm not going to joke, it sucked and every article except those of Maryanne, Dave Walmsley, and mine had typos. That was due in most part to the lack of editorial review.

I wasn't even supposed to be a writer, I was just the tech guy brought in to take care of the layout. Most of the other articles were submitted by a Grade 9 English teacher, to encourage her students to develop an interest in writing. I'm not sure it caught, many of them were made fun of after release.

Maryanne was probably the only one outside of the school staff taking it seriously. Even I thought it was going to fail, which it did, one of the many stops on the fail-train. And even when we came back the next year to write for Rob's Eastdale newspaper, that serious attitude was back. That year, the newspaper failed again.

When called about that experience Maryanne responded "Stop calling here, there is no Mary-anne here. Damn, it's one in the morning - I'm calling the cops.". Which also proves my claim that Mary-anne is a secret ninja - the people in her house don't even know she's there.

Good luck Maryanne, even if your articles do make more money than mine.