Danza Johnson, the Mighty Daily Journal's police reporter, reminds me of laundry. He isn't a sloppy dresser. He isn't a dressy dresser, either. You can tell he doesn't work at a bank, and I don't know if he even owns a tie, but I'm in no position to criticize - glass houses and such.

Danza's all right, and not in the least bit rumpled.

Besides, his physical appearance doesn't remind me of laundry, other than the general fact that we both wear clothes, and clothes are, by definition, laundry.

The association isn't caused by what Danza wears, but by what he does. It's his job to listen to the police scanner, so it sits on his desk and spews out troubling reports all day.

His desk is separated from mine by a gray metal and teal fabric barrier that reaches almost chest-high, so the scanner is practically on my desk.

That's why Danza reminds me of laundry.

It's not present-day laundry, but the long-ago kind I wore during my first full-time journalism job at the Winchester Herald Chronicle in Tennessee.

I was given a hand-held police scanner and told to pay attention to every static-infused utterance between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., and longer if something happened.

I covered car accidents, drownings, kidnappings and homicides. There were far more car accidents than the other three - Winchester isn't a jungle - but the portable scanner often guided me to things most people probably wouldn't want to see.

Come to think of it, I didn't want to see a lot of what I saw, which helps explain why Danza is the Mighty Daily Journal's police reporter, instead of yours truly.

My boss' orders went beyond 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and longer if something happened. That strict schedule applied seven days a week, unless I could beg a co-worker to take scanner duty for a day or two. I didn't have a social life to crimp, but still ...

Friday night for a high school football game?

The scanner was there.

At breakfast over Saturday morning cartoons?

The scanner was there. (I bet you can guess where this is going.)

At the Laundromat with three weeks worth of dirty clothes and enough quarters in my pockets to sink to the bottom of picturesque Tims Ford Lake?

Yep. The scanner.

If you'd given me a lump of coal, I could've produced a diamond while praying for my laundry to make it through the dryer before a drunk driver slammed into a telephone poll somewhere in the paper's coverage area.

I never had to leave my laundry to go chase a story, but the thought was thoroughly stressful, and I wore a bunch of dirty clothes in those days.

Now, Danza is in charge of the scanner, so he reminds me of laundry. I don't hold it against him. He's all right, and not the least bit rumbled.

Maybe, "least bit" goes too far, but glass houses and such.

M. Scott Morris is a Daily Journal feature writer. Contact him at (662) 678-1589 or scott.morris@journalinc.com.