Fast facts about the University of Louisiana at Lafayette: “It has a 48-acre New Iberia Research Center in New Iberia, La., which is one of the largest private non-human primate breeding colonies in the world.”
I love the fact the university’s PR staff felt they had to say it’s a non-human breeding colony. Because presumably, if you include human breeding colonies, there are some nightclubs which might technically be larger.
Of course, interviewing Ross Perot is nowhere near as exciting as drinking beers with residents of Rochester, New York. Particularly when said residents demand a post in their honor on crabwalk.com. Well, friends, I follow through on promises. This link to a review of a Khrushchev biography — in which we learn he liked to compare his Kremlin colleagues to “dogs peeing on curbstones” — is dedicated entirely and completely to you.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on how schools are preparing kids who failed the third-grade TAKS test. (For the first time, kids need to pass it this year to go on to fourth grade.)
James Brown has a daughter named Yamma Brown Lumar. Yamma Brown Lumar is the crabwalk.com Name of the Day.
If I could ban one phrase from the American lexicon, it would be: “But I support the troops.” It’s shorthand for “I don’t support this war, but I also don’t want a bunch of Americans to die.” Well, who in this country does want a bunch of Americans to die? (I’m excluding members of any al-Qaeda sleeper cells here.) It’s silly that people feel they have to say it.
The whole reason for the phrase is the idea that in Vietnam, the general public somehow didn’t support the troops — that opposition to that war wasn’t against policies in Washington, but somehow against actual soldiers. The tale this always comes back to involves soldiers getting spit on when they returned home from the front lines.
Erica, my ex-coworker in Toledo, has expressed anger that I did not recognize the important role her grandfather had in Raising Arizona. He played the chairman of the parole board — a memorable role.
CHAIRMAN: Well, you done served your twenty munce, and seeing as you never use live ammo, we got no choice but to return you to society.
SECOND MAN: These doors goan swing wide.
HI: I didn’t want to hurt anyone, sir.
SECOND MAN: Hi, we respect that.
CHAIRMAN: But you’re just hurtin’ yourself with this rambunctious behavior.
HI: I know that, sir.
CHAIRMAN: Okay then.
I wish I could read Spanish. That way I could read the signs of the picketers outside my window. (They’re upset about my employer’s coverage of Casita Maria and Rev. Justin Lucio, a priest accused of various sexual and financial improprieties. Other stories here, here, and here.)
Trivia bowl season has started up again, which means I’ll be defending my title from last year. My favorite question from last night: “Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen lost what in 1984?” His arm, of course. His left arm (although I got no bonus points for that telling detail). I had to picture the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” video to figure out the whole left/right thing.
Marybeth Reed’s dream: “I was at a Deaf Leppard [sic] concert with my friend Jenn and everybody was missing an arm but the drummer.”
Everybody’s blogging: Saints Watch Weblog, run by the sports staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. This will be of interest to the four fellow Saints fans who read crabwalk.com.
If it’s Oscar season, it must be time for Fametracker to publish their annual transcript of the meetings in the Hollywood Star Chamber, where five clones of Karl Malden choose the year’s winners.
1: Next up: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
4: They made a movie about the Twin Towers already? It’s too soon!
3: Apparently, the Orcs were behind the whole thing.
4: Damn you, Orcs!
2: Let’s bomb Orcistan!
1: You idiots, this movie is about a totally different pair of towers.
4: They made a movie called The Two Towers that wasn’t about the World Trade Center? It’s too soon!
2: Let’s bomb Orcistan anyway! Who knows what weapons they may or may not be developing?!
4: Damn you, Orcs! And I also reserve animus for half-orcs.
A larger than normal number of sex jokes this year, but what would you expect from five Karl Maldens?
Until last night, I would have sworn that Raising Arizona starred River Phoenix. A simple geographic misunderstanding.
Strangely, I never thought My Own Private Idaho starred Boise De Legge.
When speaking of the media, it’s become fashionable to roll your eyes, allude bitterly to the cable chat-fests or some embarrassing reality-TV show, and shrug the subject away. Because, my dear, the media nowadays are so sensational, so polarizing, so stupid and unsophisticated, they’re not even worth discussing. But they’re destroying us.
It’s weird so many intelligent people can continue to believe this…
Joy! The Super Friendz reunite! (Okay, I’m the only American happy about this, but joy nonetheless.)
Finally, the truth comes out: MC Hammer is behind all this. I always suspected Hammer had weapons of mass destruction in those parachute pants. If only a voice of reason — Tone Loc, for instance — could pull him aside and speak wisdom: Please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘em.
I’ll be on TXCN sometime in the 4:00 hour this afternoon, talking about a story I didn’t even write. The segment will repeat throughout the evening. Glad I didn’t pick today to wear my loud brown-green-yellow plaid shirt.
FYI, posting will probably be very sporadic around here for the next week or so.
It’s tough to make vacation plans when, in the back of your mind, you have to keep repeating: “Well, but I might be interviewing refugees in Kuwait then.” Not certain, not even likely, but possible.
Sadness: Can’t say I knew the guy, but the world needs more Eran Karmons.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Some possible requirements for those who would benefit from the fledgling Eran Karmon Memorial Fund:
A demonstrated ability to talk your way into China, without a visa, by chatting with a border guard in Nepali.
A résumé that includes at least a Fulbright Fellowship, a Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) media fellowship or equivalent.
A clear disgust with the fact that the global reach of Coca-Cola exceeds that of high-quality education and health care.
And if it isn’t asking too much, could you try to cure AIDS?
Such is the burden of anyone who would emulate Mr. Karmon, a doctoral candidate in biophysics and a vastly talented science writer who was The Seattle Times’ inaugural AAAS science-writing fellow last summer.
His family is contemplating a fund, possibly for a scholarship or a cause he believed in, after Mr. Karmon committed suicide March 5 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 27.
And yes, he had a web page. Including a statistical analysis of how many times you’d expect the last Altoid in an Altoids tin to be touched by the time it’s actually eaten.
To add a thoroughly inappropriate personal note: He went to Pomona College; it was one of my top two choices coming out of high school. If things had worked out differently, he might be more to me than a distant obit.
When I was in high school looking at colleges — twelve years ago! — I was intrigued by Deep Springs College. “Founded in 1917, the college lies in an isolated high desert valley of eastern California, about thirty miles from the nearest town. Each of its twenty-six students receive a full scholarship valued at over $50,000 per year, covering tuition, room, and board. In addition to engaging in a rigorous academic program, the all-male student body participates in self-governance and assumes substantial responsibility for the management of the college, alfalfa farm, and cattle ranch.”
I suppose it appealed to the part of me wishing to break out of my pasty-white indoor life. But then I remembered that girls are pretty nice, too, and that I was going to college to avoid manual labor, not to embrace it. I mean, this is how the college sells itself on its web site:
Students often rise before the sun. At 6:00 the dairy boys are already milking cows half asleep when the feedman gets up to do his first feed run. A farm teamer may have been in the tractor baling hay since 4:30. All of these people are especially thankful for the breakfast cook, who’s up early preparing the morning’s fixin’s.
But they’re not the only ones up. Some people pull all-nighters to get their work done. Others sleep first and wake up excruciatingly early to do classwork…
Soon after lunch the Boarding House crew is hard at work scrubbing pots, the feedman is back on another run, and the rest of the students are scattered about, each with special projects for the afternoon.
Most labor positions entail working from lunch until dinner. This could mean spending an entire day alone in an alfalfa field fixing leaks in irrigation lines, repairing fences and gates with a partner, or working as a group to dig up frozen pipes that need to be repaired and insulated. There are less romantic jobs that could mean spending the day in the office or scrubbing toilets in the main building.
Then again, imagine studying in the middle of all this.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the Legislature’s ideas on how to increase college tuition here in Texas.
And a final reminder: Monday is the absolute deadline to sign up for the final trades of the CD Mix of the Month Club. After that, the CDMOM closes up shop for good. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
For those of you who couldn’t attend 20x2 at SXSW, my two-minute presentation is available for download. (That’s a 3.3 meg Quicktime file. The one I used at SXSW was a 412 meg file, so there’s some loss of quality, most notably in the music.) For those unfamiliar with 20x2, read the March 5 entry below.
Enough people asked me how the movie was made that I figured I’d type it up for you nice people. The machine in question is a two-year-old PowerMac G4/466 tower, running Mac OS X 10.2.4.
- The main assembler is iMovie, Apple’s great movie-editing software. I’d never used iMovie before (or done anything video-related, really) and this project was primarily an excuse to play around with it. As of iMovie 3, photos (mistakenly, I’d argue) import as rendered movies, not as still frames (the so-called Ken Burns effect). So for a project like this your life will be much easier if you edit the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iMovie3.plist file to change the value of autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills to false.
- The video screen captures (the opening pico stretch, the Safari browser launch shot, the spinning beach ball, and all the Google typing) were done with Snapz Pro. It’s easy to use — it reassigns command-shift-3 as its launcher. Snapz Pro costs $49, but it’s free for 30 days — time your download around your project needs! (The $13 ScreenRecord supposedly does the same thing, but I haven’t tried it out.)
- For iMovie purposes, your captures need to be in the 4:3 ratio, so you’ve got to resize the marquee to 640x480, 320x240, 160x120, or some variant thereof. (By luck I figured out that if you right-click at the same time that you resize the marquee with the left mouse button, a popup displays the current frame size — so no more guessing. I don’t know how’d you do that if you only had one mouse button. Of course, anyone with OS X should pony up the 20 bucks or so to buy a multi-button mouse — it’s worth it. I use the six-button Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical.)
- I used Quicktime Pro to edit down Snapz Pro’s clips. In Snapz, it’s best to grab a few extra seconds on either end of what you want; with QT Pro, it’s easy to trim off that extra time in editing. You also need QT Pro if you want to do play your movie full-screen, without any of the Aqua chrome. Finally, I also used Quicktime Pro to export the clips in .dv format, which is the camcorder codec that iMovie reads. (I don’t think you can import Quicktime movies directly into iMovie — at least you couldn’t as of iMovie 2.) So even though it costs $30, you really do need Quicktime Pro.
- The opening shot is grabbed from the OS X install of pico, the Unix text editor I remember from college. You can get to it by running Terminal.app and just typing ‘pico’ at the command line. I changed the look-and-feel to the green-on-black text and blinking cursor to evoke that old-skool computing feel.
- Getting a screen capture of the spinning beachball (OS X’s equivalent of the Windows hourglass “wait” cursor) is tough — since it only comes up when your computer is too stressed out to be running screen capture software. So the movie’s beachball is actually a shot of the demo page of No Stubs, one of the downloadable cursor sets for Mighty Mouse, Unsanity’s new cursor-replacement shareware. (For some reason, the animated GIF doesn’t activate in Win IE — perhaps it’s only on OS X.)
- The photo shots were all done in Photoshop. I kept the type, the image, and the black bar in separate layers, so they were easy to edit quickly. The photos themselves all came from Corbis, iStockPhoto, and Yahoo News. The typeface is Myriad. For the longer “Waiting for…” phrases, I messed with the type’s horizontal scaling to make them fit.
- The music is a song called “The Newborn Hippopotamus,” from a tremendous album called DJ Shadow Presents Schoolhouse Funk. It’s a limited-edition compilation of 1970s high school bands, playing some of the skronkiest funk you’ll ever hear from 16-year-olds. (Song sample here.) You can’t find the album anywhere, but you can download it from eMusic, the greatest of the legitimate MP3 download sites. (You can sign up for a free trial membership and download 50 MP3s immediately.)
- The full track is 7:08, but I edited it down in Audion. I’d originally planned a longer silent stretch at the movie’s start, which allowed me to have an audio clip about 1:30 long, ending at the start of the track’s drum solo. Unfortunately (I think), the length didn’t work out, so I tagged a part of the drum solo to make it about 1:43.
- The final sound clip (“I’m feeling lucky”) was generated as an AIFF in VoiceBox, which uses the Mac’s text-to-speech technology to “read” words into a sound file. I used the Cellos voice, with the pitch tuned up slightly.
- Once I pulled everything into iMovie, I set all of the photo frames to run for 1:15 (that’s one second and 15 frames of a, um, second second). I ended up copying and pasting the beachball clip a few times, both as a transitional space filler and to keep up the waiting theme. From there, it took just a little fine tuning. I exported the whole thing to Quicktime format, using the full DV settings. In total, it probably took me about six hours, most of them late Thursday night/early Friday morning. But a lot of that was spent searching for photos. If you (unlike me) have a clue what you’re doing ahead of time, I think you could probably produce something like this in three or four hours.
Anyway, more post-SXSW posts to come, eventually. It was great seeing everyone.
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on a hacking incident at the University of Texas. (This is, coincidentally, my 1000th crabwalk.com post.) See you in Austin, ace.
I’ll be on TXCN at 4:15 (and repeating through the evening), talking about hacking and identity theft at UT.
If you will be in Houston on next Friday (March 14) and for some reason you don’t attend the massive Clem Snide/Calexico double bill at Fat Cat’s — well, you’ll deserve what’s coming to you. Two of the official bands of crabwalk.com, together at last.
I will be in Austin for SXSW from Friday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon. If you need to reach me while I’m there, my cell is 214-914-9998. Unsure whether I’ll be updating; I’ll have my iBook with me.
If you want to catch me spouting off about the future of journalism, come to my panel Sunday at 11:30 a.m. Hopefully you’ll have worked off most of your Saturday night drunk by then. My more cogent fellow presenters will be Matt Haughey, Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, and Evan Smith.
I’ll also be one of the presenters/performance artists/clueless newbies at 20x2 on Monday night. I’m supposed to go on for two minutes, answering the question “What are you waiting for?” (Ah! It all comes together, does it not, gentle reader? It does indeed.)
Dallas Observer columnist gets into screaming match with Rangers center fielder. Not to defend Carl Everett, but geez, I’ve seen high school papers with better sports columnists than this Gonzalez guy. The column’s always about him, never his subject. And he spends all his time beating his own chest about what a scary bad-ass columnist he is, how he’s such a radical who can’t be kept down by The Man.
Okay, it’s audience participation time at crabwalk.com. I’d really like everyone to answer the following question in the comments.
What was the last thing you remember waiting for? Answers can be as practical or spacy as you’d like. Merci beaucoup.
Happy Mardi Gras, people! As one of the 100 most prominent Cajun bloggers in the city of Dallas (I’m guessing here), I send you all a special huzzah and a slice of king cake (with or without the baby Jesus inside).
Dr Pepper/Seven Up enlists ‘bloggers’ to help market drink. Looking to create a nationwide buzz for a new milk-based soft drink, Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc. wants young people to help spread the word over the Web. Over the next three months, the unit of Cadbury Schweppes PLC plans to provide samples of the sweetened drink, Raging Cow, to hundreds of writers of Web logs that appeal to teens and young adults.
A few thoughts: How likely is this to work? They’ve picked a core of teen bloggers and flown them to Dallas for “orientation,” given them free samples, and asked them to blog about this new drink. It’s got to be hard to do AstroTurf marketing when the process is as open as a blog is.
Second, I’ll be sure to bring this up the next time someone mentions that bloggers are all “journalists” and somehow above reproach, while Big-J Journalists are all corrupt because they work for The Man and worship at the altar of Corporate Power.
Finally, Jeff Jarvis makes a good point: But the truth is, it’s just a nitwitted marketing idea. I’ve been around media long enough to witness (and, unfortunately, pay for) lots of them. Somebody came up with this at a brainstorming meeting and nobody else had the good sense to hoot it down then. As Nick Denton once said to me: “We can’t afford brainstorming anymore.”
So true. The worst ideas I’ve ever seen have come from group meetings where someone offered up a stupid idea and no one could work up the courage to say, “No, sorry, you’re an idiot” then and there. There’s something to be said about the old hierarchical methods of killing bad ideas and promoting good ones. (That said, this seems like an idea worth trying — if only because the cost is low and the potential pay-off is big. Potential.)
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on the prospect of tens of thousands of third graders being held back this year.
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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06 Aug: COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
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