Ray Suarez Hates Tim Rogers
Looking for a reason to attend this Thursday’s third and final installment of the “Metromorphosis Symposium” in Addison? If you’re not interested in examining regional population growth and the profound changes occurring to the population’s composition and socio-economic organization — and you should be — then maybe you’d like to see yrs trly and Ray Suarez get into a public pissing match. I’m serving on the panel this Thursday. Suarez is moderating. To find out how I rankled the august senior correspondent for The NewsHour, follow the jump:
Awhile back, Eric came across the flier put out by the symposium’s organizers. It features my headshot, along with those of Suarez and other participants. I kinda look like an idiot. And Eric made a joke about it, to the tune of the old Sesame Street song about “one of these things just doesn’t belong.”
In reaching for a comeback, I apparently fell flat on my face. I pretended that Eric was saying Suarez was the one who didn’t belong and suggested the symposium’s organizers must have had a last-minute cancellation and that Suarez — the guy with about 47 skins on the wall — was the only replacement they could get. I called it embarrassing. And I thought it was a pretty funny retort.
But Suarez didn’t. He wrote me the following note over the weekend:
Geez Tim,
Are you sure you really want to be on a panel that’s moderated by me if it’s an embarrassment that I’ve been invited by the organizers?
“Best they could do on short notice”?
Gosh… I hope you’ll be gentle with me and somehow manage to put up with my ignorant and second-rate questions. I was invited to do this event early in the year, but I guess you’d have to do a little actual reporting to find out who they would have preferred as a first choice. Wonderful thing about blogs… you don’t have to actually KNOW about anything you write about.
Can’t wait to see you this week!
Ray Suarez, Senior Correspondent, The NewsHour
Uh-oh. I sent an apology note to Suarez but have yet to hear back from him. One of these days, I’ve got to take irony out of my toolbox. It keeps getting me in trouble.
Update: We had a previously scheduled conference call among the participants. It just ended. Ray admitted that once he thought about it, he saw that his irony sensor was malfunctioning when he sent me the note. He sounds like a good guy. When he’s in town, we’ve made plans to hang out and do some scrapbooking.
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