Last week, news editor Daniel Wattenburger issued the newsroom bloggers a challenge. Write about something we would like to disappear from the world, he said.

Hmmmm.

A list of things leapt immediately to mind – mosquitoes, global warming, forest fires, cancer, greed, negativity, materialistic people, snobs, Brussels sprouts.

I immediately rejected several.

Mosquitoes, despite their tendency to whine around your ears and suck blood, also nourish numerous creatures such as birds, bats and trout.

Brussels sprout, well, plenty of folks actually like them.

Global warming is the direct result of man’s poor choices – should we be allowed to get away with that without changing our ways?

Forest fires clean out accumulated underbrush and provide forage for wildlife.

A few I would ax in a second – cancer, negativity, greed, snobs. All are contenders.

None, however, are that fun to write about unless I zoom close into some sort of microcosm.

Here’s one – shock jock radio. Several seconds of Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Don Imus or any other incendiary blowhard who has his own radio show sets my blood pumping dangerously.

I try to avoid Limbaugh and his ilk, but occasionally run across them as I drive on long trips. I’ve actually sought it out at times when I was perilously close to falling asleep at the wheel. Incensed and disgusted is better than dead.

Anyway, since Pollyanna is my hero (see previous Blog), obviously anyone who is caustic and ultra-negative is akin to an anti-hero, Pollyanna’s evil nemesis.

Their political bent doesn’t seem to matter. The common denominator is a rude, pompous, my-way-or-the-highway stance that allows for not an iota of difference in opinion.

Not surprisingly, their big mouths often get them into trouble.

Limbaugh recently drew fire after he said of Pres. Obama, “…I want him to fail…”

Another time he called professional football player Donovan McNabb consistently overrated because the media wanted a black quarter back to succeed.

Last month, he tactlessly blathered that Sen. Ted Kennedy would be dead by the time his health care legislation passed.

“Before it’s all over, it’ll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill,” Limbaugh said.

Sometimes an acerbic, un-PC comments elicits enough backlash to boot a host off the air, but it doesn’t seem to last.

In 2007, shock jock Don Imus lost his cable TV and radio simulcast deal after he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” He apologized and left the air.

Now, he is back, some say with an even-wider audience, after negotiating a multi-million-dollar deal with WABC Radio, home of Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Howard Stern last year auctioned off a 22-year-old California woman’s virginity on his show. The woman hoped to use the money to pay her tuition at Sacramento State.

Singer Dolly Parton cried foul after Stern electronically manipulated her speaking voice to create “racist and sexually vulgar statements.” She threatened a lawsuit.

Go get him, Dolly. I feel your pain, at least vicariously.

Why do thousands of people listen to these guys? I’m mystified. Someone tell me.

Pollyanna - she’s my hero.

No, seriously.

You remember the movie. Pollyanna is a pigtailed, orphan who goes to live with her stern Aunt Polly. The little girl’s sunny view of life rubs off on even the dourest person in town and, before long, even her ice princess aunt is helpless against Pollyanna’s unfettered enthusiasm.

Personally, I try to emulate Pollyanna’s robust optimism in my own life. I admire her stubborn determination to see only good in the world.

I guess I’ve enjoyed some success in this endeavor, since some of my friends in past years have said I am over-the-top in the optimism department - “sickeningly positive,” according to one.

I’ve toned down a bit since getting back into journalism. My reporter’s life might even put Pollyanna’s indomitable spirit to the test, but I believe she could pull it off.

In the last three-and-a-half years, I’ve seen plenty of accidents scenes and bodies of people who died in tragic accidents. A girl burned to death in her car. A man lying dead on the freeway after falling asleep and crashing into a rock wall. A little boy who drowned in a creek near his family’s home.

I watched a mother and her teenage son cry as they watched their home destroyed by fire. I cried with the family of a soldier who died in Iraq.

But, other days….oh the other days.

Some days, I absolutely adore my job.

The hot air balloon ride. The talks with political movers and shakers and entertainers and people who have survived brushes with death. I've dipped my toe into dozens of experiences, careers and lifestyles.

One thing I’ve learned is you don’t have to be famous to be fascinating.

My assignment Friday was to write a story about a Pendleton man who died recently – Joe Daley, Sherwood Elementary School principal for 32 years.

I seem to draw this type of assignment quite often – stories about people who have died.

In fact, the very first story I wrote as an East Oregonian reporter was about David Hamley, one of the original owners of Hamley’s, who died the weekend before I started working.

I love this type of story, chronicling the lives of intriguing people.

Take the incredible Mr. Daley, for example.

When I started calling family and friends, just about everybody had a hilarious tale of the principal and his unsinkable attitude about life. He and Pollyanna might have had some scintillating conversations.

I didn’t have room for most of the stories in my article but I listened in rapt attention as his friends shared the hilarious, and sometimes touching details.

Here’s a couple of the stories that didn’t make it into my story.

Daley served in World War II in New Guinea, said his friend Chuck Rosenquist. Along the way, sergeant managed to lose his stripes after pulling a prank and had to earn them back. Evidently, Daley was in charge of a group of buck privates who had to dig a path to the latrine. Daley decided to have some fun.

“He had them take a right angle and go into the woods,” Rosenquist said.

The privates spent the day building a trail to nowhere.

Daley had a softer side, too, Rosenquist said. One time the pair trekked to the coast for an education conference and planned a fishing expedition on the side.

When they arrived at the dock, another of the fishing boat’s customers arrived – with his two sons. The boys weren’t on the list and the boat was full.

“Joe said, ‘Chuck, why don’t you and I just roam around Astoria for the day,'” Rosenquist remembered. “He’d been looking forward to it, but he gave it up immediately – he was a softie.”

Daley’s daughter offered proof that her father wasn’t perfect, though nearly so. One day, she said, a neighbor’s pet skunk got loose and ran under the Daley’s car. He convinced the little girl to go under the car and get the animal, telling her skunks don’t bite.

She found out different.

“He bit,” she said, “and bit hard.”

Anyway, you get the gist – there are so many interesting things that never make it onto the pages of the newspaper because space doesn’t allow it.

I consider myself blessed to be the one to do a deep dive into people’s lives and come out all the richer. People, I believe, are basically good and amazingly fascinating.

My Pollyanna tendencies are alive and well.

The 16-year-old who sat across from the table from me broke my heart.

Allen and I sat in a booth at Great Pacific, sipping coffee drinks and talking about his four months of homelessness for a story I was doing on homeless students (Life in the shadows, March 14). Calmly, matter-of-factly, he leaned back and described what it was like to live under a bridge during the months of September through December this year. He wore everything he owned – sweaters, long pants, shorts, shirts – and slept on the cold ground as cars passed overhead on Tutuilla Creek Road.

Allen winced as he recalled snowy, icy nights where frigid winds invaded his shelter.

“Why?” I asked him. "Why live like that?"

He told me a story of his family life. Because of a turbulent relationship with his step-father, he moved out and began living with his father and his new wife. That relationship was rocky, too. One day, he and his dad got into an argument that turned physical.

“He slammed me against the wall,” Allen told me. “I pushed him back.”

Allen took off on foot with a hastily-packed bag and walked 12 miles or so to Pendleton. Not knowing what to do, he just kept on walking around. He slept a little during the day, but was afraid to at night.

In September, he started living under the bridge by night and attending school by day. He didn’t eat at night, but filled up during school breakfast and lunch.

As Allen talked, a youth worker named Danny Bane, sitting next to Allen, watched him with intensity and injected his own questions.

“He’s so honorable,” Danny told me. “He’s not taking advantage of the system.”

I asked if Allen would take me to his bridge. He said he would, even let us photograph him for my story on homeless students if we didn’t show his face.

A few days later, we headed down there in my Toyota Prius. Allen, who’d never ridden in a Prius, peppered me with questions about how the car worked. As we drove, rain pelted the windshield.

“There it is,” he said, pointing at a place Tutuilla crossed the creek.

I pulled over and waited for E.J. Harris, one of the paper’s photographers, to pull up behind us. We all got out and slipped through a gap in the fence, our feet squishing in the mud. E.J. and Allen scrambled under the bridge for a photo.

Seeing the bridge, I felt like crying for this boy. A boy who lived outside during the cruelest months of the year, a mere quarter mile from my home – a home with an extra bedroom, heat and plenty of comfort food.

E.J., who lives within eyeshot of the bridge, later shared the same sentiments. He regularly steps out on his deck for a cigarette.

“I never saw him,” he said.

After the photo session, I took him to my house for lunch – hot soup and a peanut butter sandwich. He told me how he planned to graduate early and go into law enforcement. I told him how much respect I had for him – someone who’d managed to make it through such a raw and intensely difficult experience.

He thanked me profusely for lunch, like I’d given him filet mignon. I drove him back to school and sat idling, watching him walk up the sidewalk and through the school doors.

Allen’s now in a much better place, living with the family of a friend, but how many other Allens are out there, I wondered. I’ve read several different reports and I don’t think anyone truly knows.

I said an extra prayer that night – for Allen and for other teens living in cars, under bridges or couch surfing at their friends’ homes or otherwise living in the shadows. God help them, since we humans can't seem to do it ourselves.