I need a weekend. Thankfully, I hear one’s coming up.
A pet peeve of mine: stories that report someone has gotten in trouble for saying something insensitive — without saying what the comments were! Like this story on a Major League Baseball umpire who made an anti-Semitic remark. You have to go to another version of the story to find out what exactly he said.
FYI, I’ll be on TXCN live this afternoon at 4:20, then looping on tape throughout the evening.
Perhaps I’ll be loopy on something else entirely by then.
Emergency request: I’m supposed to go on a Cheap Date tonight. (For new readers: I write an occasional column for my employer detailing a night on the town that, for two people, costs less than 30 bucks.) But I’ve been too busy to plan. Anyone have any good ideas for a Dallas Cheap Date?
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on a new testing standard that means almost a third of Texas schools will be declared failing by the feds this year.
And here are links to the equivalent stories in the Houston Chronicle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Austin American-Statesman, and the San Antonio Express News: um, oh, that’s right. They didn’t get the story.
What a day. Along with the NYT thing, here’s my story from today’s front page, a somewhat interesting profile of the new chairman of the House education committee. I’ll also be on tomorrow’s front page with what might (?) be a nice exclusive. (Maybe.)
There’s nothing like being in the New York Times to bring old friends out of the woodwork. Hello, old friends! (And Times readers.)
On the other hand, why wait until tomorrow when the story is posted today? (Notice the annoyingly smirky photo. That’s the look you get on your face when you’ve been smiling and holding a CD in the same position for 45 minutes straight. Sorry.)
Judge throws out case regarding “cloned” Baby Eve. The best part: the judge is named John Frusciante. (No, thankfully, it’s not that John Frusciante.)
Genius: The Lord of the Rings, starring Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and the rest of the mid-century pantheon of stars. (That’s an 18-meg download, by the way. An 18-meg Maltese-Falcon-meets-Casablanca-meets-Godzilla-meets-Tolkien download.) It’s so good to see Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (as Gollum, natch) still getting work.
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on a wealthy school district near Austin. Please read past the headline, which isn’t what the story’s about.
The strange Canadian fascination with the CD Mix of the Month Club continues, with this story in the Toronto Star. Good job getting the words “nice ass” into the first paragraph.
A well-written steroids piece in ESPN the Magazine: A look back at the 1980 made-for-TV “Strongest Man in Football” competition. Four of the eight competitors died an early death, likely due to ‘roids.
Oops! Time Magazine retracts its earlier story accusing Bush of neo-Confederate tendencies.
“The article “Look Away, Dixieland” [Jan. 27] stated that President George W. Bush ‘quietly reinstated’ a tradition of having the White House deliver a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery — a practice ‘that his father had halted in 1990.’ The story is wrong. First, the elder president Bush did not, as TIME reported, end the decades-old practice of the White House delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial; he changed the date on which the wreath is delivered from the day that some southern heritage groups commemorate Jefferson Davis’s birthday to the federal Memorial Day holiday. Second, according to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day continued under Bill Clinton as it does under George W. Bush.”
That’s got to sting.
If I haven’t before, please allow me to recommend my friend James’ Poor Clio blog for your bloggish needs.
“I’m thinking of proposing a new reality show: Joe Puts-The-Lid-Down. Or how about Joe Really Actually Very Nice and Considerate. Or Joe Who Likes Chick Flicks. All with the same punch line, of course: We Lied.”
From: comments@braums.com
To: me
Subject: Re: Your Comments to Braum’s
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 13:21:53 -0600
Dear Josh,
Thank you for your email requesting information on Braum’s menu items. At the present time we do not have the calorie specifications available on menu items, including the Double Dip Hot Caramel Sundae you asked about. They have never been analyzed. Once again thank you for your interest in Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Stores.
Sincerely,
[name withheld]
Customer Service
Just mistyped the URL for Guidelive.com, the Dallas-area entertainment site. Strangely, there’s no web site at www.guidelice.com. Shouldn’t there be? Wouldn’t we all like a few guide lice in our lives, showing us the way, helping us navigate through life’s difficult moments? They could have tiny little leashes. It would be so cute.
There is a headlice.org, though, should you need the latest lice information.
Want to get depressed? Try reading and/or editing the writing of principals and teachers. You should see the emails I get. If I had a nickel for every misplaced apostrophe, every use of “quotation marks” for emphasis, and every they’re/their/there error, I’d…have many nickels.
An earnest welcome to all the naked, horny prep school students arriving here from the Abercrombie and Fitch site. The powers that be at A&F have deemed crabwalk.com a “Cool Site.” I’ll take all the validation I can get, even from, well, Abercrombie and Fitch.
I own a grand total of one Abercrombie clothing item, a six-year-old pea coat. Fortunately, I’m a smaller person now than I was then, so it no longer fits. But a good, solid pea coat.
Byron Mouton, my hero, is now playing for the Idaho Stampede. Byron is from my hometown, grew up a few blocks from me, and was the starting small forward on last year’s NCAA champion Maryland Terrapins. Now he plays next door to a cheese- and sugar-processing factory. He’ll be rocking the NBA soon enough.
Totally and unacceptably lame-ass: The Dismemberment Plan breaks up. Bah humbug.
Whether you’re a libertarian or a unreformed Trotskyite, there’s now an excellent reason to be reading Reason.com, the web site of libertarian micromag Reason. The web site is now being run by Tim Cavanaugh, genius ex-editor of genius ex-web site Suck.com.
Cavanaugh’s brought along some of his fellow ex-Sucksters, many of them certainly desparate for freelance work: Joey Anuff, Chris Bray, Ana Marie Cox, etc. Cavanaugh sums up the Suck philosophy as “a rallying call that says, ‘This is the end of rallying calls.’” Well put.
The web site’s something of a contrast to the magazine, which can be a bit dry. (I used to subscribe, probably 10-12 years ago.) Not dry in a bad way, really — just dry in the same way The New Republic, National Review, and other wonk mags are dry. They’re all about Social Security reform, for heaven’s sake! Just try to make that sexy!
(Note: Dallas blogger Virginia Postrel is Reason’s former editor.)
Much sadness: Chanda lost to Myskina. Damned Russians. She and Kournikova (naked photos! Kournikova nude porn! Hello, Google!) lost in doubles too.
Now I just have to track her down so she can come to our high school reunion in May. Having drawn the proverbial short straw, I have to organize the damned thing. So my question, to loyal crabwalk readers: anyone have any suggestions? Any great reunion experiences you’ve had that might be worth replicating? Great ideas are always welcome. (One note: our alma mater was a very small rural school in south Louisiana, so we had only 43 graduates. So even if we get a high attendance rate, we’re still talking about a small gathering.)
Swappingtons. “Inside, you will find all sorts of books, CDs and DVDs that other folks own, but wish to swap away. The way it works is simple: You list items that you don’t want, and someone will swap you for those items. When they swap you, they transfer swap points to your account, and you mail them the item in question. Once you have the points, you can go and spend them on other items that other folks list on the site. In short, Swappingtons is a great way to get rid of any books, CDs or DVDs that you don’t want anymore, and get other items in return for them.”
Go sign up and give my name as the person who referred you (username: jbenton), so I can get me some point mojo.
Remember some months ago, when I mentioned I’d be writing an occasional column for the Dallas Morning News called “Cheap Date,” in which I’d take some lucky woman out on the town for $30 or less?
Well, the first piece ran some months ago. The second is in today’s paper. (So what if the date in question took place back in August? At least the woman in question can still stand me.)
Longtime readers remember that crabwalk.com’s favorite tennis player is Chanda Rubin, primarily because I went to high school with her. Well, Chanda’s rocking again, this time at the Australian Open. (The Aussie is where Chanda’s had her top grand slam performances — winning the whole thing in doubles in 1996, the same year she got to the semifinals in singles.)
This year, she’s made it to the fourth round in singles, disposing of Barbara Schwartz, Mary Pierce, and Melinda Czink. Up next: Anastasia Myskina, the eighth seed. In doubles, she’s paired again with Anna Kournikova and is in the third round. And unlike the U.S. Open, she and Anna are on the opposite side of the draw from the Williams sisters, so a spot in the finals is entirely possible.
Everyone say it with me: Go Chanda!
Another unexplained week-long absence — could Josh have been kidnapped by aliens?
No such luck — just a combination of slacktitude and a work trip to Austin and San Antonio.
As an aside, I just realized that President Bush quoted one of my stories in a speech a couple weeks ago. On December 2, I wrote a piece on Del Valle High School in El Paso. In it was this quote from the principal, J.R. Guinn:
“You have to make the expectation of success part of your belief system,” Mr. Guinn said. “Whether it’s athletics, academic competitions, band – whatever it is – we’re raising the bar. We expect success.”
Here’s the text of Bush’s speech on Jan. 8, on the one-year anniversary of his education bill:
At Del Valle High School in El Paso, less than half the children in that high school could pass an Algebra I exam two years ago. See, we measured in Texas. We wanted to know. This year, the number has risen to 74 percent.
I want to tell you what J.R. Guinn has said. He said, you have to make the expectation of success part of your belief system. We’re raising the bar, and we expect success. And, J.R., you’re getting success. Thank you for your leadership. Good guy.
Sign No. 34,683 that I’m getting old: Coming home from the CD store with a new disc — then discovering that I already own it.
On NPR the other day, I heard an interview with Pat Conroy, a novelist whose entire career has essentially been spent repeating one theme over and over again: “My dad was an asshole.” The interview seemed a little too pat. As he told stories about how mean his dad was, he seemed a little too pleased with himself. Really, he didn’t seem very likeable.
Now he’s written a non-fiction memoir about (surprise!) how mean his dad was. A central scene involves his dad beating him up during the annual athletic banquet at his D.C. high school, Gonzaga. In the book, Dad punches his son on the jaw; when his classmates see him get socked, “a free-for-all began” as all the other fathers come to his defense.
“They had no idea who my father was and did not care,” Conroy writes. “They saw a stranger knock a Gonzaga boy to his knees and came roaring to my defense.”
(As one Gonzaga official said about the book: “Everything he writes, his dad beats him up—I know he gets pounded in The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides—and stories about his dad beating him up are in every article that’s ever been written about the guy. So nobody should be surprised that he gets beat up in this book, too.”)
Strange thing, though: it appears the incident may never have happened.
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on Texas universities’ push to raise tuition.
Oops, forgot to link to my story in yesterday’s paper. Perhaps because it wasn’t all that interesting.
You know, there are worse ways to kill an hour than being the subject of a New York Times photo shoot. Then again, when the photo actually runs in the Old Gray Lady, all of you will know what I look like. That could send hit counts plummeting.
Interesting: my employer’s started a business news page that’s awfully blog like, in format if not in tone.
Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, phone pals.
It was a practical joke that may have worked too well: Two Miami radio-show hosts known for playing outrageous pranks on the air got Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on a private line this morning by pretending that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was calling him from Havana.
The joke was part of a segment called Fidel Te Llama or ”Fidel’s Calling You,” in which Santos and his co-host, Joe Ferrero, call various people and play snippets of a controversial conversation between Castro and Mexican President Vicente Fox that Castro made public in 2001.
Hearing Castro’s distinctive rasp, the unsuspecting recipients of the call usually believe it is the comandante himself on the phone. After a few minutes of a disjointed conversation in which the same nonsensical sentence fragments are repeated, the victims get suspicious.
I am pleased to announce the return of Stupid McNupid, my pal Kelly’s blog, now safely hosted on my server, far away from the Blogger ills du jour.
Also, Texans can see me on rotation on TXCN for the next few hours, talking about federal education policy.
I volunteer at Sunset High School here in Dallas. Every week, I have to walk right past the home-ec room (or whatever it is they call home-ec rooms nowadays). They have the best-smelling cookies for sale, every morning. You can smell them three hallways away. I don’t see how anyone gets any work done.
On an unrelated note, everyone reading this should go to SXSW Interactive in Austin this March. Yours truly will be opining on a panel (alongside Matt Haughey and J.D. Lasica) about…um…something or another.
Mr. Blackwell’s annual list of worst-dressed celebs is out again. Anyone else wonder what Herr Blackwell does for the other 364 days out of the year, when he’s not thinking up bon mots about the ill-attired? (“Anna [Nicole Smith]’s fashion follies are the worst of the year…don’t bother with a new designer, Anna, just hire a structural engineer!”) Seems like a somewhat sad existence.
One thing we know he’s not busy doing: fixing his web site, last updated in 1997. And seriously, this man is a self-appointed arbiter of style? The man looks like the announcer on a Game Show Network rerun.
Is it just me, or is David Samuels the worst rock critic writing today? (One of life’s mysteries: how Slate can be so smart on political and business analysis and so bad on cultural coverage. I mean, abysmal.) He’s just so consistently disappointing — you can almost see the boys in Redmond thinking, “That David, he must be plugged in to what the kids like these days.”
This “indie-rock year in review” was an embarassment. (“The most important story of the year in indie rock is that Elliott Smith didn’t release a record…Only the redoubtable Cat Power (whose new record will be coming out in February on Matador), the queen of sadcore, continues to make the case for indie rock as a world apart.” Puh-leeze. Elliott Smith spending the year with a heroin needle in his arm instead of recording is the biggest story of the year? Only Cat Power is “keeping it real” [chest thump] by staying on an indie? The Guided By Voices record was the “best rock record of the year”? Somebody, pull this man out of 1996!)
And let’s not even discuss his claim that the Vines are better than the Strokes, the White Stripes, and the Hives. (“As a result, Highly Evolved now stands a mere 12,000 units away from the magic 500,000 threshold required for earning a gold record. So go buy it. That’s my advice. The Vines deserve a gold record as much as any band in the business—especially this year.”) I repeat: puh-leeze.)
Good for Toledo — not every city could handle having a gay Hispanic ex-priest as the president of city council. I used to cover Louis Escobar, and he’s a good man.
Good profile in Sunday’s paper of Evan Smith, the New York-bred editor of Texas Monthly. Scary anecdote:
In 1994, when he briefly thought he would like to return to the East to work for another magazine, Mr. Smith and his future wife packed up to leave Austin. But first there were the magazines in the closet.
Over the years they had piled up – hundreds of Esquires and Vanity Fairs and New Republics, perused, read, cherished, hoarded.
“I think we kept every magazine we had ever had,” says Julia Smith. “Evan loaded them in the back of the car – they were so heavy, the car was scraping the ground – and he drove them to Half Price Books.”
The clerks at the bookstore solemnly watched as he unloaded them. Then they assessed the whole lot and offered him … $1.
Years of talent, of thought, of words shaped and fought over and poured out upon the page. Worth a buck.
It was more than an insult, says his wife. “It was a blow to what he does.”
That doesn’t speak well about my plan for eventually liquidating all the five-year magazine stacks in my apartment. (Then again, there wasn’t eBay back in 1994.)
Happy new year! My blog vacation is ending with a vengeance, I promise you. (It was partly caused by a host snafu, joined with a forced but complicated switch from Berkeley to MySQL databasing on the backend of this site. Non-technical readers: I promise no more posts about Berkeley or MySQL for the rest of winter.)
If you’re (a) an environmentalist, (b) a car enthusiast, or (c) a policy wonk, you’ll be interested in Supercar: The tanking of an American dream, a series that just ran in the Chicago Tribune. It’s by my ol’ bud Sam Roe, who I sat next to at my old job. It’s all about how a project to build an 80-mpg family car got scuttled by government and industry intrigue. (Warning: like all Sam Roe stories, this one’s an epic. Read it in chunks, or be prepared to set aside a decent percentage of your day.)
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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