Attention, PR people: there’s no easier way to get me royally pissed off than to be condescending to me.

“Do you cover education a lot?” she said in a tone usually reserved for telling four-year-olds about why leaves fall off trees in the winter. Yep, that would be my job. “Have you ever heard of [the flak’s extremely prominent group, heard of by most 12-year-olds]?” Yep, dipshit, I’ve interviewed your boss a few times. “When I say ‘vouchers,’ do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you heard that term before?” You bet, you empty-headed fool. When I say ‘too stupid to tie your shoes,’ do you understand what I’m talking about? “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘high-stakes testing’?” “You probably don’t know this, but teachers don’t make very much money.” Etc., etc., etc. I kept waiting for her to gently let me know the sun rises in the east, or that there’s this fellow named Bush who’s president.

There are some wonderful PR folks out there, of course — intelligent, interested in their subject, with a good sense of what makes news and what doesn’t. But any reporter with more than a week on the job knows that they make up a small percentage of the field. Most are bubble-skulled idiots who know how to dress up real nice for the cameras but couldn’t explain a complex issue if their 401(k) depended on it. They’re the folks who stumbled into writing press releases because they flunked News Writing 101 in college.

If you’re brilliant — a scientist, an author, a professor — you can get away with being condescending to me. If you’re talking to me about a subject I know nothing about, you can (sometimes) get away with being condescending to me. If you’re a 22-year-old pretty-faced moron who doesn’t know her Manolo Blahniks from a hole in the ground, shut the fuck up and transfer me to someone with a clue.

31 May 2002 | 1 comment

Woo hoo! Chanda keeps rockin’ at Roland Garros, 6-1, 6-0! (Previously mentioned here.) She’s mowed down seeded players in the last two rounds. Unfortunately, she now gets Venus Williams in the Round of 16. But hey, Chanda was Venus before Venus was Venus — it’s payback time.

31 May 2002 | No comments

Here’s my story — which they completely overplayed in today’s paper, not that I’m complaining — about social studies dragging down school ratings.

I really didn’t mean to make Metafilter all weepy.

If you’re looking for a place to live near downtown Dallas, my neighbor’s moving out today. I won’t lie: he won’t be missed. Dumb as a box of rocks, annoying, deeply uninteresting at every level. (Mystery Of Life #3,267: He’s unattractive, stupid, unemployed, completely without charm — but has the hottest damned girlfriend in the building.) It’s an okay apartment, though, with a great location. With him gone, I officially have no neighbors, which means I can play bad guitar as loudly as I want at 2 a.m. That’s good for no one.

31 May 2002 | 2 comments

Peter Beinart has a sobering piece on Cory Booker’s defeat in Newark (mentioned earlier here).

(This article is also Yale synergy in action: Beinart, a former columnist for my old newspaper, writing about Booker, my former teacher.)

Someone please slap some sense into me and remind me I shouldn’t be reading The New Republic at 12:20 a.m.

31 May 2002 | No comments

Welcome to the world, Adam.

30 May 2002 | No comments

When ESPN The Magazine debuted a couple years ago, it was a joke — all flash and infographics, no substance. It’s remarkably how much they’ve turned it around; they’re even better than SI some weeks. The old ESPN The Magazine wouldn’t have been capable of serious magazine journalism like this.

(Maybe there’s a lesson in there about journalism style and substance. USA Today, the legendary McPaper, has also turned it around in the last few years — and, perhaps not coincidentally, finally become profitable. Their Middle East coverage, for instance, has been stellar. Best line from that story linked above: “Former USA Today editor John Quinn once joked that the paper had become famous for ‘bringing new depth to the definition of shallow’ and that if it ever won a Pulitzer Prize, it would be for ‘best investigative paragraph.’”)

30 May 2002 | No comments

For the cable-ready masochists out there, I’ll be on TXCN every hour tonight after 7 p.m., talking about how kids today don’t know themselves no history or nuttin’.

30 May 2002 | No comments

Roberta deBoer, The Blade’s city columnist, gives her take on Millie — and it’s surprisingly acerbic. Truthful, but acerbic.

Back when ABC ran a regular weekly feature that Peter Jennings introduced as the Person of the Week, Millie graced that show in a segment we all clustered around newsroom TVs to watch. When it ended, I wished out loud I could have met the sweet old lady they depicted, because whoever it was, it wasn’t Millie. You could think of her as an old lady, if you were brave enough - but sweet? Millie was a porcupine of a human being, which of course only made her even more interesting.

And this anecdote, which I remembered as happening while I was at the paper, at a Toledo convention of ONWA:

Maybe a dozen or so years ago, a statewide women’s journalism group held a convention in Toledo. This was about the time Millie, whose slowing-down phase was obvious to all but her, got a new assignment. It was a desk job of some kind so, to her way of thinking, it was a lesser assignment.

“Oh, yes,’’ Millie was reported to have said breezily, “and I wrote some books too.’’

(By the way, The Blade’s Roberta deBoer is not the same person as the Roberta DeBoer you may remember from the Baby Jessica custody battle 10 years ago.)

30 May 2002 | No comments

If you’ve ever doubted Ari Fleischer’s inherent evil, this lays it out pretty clearly. Flackery at its most dastardly.

30 May 2002 | 2 comments

I’d like to thank Kim for emailing a link to this story with this note: This is your destiny. (For those too bored to click, it’s a story about a 91-year-old reporter who “covers” the Pentagon. Problem is, he hasn’t written a story in six years. Just keeps showing up to work, day in, day out. “Mr. Cromley has a cubicle in the Pentagon press room outfitted with an old Royal typewriter without a ribbon, a 1971 World Almanac and 17 toothbrushes in a plastic cup.”)

30 May 2002 | 1 comment

Here’s my story on today’s front page, a scoop of sorts about the state likely abandoning its school ratings system next year. (This has been a busy week; when another story runs Friday, I’ll set my personal Dallas record with four page-one stories this week.)

I hate looking at my writing after it appears in the paper. The awkward word choices and phrase constructions leap off the page. Damn.

30 May 2002 | 1 comment

As might be expected, the stellar Post Style section has the best take on Millie Benson, particularly on the bowdlerized editions of her books put out by her prudish successors.

“Benson used to make autograph seekers read the first paragraph of their editions out loud before she’d consent to sign the copy — she knew in an instant if the book was an update, and didn’t want to autograph books that were not ‘hers.’”

And while I’m sure Nancy Drew was fine for icky girls and stuff, I bet they don’t compare to the Brains Benton mysteries.

30 May 2002 | No comments

Brett Shipp, fighting for you.

29 May 2002 | No comments

There’s a great discussion of the swearing-in-newsrooms story over on the letters page of Romenesko. My favorite is from an editor noting the landscape beyond common newsroom vulgarity:

In my city editing days at the Boston Herald, fuck was pretty much heard so often that no one ever noticed it. It just meant a standard snafu. But there were degrees of emergency that far exceeded fuck.

I thought at the time and still think that both those two funny fucking fuckers were really fucking fucked.

29 May 2002 | No comments

Millie Benson died yesterday, at age 96.

Millie crammed a lot of adventure into her life: learning to fly at 59, archeological digs in Central America, being a championship diver in college, working as a journalist (at my old newspaper, the Toledo Blade) up until the end.

But if you’ve ever heard of her, it’s for the 23 books she wrote in the 1920s under the pen name Carolyn Keene. Millie created Nancy Drew. (For decades, the publishers made her deny it, but a 1980 court case proved once and for all that she was Carolyn Keene.)

I worked alongside Millie for a while, when we were both working nights — I was the cops reporter, she wrote obituaries. To put it generously, Millie could be cranky; I have a fond memory of getting a phone call from a grieving widower one night saying, “Excuse me, but an older woman claiming to be one of your reporters just called me. She sounded a little…off. Does she really work for you?”

She’d get frustrated if the recently deceased she was writing about led an unexciting life. “Didn’t your husband do anything interesting?” she’d ask their widows. “Anything at all? Did he at least bowl, or something boring like that?”

By the time I got to The Blade in 1997, Millie’s eyesight was already pretty much shot. The techs blew up the text on her screen to Olympian sizes, and she still used a magnifying glass to read it. But she kept writing. One of my occasional jobs as the night cops reporter was to pre-read Millie’s obituaries before the actual editors got to them and to start the process by which they’d be turned into something approaching English. The writing itself was still fine, but her typing was abysmal. I remember one time when three entire paragraphs were completely illegible — not a coherent word among them. After some investigation, I realized she’d typed the whole thing with all of her fingers one key over from where they should have been: every “e” became a “w,” every “f” became a “d,” etc.

Anyway, it’s a shame to see her go. Nancy Drew is a more than worthy legacy to leave behind. (Particularly since the Nancy she wrote was the feisty, kick-ass one, not the wussy Nancy her successors as Carolyn Keene changed her into. The books’ publishers went back and changed Millie’s books to make Nancy more compliant. Details here and here.) Wherever you are, knock back the beverage of your choice today and toast a cranky old lady who crammed five lives’ worth of excitement into 96 years.

29 May 2002 | 3 comments

Union battles like this sure make us reporters happy. (Unfortunately, I can’t find a link for this story anywhere online, but this story ran in the Cleveland newspaper last Thursday. The reporter was Rena A. Koontz, to give credit where it’s due.)

HEADLINE: Volunteer landscaping prompts union protest

Brooklyn, Ohio — A good deed meant to honor a dead second-grader has turned into a fight over whether school employees were cheated out of landscaping work.

Two custodians, whose duties include landscaping, have filed a grievance with the Brooklyn school district claiming they should be paid for landscaping work that a local company donated, even though it had no impact on their work hours.

Mark Hennings and Doug Scott want $37 an hour, the time-and-one-half rate, for the two weekends that volunteers, including high school seniors fulfilling community service requirements, spent sprucing up the grounds of Brooklyn High School and Roadoan Elementary School. The project honored Matthew Barrick, 8, who died Feb. 14 from a brain aneurysm. Funeral services were private, so Roadoan Principal Margaret Lennard and staff members decided to have a ceremony and plant a tree at the school to honor Matthew.

The idea snowballed. Local landscapers Jim and Tara Beale offered their help, donating $700 worth of materials. Semins’ Green House, Home Depot, Nations’ Rent and other companies and residents also donated materials, totaling $3,000.

At the ceremony, held two weeks ago, students sang songs and wrote letters to Matthew. They also raised money to help Matthew’s mother pay medical bills.

Then, a few days later, the custodians filed their grievance.

Tempers flared at Tuesday’s school board meeting when the grievance was discussed.

Gretchen Derethik, the high school principal, choked back tears as she defended the students who earned their community service hours in Matthew’s honor.

“The kids are taking pride in their school and our differences are pulling the kids right into the middle of our problems,” Derethik said. “Volunteerism is being criticized. This needs to stop. All we do is fight over nothing.”

Board members and some audience members stood and applauded.

Hennings angrily insisted that the project violated the union contract. Union members applauded him.

(Update: Thanks to commenter Stacy, here’s a link to the story, with an “amplification” featuring further union comments. [For those who don’t know, an “amplification” is a newspaper’s way of saying, “We didn’t get anything wrong, but powerful people are complaining about our story, so here’s a little something to get them off our backs.”] The comments don’t seem particularly exculpatory to me.

One final note: the Newhouse-owned newspapers, like the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, all have the ugliest, least useful web sites imaginable. The New Orleans and Portland papers are both excellent in print, but their web sites are awful.)

28 May 2002 | 3 comments

Got a letter in the mail today from Wal-Mart. They’re trying to build a new store on a smallish site in the middle of Dallas, a few blocks from Love Field — quite a shift from the acres of asphault they usually use. It’ll probably prove controversial, if they’re already lobbying nearby residents like me (actually, I’m not really nearby) and putting up web sites to defend it a year before it opens.

28 May 2002 | 2 comments

A recent conversation with someone who noticed a copy of a CDMOM CD on my desk:

Q: What’s crabcakes.com?
A: Um, I have no idea what crabcakes.com is.
Q: Oh, sorry — crabcock.com.
A: Nope, wrong again.
Q: Oops. What’s crabwalk.com?

And if you’re wondering, yes, I did just post this so I can get all the crustacean-fetish porn hits Google has to offer up.

28 May 2002 | 3 comments

I really don’t believe this woman has ever set foot in a fucking newsroom.

28 May 2002 | 5 comments

I’m back in Dallas. Here’s my story on today’s front page, about graduation ceremonies for home schoolers.

28 May 2002 | 2 comments

Here’s my story in Monday’s paper, on how Texans are more edumacated now than ever before. Not sure where it is in the print edition, since I’m still in Louisiana.

This has been a stressful weekend. The low point came at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning. That’s when I scrubbed at the small puddles of my grandmother’s blood on the bathroom floor, a frenzied attempt to clean them before they’d stain.

My grandmother and I have oddly complementary sleep schedules when I’m visiting here. I usually stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., watching the wonders of late-night TV. She goes to sleep around 7 p.m. or so, then wakes up at 2 or 3. We often overlap by a few minutes.

Last night, I’d gone to bed a bit earlier than normal, around 1:30 or so. My grandmother got up about an hour later to do some laundry. But after starting the washer, she lost her balance, fell hard against the dryer, and screamed.

I dashed in (my bedroom’s two feet from the washer and dryer) and saw her bleeding heavily. Three big chunks of skin, each between one and two square inches, had been sliced off her left arm and were dangling by a thread of flesh. Just the outermost layer, nothing deep, but there was blood everywhere — on the dryer, on the floor, on her nightgown.

You see, my grandmother really frightened me this weekend. She was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis about two years ago. In essence, her lungs are slowly turning to scar tissue, which will kill her. For a while we didn’t think she had much time left; the phrase “a couple of months” was bandied about. But with the help of pill after pill after pill — she’s on more than 20 medications — she’s hung in there. She’s changed quite a bit: she’s slower, the pills have added about 100 pounds. But she’s hung in there.

I drove into Rayne around 2 a.m. Friday night, and when I walked in, she was shaking. I’d never seen her shaking, except for that time she visited my in Toledo in the winter. She looked weaker than I’d ever seen her; she had difficulty making sense, and understanding what I was saying. After she’d been sent to the hospital a couple of days ago for a lung infection, she’d been put on two new medications. They seemed to be screwing with her head.

It scared me. I come down to Rayne about every five or six weekends, and I’m always conscious of the fact each time might be my last seeing her. But Friday night, it really seemed possible.

Saturday was much better. She seemed like her old self, yammering away about Rayne politics and cracking jokes. But then she fell against the dryer. Her sense of balance — never strong, since we Bentons are by nature a clumsy people — is being driven more off than normal by the new medicine. Her skin has become freakishly dry, thanks to the meds, and fragile. Her arms have been more black and blue than flesh-colored for the last year because she bruises so easily. (The nurse who comes to visit her every so often always asks if she’s being beaten. She’s not, unless beatings by medication count.) When she fell last night, her arms didn’t even hit anything sharp, just the rounded edge of the dryer, but that was enough to shave off skin.

I pulled her into the bathroom, where we washed it off with peroxide and water, put some sort of cream she called for on it, cut away two flaps of skin with scissors (she insisted), and bandaged it up as best we could. After a while of sitting down, the adrenaline stopped pumping quite so violently, and we went back to sleep. Well, in my case, back to bed. Not quite back to sleep.

Today, she was back in good form. Cranky, but the kind of cranky that’s been part of her healthy personality for decades. But I keep worrying. I leave town Monday afternoon and won’t be back for a month. I hope she’s here waiting for me then.

27 May 2002 | 6 comments

Bravo, Chanda. (Chanda and I went to school together. Our lockers were next to each other in 7th grade. I even have an old Boorstin book of hers somewhere in my apartment. I don’t remember stealing it, but I suppose I must have at some point.)

Anyway, Chanda has had a promising career (she was once ranked #6 in the world) sidetracked by repeated injuries, so it’s good to see her back in a final, even if she lost to Seles.

I’m in Rayne for the holiday weekend, gorging on po-boys and rice dressing. Many observations, some of which may make it here in the near future.

25 May 2002 | No comments

I suppose those who start out highest have the farthest to fall. Manute Bol, the 7’7” Sudan man who remains the tallest player in the history of the NBA, was an endearing freak show during his career. (Woody Allen: “Manute Bol is so skinny, to save money on road trips they just fax him from city to city.”)

But once his career ended, he ended up in the middle of Sudan’s civil war (read that last link if you read no others here), held prisoner by government forces. Last year, he managed to escape to Egypt, and finally a few months ago made it back to the U.S.. It’s an amazing story.

I suppose that’s why it’s so unspeakably sad to see Manute Bol, former millionaire, noble Dinka tribesman, freak of nature, reduced to Celebrity Boxing II to raise cash.

24 May 2002 | 1 comment

Sea Ray fans (and that should include anyone who’s gotten my May mix, since they’re Track 2): tune into DCN tonight at 9 pm. (CDT) for a live webcast for their show at Maxwell’s, opening for Remy Zero.

23 May 2002 | No comments

The long-time voice of Judaism at The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, has a crack piece on Jewish fear. Robert Siegel talked with Wieseltier about it on NPR Tuesday. (Robert Wright had a more press-centric take on some of the same issues. The American press always gets hit with allegations of bias on Israel vs. Palestinians, although the attacks are almost evenly split down the middle between those who think the press is too pro-Palestinian or too pro-Israeli.)

Speaking of Judaism and NPR, anybody else confused about the endless promotion they’re giving the Yiddish Radio Project? They’ve been hyping this 10-part series (!) every day for months. They promo it at least once an hour during All Things Considered and Morning Edition. I’m sure it’s great (I’ve just heard promos, not any of the actual pieces), but I’ve honestly never seen any form of media give this much promotion to anything they’ve ever done — not newspapers, not magazines, certainly not radio. While I’m sure NPR’s audience skews more Jewish than most media, I have a difficult time imagining there’s enough interest to merit that much hype.

Plus, the radio series actually has its own separate set of corporate sponsors, including (logically) Hebrew National. That always makes me leery.

Certainly I’ve got no problem with NPR having a corporate underwriter; to me, it’s just like a normal advertisement. But it bothers me when the money gets too close to the journalism — as in a corporation sponsoring a specific story. (For instance, I don’t like it that Marketplace, the fine radio business program, apparently has no problem letting companies pay for specific beats or areas of coverage. Phillips Petroleum sponsors their international business coverage, for example.) Imagine if a newspaper series ran with a little tag that said, “The Morning News’ education coverage is sponsored by Stanley Kaplan.”

23 May 2002 | 4 comments

Celebrity blogger Virginia Postrel is writing a regular column for D Magazine, our local city mag. (I had no idea until I saw her byline that she lives only a few blocks from me. Back when I was a hyperpolitical teenager, I used to read her libertarian magazine Reason.)

Her political blog ranks up there with my fave, Mickey Kaus’ newly Slate-d kausfiles, and Josh Marshall’s TPM as far as blogs-by-opinion-journalists go.

Anyway, her column on downtown this month (and especially her dead-on takedown of the McKinney Avenue Trolley last month) are refreshing counters to the typical mess of economic development pablum usually serve up. If you’re interested in urban design and how cities become more vital places, she’s a good read.

And if you’re not interested in urban design and how cities become more vital places, well, while you’re at the D Mag website, you can hear Mark Cuban threaten to “come and slice your fucking nuts off.”

23 May 2002 | 6 comments

The weather’s gorgeous, summer’s approaching, and it’s not yet 112 degrees outside — but just about every last person I know is stressed, depressed, cranky, or otherwise out of sorts. (Me included.) No idea why.

Hell, even the Internet feels tired.

22 May 2002 | 3 comments

A print columnist explains why he’s also a blogger. “As someone who gets paid to write, the idea of writing for free seemed counterintuitive at first. But in my experience, writing more has made me a better writer. Meanwhile, the blog lets me publish work that might otherwise go unwritten.”

21 May 2002 | 1 comment

Vocab Dept. (alert Gareth Branwyn!): Google shout-out, n. The gratuitous naming of an individual in a blog post in hopes that a popular search engine will pick it up and provide a search return where there was none before.

Sample usage: When I was in AP English in high school, our instructor (the superb Don DeWitt, who deserves a Google shout-out in this entry)…

21 May 2002 | No comments

Found while researching the independence movement in the New Zealand territory of Tokelau: www.nopantsland.tk. (No content there yet, but it’s been registered. Luckily, prime domain names like easynopantsland.tk, quicknopantsland.tk, and interactivenopantsland.tk are still available.)

It’s really a shame Tokelau probably won’t be with us much longer. And man, they had a rough couple of decades in the 1850s and 1860s.

21 May 2002 | No comments

Two links I’ve been storing up during the MT switchover:

Women turn back short of Everest summit. Quote: “The climb was billed as the first by an all-woman team attempting to summit Everest. The women were accompanied by two male guides, a male photographer and eight Nepali sherpas.”

Um, excuse me, but how in the world can that be described as an “all-woman team”? Assuming the sherpas are male, that’s five women and 11 men. My real argument here isn’t about gender: it’s about the shoddy treatment that the Nepali sherpas always get in Everest summit stories. These folks carry all the gear and climb just as far as the white folks who get the pub, but they get no attention. Sir Edmund Hillary gets the title and the fame, Tenzing Norgay gets forgotten. (Well, not forgotten, but you get my point.) Now these sherpas are evidently not even human, since it’s an “all-woman” team.

And, totally unrelated, Samsung means to come.

21 May 2002 | 2 comments

In other news, I’m on TXCN all night, if you’re up later than you should be and need a way to sleep. And my story on textbook controversy (!) is on today’s front page. (This may be the first time Karl Marx is quoted approvingly on the front page of the DMN.)

21 May 2002 | No comments

(Warning: geektalk ahead.)

If you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet the last few days, I’ve been busy moving the software that runs this site over from Greymatter to Movable Type. It’s been a laborious switch.

Not because of any problems with MT, which is elegantly assembled and easy to use (once you get past an install a newbie might find threatening). Mena and Ben have put together a terrific program I’d recommend to anyone. My problems arose (a) because I had to hack a way to get my comments imported, since they weren’t Greymatter-native but used dotComments instead, and (b) because I used GM’s connected-files features for everything on crabwalk.com except the main blog, each page of which had to be manually transported to the new templates.

But it’s all done now. Please poke around and tell me if you see anything that looks wrong (or, more accurately, more wrong than it usually does). The only changes should be: (a) having the permalink date stamp and the comments tag on a separate line (MT, for all of its blessings, insists on wrapping posts in a P tag if you want it to convert line breaks, which means there’s no way to have other tags on the same line as the post itself unless you’re willing to manually change every P tag in all of your past posts); (b) a less attractive pop-up comments window (since to my knowledge MT can’t put comments in alternating-color table cells, at least not without some code hacking I’m not willing to get into); and (c) switching the archives from the /archives/ directory to /archive/ (I kept the old GM archives there to avoid link-rot).

21 May 2002 | 6 comments

Scary. Let’s hope this tech never reaches the consumer level. (“New from Apple: iFraud!”)

17 May 2002 | No comments

Kelly’s posted some photos from her birthday weekend. (I’m in #1, looking tall, and #5, getting what Kelly has termed a “surprise rectal exam.”)

17 May 2002 | No comments

I feel sorry for headline writers sometimes. They get a story like this handed to them and they can only write something like “Woman charged in husband’s shooting.”

A criminal complaint said rescuers found [Mr.] Winkler bleeding from a gunshot wound to the groin at 11:40 a.m. May 7 at their home in the 800 block of Howard Street. Winkler was wearing shoes and socks and his pants were down at his ankles.

Susan Winkler said she didn’t remember the gun was loaded when she pulled the trigger and the gun fired, the complaint said.

17 May 2002 | No comments

Warning! Exploding chicken ahead!

17 May 2002 | No comments

From the geniuses at Fametracker, some rejected Spiderman lines that nearly took the place of Aunt May’s late-movie jibe, “You do too much, Peter. You’re not Superman”:

“You can’t compel ants to do your bidding, Peter. You’re not Ant Man.”

“You can’t change into any water- or ice-based object, while your sister changes into the animal of her choice, Peter. You’re not the Wonder Twins.”

“You can’t leave a comprehensive and compelling collection of letters detailing public and private life in the heyday of the Roman Empire, Peter. You’re not Pliny the Elder.”

17 May 2002 | No comments

The history of Westernized Indian food. I don’t care if it was invented in Scotland, I love my chicken tikka massala.

Busy day at work — gotta write two stories. Just came from a meeting where an editor was unable to identify Yoda. Scary.

Finally, Dear Abby tackles the difficult issue of naked slumber parties for 15-year-old girls. Ah, the memories! The pillow fights! Those were the days.

17 May 2002 | No comments

Frightening Fox show of the fall: “Fastlane,” a drama about two undercover cops in Los Angeles, with “Beverly Hills 90210” actress Tiffani Amber Thiessen as their boss. That Tiffani always seemed like the criminal justice management type.

16 May 2002 | No comments

Mister Pants has devised what he considers the most insulting way to end a phone call: “Gotta go. Frasier’s on.”

16 May 2002 | No comments

You too can own bone chips from a major league pitcher’s elbow! (I love the eBay ID of one of the bidders: osamabinbiddin.)

15 May 2002 | No comments

When I was working in Toledo, the city (or more accurately, the newspaper) was obsessed with brain drain, the idea that the city’s bright young people were fleeing as quickly as they could. (To which most outside observers would say: well, duh.)

I wrote a few stories about this fairly intuitive phenomenon while at the paper, and it was always amusing to see how the city fathers tried to react to it. (It usually involved tax breaks to industries that promised minimum wage jobs, or paying for a new sports facility to watch thuggish minor-league hockey.)

This story, however, nails the origins of the problem better than anything else I’ve seen. It’s an examination of the importance of a “creative class” of (primarily) young artists, writers, and professionals to a city. It goes so far as to claim that the number of gays and rock bands in a city are a better predictor of economic growth than the usual economic development crap cities lay out.

“Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads ‘non-standard people welcome here.’ The creative class people I study use the word ‘diversity’ a lot, but not to press any political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of creative class values. Creative-minded people enjoy a mix of influences. They want to hear different kinds of music and try different kinds of food. They want to meet and socialize with people unlike themselves, trade views and spar over issues.”

The folks who run places like Toledo would do well to read this piece and focus on smaller-scale improvements, rather than shoveling millions to hucksters promising big-box success.

(The final irony of one of those brain drain stories I wrote: it won a prize as Story of the Year from the Toledo Press Club. But when it came time for the awards ceremony, both of the story’s co-authors — Sam Roe and myself, both youngish educated folks — had already skipped town, he to the Trib, me to the DMN.)

15 May 2002 | 2 comments

Alas, crabwalk.com doesn’t have enough readers in Newark.

14 May 2002 | 2 comments

Great lines from an okay Wilco review:

“It puts me in mind of an anecdote from Jimmy McDonough’s new Neil Young bio. Young put Graham Nash in a rowboat, rowed the two of them to the middle of his lake, and played the Harvest album for him for the first time. Young’s house was wired up as the left speaker, and his entire barn as the right speaker. When somebody on shore asked Young how he liked the sound, he hollered, ‘MORE BARN!’”

I think I’m going to go around yelling “more barn!” for the rest of the evening.

14 May 2002 | No comments

If you live in Newark, New Jersey, I have two messages for you. First, I’m very sorry. Second, go to the polls today and vote for my old college teaching assistant, Cory Booker, who’s running for mayor at the tender age of 33.

Cory was my TA for a polisci class I took in college. I don’t pretend to know about Newark politics, but even in the ego-ridden environment of my alma mater, it was clear that Cory was a couple steps ahead of everybody else. (All-American football player and class president at Stanford, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale law graduate.) As one might expect in a city dominated by paleolithic machine politics, things have gotten a little messy, with Booker’s incumbent opponent even saying he gets funding from the KKK. (Both Booker and the incumbent are black, but Booker is evidently not quite black enough for the mayor’s tastes.) Go Cory!

14 May 2002 | 3 comments

Here’s my story on history teachers from today’s paper.

14 May 2002 | No comments

In case any Texan was wondering, this Texas Monthly article outlines the case of its headline quite nicely: Dallas Is Better Than Houston. (You need to be a Texas Monthly subscriber to read it, but really, shouldn’t you be anyway?) I spent chunks of my teenage summers in Houston, and I’ll take Dallas every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Some of the best lines (from the author, the late A.C. Greene):

- “Dallas has three seasons: summer, winter, and two weeks of fall, but Houston has only two: the beginning of summer, and the end. Houston humidity doesn’t just wilt your shirt, it eats away your courage. Smog is constant and ubiquitous, but Houston’s proud of it. It holds to the conceit that pollution is a sign of progress.”

- “The whole damn thing is too big, too spread out. Nobody quite knows for sure where he is in Houston. Even the taxi drivers are confused. Your chances are no better than three-in-five that coming from Houston Intercontinental Airport (second largest airport in Texas, the largest being DFW, need I note?) you’ll draw one who can deposit you where you want to go without having to stop and ask for help along the way. In some cities this sort of thing happens because the cab driver is too new. In Houston it happens because some part of town’s too new.”

- “I’m from Dallas,” you say, anywhere in the world, and for the next few minutes you don’t have to worry about making conversation. Everyone has an opinion about Dallas. But try saying you’re from Houston, and after the words “petroleum” and “rich” have been said a few times, the dialogue lapses.”

And a few choice quotes about the city:

- “Houston is an example of what can happen when architecture catches a venereal disease.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

- “After you’ve listened to the talk you begin to feel that the creation of the world, the arrangement of the solar system, and all subsequent events, including the discovery of America, were provisions of an all-wise Providence, arranged with a direct view to the advancement of the commercial interests of Houston.” — A. E. Sweet and J. A. Knox, 1882

- “I like you, Houston … you don’t put your slums in one unsightly place. You spread them all over the city.” — Architect O’Neil Ford

13 May 2002 | 6 comments

I’ll be on TXCN all night tonight talking about my story on the failings of U.S. history teachers. (It’ll be on tomorrow’s front page. Also, test your own knowledge of recent history with this dallasnews.com quiz that’ll run with my story.)

13 May 2002 | No comments

Anybody else think this is fairly shoddy journalism? It’s a classic reporter error to mistake a small movement in a counterintuitive niche into a full-blown trend.

The link to the story reads: HIV cases increasingly older and straighter. But the story doesn’t include anything at all about HIV becoming more of a heterosexual problem. (Michael Fumento, despite occasionally being something of a nutcase and having an alarming love for animated GIFs, has written often and persuasively about the media’s attempts to make AIDS seem more heterosexual than it is. On one hand, it’s a laudable attempt to bring attention to a serious problem; on the other, though, it’s something of an insult to the gays whose deaths are apparently not enough of a tragedy to get people interested.)

The thrust of the story is about an alleged boom in AIDS infections among the elderly. There’s only one fact in the story to back this up: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the proportion of Americans over 50 with AIDS has risen steadily from 10 percent in the early 1990s to 13.4 percent in 1999, the most recent figures available.”

First off, the phrasing’s wrong: it should be the proportion of Americans with AIDS who are over 50, not the other way around. (It’s not as if 13.4 percent of old people have AIDS; it’s that 13.4 percent of people with AIDS are old.)

Second, the story omits an extraordinarily obvious point. Think about it: there are two ways to be an old person with AIDS. First, you could contract HIV at an old age. Or second, you could be contract HIV at a younger age and just live longer.

In the 1980s, before AZT, before protease inhibitors, AIDS wasn’t something you lived with for decades. Once symptoms developed, you generally died in short order. Now, of course, people can live a decade or more with proper medication. So let’s say you were a 42-year-old gay man in 1990, and you contracted HIV. Thanks to protease cocktails, you’re now a thriving 54-year-old man with HIV. Sure, you’d be part of that 3.4 percent increase in older AIDS patients, but it’s got nothing to do with older people getting infected more often, the thesis of the story.

The only anecdote given in the story is of Jane Fowler, a 67-year-old with HIV. But the story points out she contracted HIV from a man she was dating 17 years ago! How can an infection in 1985 be part of a rising infection trend today? The fact she’s lived longer is, however, sign that it’s people living longer that’s behind any numerical rise.

Even the big official quote in the story — “It is an area we want to be concerned about,” said Robert Janssen, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “Potentially there is a risk of there being increases in new infections in older people” — is not convincing. (Any reporter will tell you that’s exactly the kind of fuzzy quote you get if you call someone up and say: “Hi, I’m doing a story about this growing problem. Isn’t it a growing problem?”)

Maybe the basis of the story is accurate, and more old people are being infected. But the reporter hasn’t done anything to prove it here.

13 May 2002 | 3 comments

For the three of you interested, the Josh Update since Thursday: Spent Thursday night with Laura out at the DMA, getting a sneak peak at the new Thomas Struth retrospective and listening to those wacky boys in the Observer-approved Chomsky. (That would be the Dallas Observer, not the New York Observer.)

Then Friday morning, it was off to Cecil, Wisconsin, for the mumble-mumble birthday of Kelly. (On the legendary Cheese Factory Road no less!) It was good to see some of the old Toledo crew and to revel in the smell of cow manure on Kelly’s family’s dairy farm. Plus, beer’s cheaper there than in Dallas. The only real drawback was the thick blanket of cigarette smoke in every Wisconsin home and bar, which left me unable to breathe for big chunks of the weekend. But hey, breathing’s optional, right?

Larry King-style dot-dot-dots: Oliver North was in line behind me at DFW, followed by a crowd of middle-aged Rush-listening middle managers who apparently believe selling arms to Iranian militants to fund the overthrow of a legitimate government is downright patriotic!… I was accused of being an industrial spy in a cheese-novelty shop… Kelly’s family owns a cow named Satan…

13 May 2002 | 1 comment

My college officemate Gabriel Snyder is moving, from the New York Observer to Us Weekly. So I guess I’ve read the last of his writing for a while. It’s disappointing, since he interviewed me for an Observer media column a couple weeks ago, and I suppose it’ll never see print now.

13 May 2002 | No comments

Kevyn Aucoin, the world’s most famous makeup artist and a Cajun to boot, died last week. I don’t pretend to follow the makeup world, but I do follow my fellow Cajuns, and everything I’d read about him in the last few years indicated he was an honestly great guy, generous, talented, and kind.

13 May 2002 | 2 comments

Guerrilla freeway signage. Great story from the LAT. (Check out the video, too.)

09 May 2002 | No comments

I must admit I was pleased to see Larry King lose his USA Today column last year. It was, after all, consistently the worst piece of high-profile “journalism” in America, a nonsensical string of celebrity suckups, meaningless observations, and unsupportable claims, all assembled with the coherence of an ADD eight-year-old playing with Legos. (It was even made subject of a half-ass crabwalk.com parody back in October.)

But it’s somehow strangely satisfying to see his column reappear at CNN’s site as “King’s Things.” It gives hope to those of us who struggle with our inner mediocrity. To save you 10 clicks, here is King’s column this week, in its entirety:

Do you see any hotels use keys anymore? I hate the cards and the flashing green or red lights… Whatever happened to Newt Gingrich? I never see him anymore… Art Howe is baseball’s most underrated manager. He consistently gets the most out of the Oakland A’s… You look up “funny” in the dictionary, you get a picture of Lewis Black. The man is flat-out hilarious… My friend Rich Cohen has written a mini-masterpiece. “Lake Effect,” a memoir of growing up in suburban Chicago, will hold you every page… I’m so old I can remember when they actually called “walks” in the NBA. Every game I see at least 10 traveling violations without any whistle… Have you seen anyone smoking a pipe lately? Whatever happened to those little wooden things?… To me the jockey is the best athlete, all things considered. Therefore, Laffit Pincay should have a statue erected of him… New York-New York in Las Vegas is a fun hotel. However, the roller coaster is not my cup of tea … Has Robert B. Parker ever written a bad book? The man is one terrific writer.

09 May 2002 | 2 comments

I spent last night at Bent Tree Country Club for the annual dinner of Yale Club of Dallas. This is the third time I’ve gone to a club event since I’ve been in Dallas, and each time I arrive with the faint hope that there’ll be someone close to my age there. And each time, I’m disappointed — it’s gray hair as far as the eye can see.

After I showed up, a guy walked up to me and started chatting. “Doesn’t look like there are too many of us younger people here,” he said. His name tag said: Class of ‘73. 1973! He’s probably 50! He graduated before I was born! But at that moment, he and I truly made up the young crowd. (Thankfully, my friend Natacha showed up a bit later, which was welcome, both because I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months and because she can breathe without the aid of an oxygen tank and has no liver spots.)

On the way in, a youngish guy wearing a golf shirt in an SUV asked me what was going on at the club tonight that brought all these cars into the parking lot. I told him. “Ah, rich people,” he said dismissively. He said dismissively, while driving his Lexus LX 470 away from his tee time at his country club. It’s always interesting seeing Old Money and New Money collide, each thinking the other unworthy of their riches. (I, of course, represent that all-important third category, No Money.)

Anyway, dinner was nice, if only because of the dessert: a noble cannoli, prompting fond memories of Libby’s Italian, the true highlight of four years in New Haven.

09 May 2002 | No comments

Stupid dad, freaky looking kid.

09 May 2002 | 3 comments

Back before I became a history major and a writer, I was mostly known academically as a math geek. In seventh and eighth grade, I was good enough to be in Mathcounts, a national math competition. (Actually, I was never good enough to make it to nationals; this kid from Paul Breaux Middle always beat me in the finals.)

Anyway, despite the fact I last competed in 1988, I somehow have remained on the Mathcounts mailing list for the last 14 years. In the latest edition of “Mathcounts News,” there are five sample questions from recent competitions. Since you folks seemed to like it the last time we played Math Quiz here on crabwalk.com, here are a few more. (I can only post the first three here now because the other two include graphs or charts. Leave your answers in the comments. And don’t look there before you do the problems yourself!)

1. What is the sum of the reciprocals of the natural-number factors of 6?

2. A middle school has 12 doors to enter or leave the building. In how many ways is it possible to enter the building by one door and leave by a different door?

3. At the Word Store, each vowel sells for a different price, but all consonants are free. The word “triangle” sells for $6, “square” sells for $9, “pentagon” sells for $7, “cube” sells for $7, and “tetrahedron” sells for $8. What is dollar cost of the word “octahedron”?

08 May 2002 | 6 comments

There is a mariachi band in the newsroom. They’re playing La Bamba. Loudly. With a Casio keyboard accompaniment. Gotta love journalism.

08 May 2002 | 9 comments

A nice profile of Jane Scott, the world’s oldest rock critic, who just retired at 83. (Aside: Geez, the Washington Post’s Style section just does the best damned features. Always with the right combination of snarkiness and generosity. They’re so good.) A friend of mine was once an arts reporting intern at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the newspaper Scott worked at, and he thought she was cool as hell.

“She accompanied Jimi Hendrix when he bought a blue Corvette, and she dueted with Brian Wilson on ‘California Girls’ after he beelined to a piano during an interview in a hotel lobby. She watched Keith Moon handcuff himself to a young lady he didn’t know, and she got a snarky backstage brushoff from Janis Joplin. By any measure, it’s been a memorable run.”

She also makes a confession: “I was never good at the difference between metal and punk-metal.”

07 May 2002 | 2 comments

As a reporter, I’ve heard government officials give some creative reasons for not turning over public records. But I’ve never been told I can’t see a document because it might violate a giraffe’s right to privacy.

06 May 2002 | 1 comment

Saw Spiderman with Abby and some of her friends this afternoon. How much would it suck if Peter Parker lived in some suburban subdivision instead of the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan? I can’t imagine his spidey-powers would be nearly as useful if he could only web-swing from two-story colonial to two-story Georgian. Climbing walls wouldn’t do him much good, either. (Well, except maybe for roof maintenance purposes.)

04 May 2002 | No comments

Today I interviewed a teacher from Lubbock who happened to be in D.C. for a meeting. After we’d been talking on the phone for a while about Texas educational policy, he let this fly: “I can tell we’re on the same wavelength as fellow Texans — I can tell from your accent.”

Anyone who’s met me knows I don’t have a Texan accent. (Hell, I haven’t even lived here two years.) I also don’t have a Southern accent (never did, despite growing up in Louisiana), and the rather thick Cajun accent I once had was long ago banished, only to return as an occasional party trick. If they hazard a guess, most folks think I’m from Nebraska, or Kansas, or some other such flatland.

So of course, my immediate mental response was: “Silly, silly man — you think I’m a Texan? Have you ears, friend?”

And of course, my verbal response was an eager “Sure, sure!” (Gotta keep those interviews going smooth.)

03 May 2002 | 1 comment

Mike “moderation in all things” Tyson on the media: “I wish that you guys had children so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain because that’s the pain I have waking up every day.”

03 May 2002 | 1 comment

My colleague who sits next to me just told a story about when Texas was switching over from the electric chair to lethal injection as its method of executing prisoners.

He was covering the proposed switch when the bill was before the Texas Legislature. There was various testimony back and forth. Then an 80-something legislator tottered up to the mike, face stuck in a scowl, to offer his thoughts.

“My constituents and I are concerned,” he said. “We’re worried. We think that death by lethal injection is just a slap on the wrist.”

03 May 2002 | 3 comments

“Female stand-ups were rare in the 1950s — even in bohemian San Francisco — and Diller’s rowdy, machine-gun delivery wowed the avant-garde.”

Somehow, America’s found it easy to forget that Phyllis Diller was once on the avant-garde.

03 May 2002 | No comments

My story in today’s paper, on rising college costs.

02 May 2002 | 12 comments

If you’re looking for a road trip for this weekend, you could do a lot worse than the Crawfish Festival in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The crawfish eating contest on Saturday and the etouffee cookoff on Sunday promise to be real treats. (Side note: I actually had a Popeye’s crawfish etouffee the other day. And you know, it wasn’t half bad. Considering my normal disdain for Cajun food produced by Texans — much less Ohioans, Connecticuters, or other lower orders of human — I was surprised how downright acceptable I found it.)

And if you like Cajun music, the Crawfish Festival has some fine acts: Belton Richard, the Hackberry Ramblers, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie, Kevin Naquin & The Ossun Playboys, D.L. Menard, Balfa Toujours, Bois Sec Ardoin, the great Keith Frank, and the Red Stick Ramblers (who regular readers should recognize from previous mentions here).

02 May 2002 | 5 comments

Why computers aren’t perfect: When asked to get me from Dallas to New Haven, Connecticut in a timely fashion, Expedia recommends the following route: Dallas/Fort Worth to Las Vegas to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to New Haven. That’s departing at 4:03 p.m. and arriving the following day at 11:10 a.m. New Haven may be a bit of a backwater, but come on, Kigali it ain’t.

02 May 2002 | 6 comments

If you’re interested, my latest so-so performance will be rebroadcast hourly tonight on TXCN. Since I don’t have cable any more, I won’t be able to see it myself, so feel free to send your heart-rending critiques my way.

01 May 2002 | 1 comment

Greetings MSN readers! (I must say, the folks who pick the Link of the Day aren’t particularly creative, since this is the second time in two months the CD Mix of the Month Club has been tapped.) Feel free to take a look around, comment on anything you like, and tell Bill Gates I said hi.

01 May 2002 | 3 comments

If you go to Wired News, enter the search terms “belo and adelman,” then click on the May 1, 2002 entry, you’ll find an interesting story. I will have no further comment on it.

01 May 2002 | 8 comments