Fellow Mac geeks: Thinking of ways to get around the digital rights management encryption of songs bought via the iTunes Music Store? (Just for jollys, not for any evil intentions.) Just channel the sound through Audio Hijack or its pro version. (With the regular version you have to record into AIFF and then convert to MP3 in iTunes; with the Pro version, you skip the conversion step and go straight into MP3.) Works fine for me, and it strips out all encryption and usage limits.
Currently accepting applications for people to go to the Stephen Malkmus show Friday night at Trees with me.
If you’re going to dress up as an Iraqi official, you should at least have a better fake name than Niknak-Padiwak Givudogabon.
The best thing about Apple’s new iTunes Music Store: It hasn’t been around long enough for the recommendations system to make sense. (You know, the “If you like this CD, you’ll also like” thing that Amazon and others get from analyzing customer data.)
If you try to buy a track off 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the current number one recommendation is Paco de Lucia & Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. I had no idea 50 Cent’s bangers were all secret flamenco guitar aficionados.
Oh, and congrats to Molly, who somehow won $800 in a public speaking contest for memorizing her story about my burrito habits.
Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger. Crabwalk, although inclined by life experience among the Weisbergeresque to agree, takes no formal stance.
Got back from Chicago last night (mad shout-out to my education writer homeez!). Drank a lot of beer. Bought a sportscoat. Drank some more beer. Heard about a newspaper shutting down a reporter’s blog. Silently praised my employers for being more logical. Pledged more regular blog postings to satisfy the five readers left after the CDMOM shutdown. Drank beer.
Oh yeah, here’s my story from today’s front page, article no. 3,573,738 in my endless standardized testing death march.
Just taped a TXCN appearance — it should air over the weekend, in reference to a story that’ll run on Monday’s front page.
Proof that the odds are against guys at bars.
Beulah not breaking up after all.
Monica Lewinsky…Monica Lewinsky…why do I know that name? Oh, the handbags! Of course!
I’m off to Chicago tomorrow morning for four days. I used to hang out in Chicago quite a bit in my Toledo days, but it’s been a while. All suggestions are welcome.
I’m not sure I can properly communicate through electronic prose my excitement — nay, my joy — that a reliable boiled crawfish joint has opened one block away from my Louisiana family home. $14.99 for five pounds — a thoroughly acceptable price. I suspect my traditional five-pound gain per home visit will soon reach eight or nine.
Also, here’s my story from tomorrow’s front page, on a rural school district that’s gone from craptacular to rock-star status in a few years’ time. (Well, I phrase it differently in the story.) Notice the he’s-pushing-it use of the phrase “thousands-strong throngs.”
Dallasites, don’t forget! The Colossal Colon is coming to town, April 23 to 26.
Wow. The Dutch sure have a different conception of justice than we Americans do. Seriously, you assassinate your nation’s leading candidate for prime minister — and you get 12 years in prison? Can you possibly imagine someone killing an American presidential candidate and walking free 12 years later?
“The panel of three judges…were not imposing a life sentence, they said, because they had been persuaded that Mr. van der Graaf was not likely to repeat his crime.” I suppose it’s the second political assassination that really shows you’re a bad guy.
Oh, and on a personal note, somebody pinch me: Today I wrote the final check to pay off my student loans. The $15,810 I once owed for my time in New Haven is finally, like my major, history.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the Texas Legislature vote to boost college tuition up to 22 percent.
Also, I just taped another appearance on TXCN — it should run Friday and repeat through the weekend, promoting a story that’ll be on Monday’s front page.
I’m leaving in a few hours for Louisiana and a four-day weekend. May your rocks continue to roll in my absence.
The comics page at my old college paper — long considered the most important real estate in college journalism — has been strong of late. Don’t Look at Me by Tom O’Donnell is great week in and week out. This Happy Planet is usually creepy good, and Cavalcade of Assholes (which repurposes self-important quotes from the editorials of rival paper) is entertaining in a bloviating sort of way.
Just the other day I was wondering: What is the single, unifying theme behind the hit ABC daytime drama All My Children? Thank heavens, now I know!
“The theme of ‘All My Children’ from the beginning is the belief that, as God’s children, we are all bound to each other by our common humanity despite our many personal differences; that it is our failure to understand and respect those differences that causes most of life’s pain and suffering.”
So it’s not about hot lesbian action?
My guess is that James Scott of the Charleston Post and Courier is being mercilessly taunted at work today. In his story on the Masters protests, he writes:
“Throughout the morning, law enforcement officers stood on the perimeter of the five-acre field. At no point did the protest turn violent, though officers escorted Heywood Jablome away after he held up a sign directly in front of Burk that read “Make me dinner” before shouting ‘Oprah rules.’”
Uday, Saddam’s kid, used a Yahoo Mail account! All this time, you could have dropped him a line at udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com.
I’m sure Yahoo will be using that in their promotional campaigns: The web-based email of torturers everywhere!
Sniff, sniff…the track listing for the final CD Mix of the Month Club mix is online.
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on the Iraqi leadership’s disappearing act.
I’ll be on TXCN sometime tonight talking about the war and where Saddam Hussein’s cronies are all hiding. (Yep, I figured it all out, from right here at my desk in Dallas.)
My debut as a war analyst will also be on tomorrow’s front page, strangely enough.
Sadness is spending $83.00 on 100 83-cent stamps…then getting home to discover they gave you 100 76-cent stamps instead.
Now that CDMOM is over, there’s time for a little statistical reflection. I made 16 monthly mixes, with a total of 316 songs. Here are the artists who appeared most often:
5 appearances: American Music Club.
4: Clem Snide, Death Cab for Cutie, Sloan, Spoon.
3: Calexico, The Dismemberment Plan, Enon, Luna, Pavement, The Pixies, Velvet Crush.
2: Beulah, Big Star, Blackalicious, Richard Buckner, Built to Spill, Call and Response, The Clash, Evan Dando, Devo, DJ Shadow, Mark Eitzel, The Faint, The Flashing Lights, Ben Folds Five, Freelance Hellraiser, The French Kicks, J Mascis, The Minders, Morphine, Mos Def, New Wet Kojak, David Poe, Quasi, Rainer Maria, The Red Stick Ramblers, Saint Etienne, Sea Ray, Seam, Sebadoh, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth, Superchunk, Tahiti 80, Rufus Wainwright, The Weakerthans, X, The Young Fresh Fellows.
Unsurprisingly, that list’s a pretty solid reflection of my tastes. You should buy all their CDs. (Okay, not all — even these giants have produced a few stinkers. But most are great, and all are worth supporting.)
Hold your horses, people — the March CDMOM discs should be in the mail tomorrow. There’s a war going on, ferchrissakes! Doesn’t that give me a little wiggle room?
I can mail them now after spending 30 minutes negotiating with the folks at the post office over whether I should be allowed to buy stamps or not. (They had the stamps I needed, but were unsure whether someone else might need them more than I did later.)
Why don’t the White Stripes just hurry up and endorse Target already? We all know that’s what the red-and-white color scheme has been about all these years.
By the way, that new White Stripes record is going to blow up. I swung by Tower to pick up my copy over the weekend and it was the only CD in the player anyone was listening to. Every five minutes I’d look over and someone new would have the headphones on and a copy of Elephant in their hands: a paunchy, fortysomething soccer dad; a dorky 15-year-old trying his damnedest to be cool; an ancient old lady with a bun (seriously).
By the way, sorry for the silence — technical problems.
Big day: Here’s my story from today’s front page on East Dallas Community School, a great Montessori school founded by a bunch of ’60s idealists. It’s the latest installment of the Schools That Work series. (Even if it did suffer some last-minute surgery in order for it to fit in today’s packed A-section.)
And on the cover of the Metro section is the debut of my column, Thinking About Education. (Well, it’s not just my column — three colleagues and I are writing it in rotation.) Those wondering what I look like in real life can pick up today’s paper to see my ugly mug. For some reason, I chose a very nerdy, wonky, numbers-based topic for my first column. Don’t worry, that’ll change — my next one’s about a show on the WB.
“William Whyte’s rule: virtually all corporate relocations involve a move to a location which is closer to the CEO’s home than the old location. Whyte discovered this principle after an extensive study of Fortune 500 companies that left New York City for the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. They always had big, complicated Relocation Committees which carefully studied all the options and chose, coincidentally I’m sure, to move to within half a mile of the CEO’s home in Danbury, Connecticut. Whyte also showed that these companies all tanked after the relocation.”
Dude, am I the only one who didn’t know Christopher Reeve is bald? (Here too.) Nothing wrong with it, of course, but at least kill the bad toupees.
Longtime readers will remember my mix of excitement and fright at the filming of my favorite book, A Confederacy of Dunces. Matt informed me today that the movie’s shaping up: Stephen Soderburgh writing and producing, Drew Barrymore as Darlene. Philip Seymour Hoffman is rumored for the lead (just as I proposed ten months ago!), which would be a relief. And ex-Dallasite David Gordon Green, whose George Washington got great reviews, is set to direct.
Thankfully, he seems to have the right idea.
“It’s a book I’m very invested in. I’m not a big reader, but it’s the greatest book I’ve read. I mean, I got it when I was 15, and I’ve read it every year since. It’s a different game but something I’m totally excited about trying to do. It’s pretty awesome to have a movie that from the get-go is gonna have a certain profile.”
I’m not a coffee drinker. Sure, if a bunch of people are heading for Starbucks, I’ll blow a few bucks on some long-named drink. But coffee is a few-times-a-year thing for me.
But this week has been crazy busy, and I figured I might need a little extra pep. On Tuesday, I started drinking a cup in the morning.
Last night, I slept perhaps 10 total minutes. I also had a very vivid dream that the Dallas schools web site had been redesigned in Soviet constructivist style — lots of strong reds and blacks, Cyrillic block letters, abstracted forms, the whole nine.
I think I’m going to stop drinking coffee.
A damned shame. I didn’t agree with Michael Kelly much, but he turned into a superb editor, as anyone who’s read The Atlantic Monthly the last couple of years could tell you.
Update: Here’s what is probably Kelly’s most famous piece, about how a band of Iraqis surrendered to him during Gulf War I.
How SARS spread. Thankfully, there’s no little square labeled “crabwalk.com Global HQ” yet.
“That’s a big squid.” “Nope.” “No, seriously, that’s a giant squid.” “Nope.” “Huh? I mean, that’s a huge damned squid.”
“Nope. That’s a colossal squid.”
An important appeal for help preserving Cajun and Creole culture. Longtime readers know I’m a proud south Louisiana Cajun, and it kills me to hear about this.
Considered by musicians (including the Mamou Playboys, Zachary Richard, and Beausoleil among others) and scholars to be one of the most important audio collections in the world, hundreds of tapes in the Archive of Cajun and Creole folklore are in danger of permanent loss caused by aging and environmental damage.
The recordings were stored without climate control during three years of renovations on the University of Louisiana Dupré Library. Located on the uppermost floor of the library, the archive was subject to the full onslaught of several Louisiana summers, exacerbated by an unusual period of drought that denied even a few cooling rain clouds. Many recordings exist only on reel-to-reel tapes, some of which literally melted in their boxes. Others often fall apart as they are being re-recorded onto other media. The Archive’s administration is doing the best it can: it recently won a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and has received some support from the University. But the undertaking is expensive and time consuming, and the few resources the Archive has are stretched as far as they can go…
Friends, this situation is bordering on tragic. With only volunteer labor and exhausted funding, John Laudun, Carl Brasseaux and Erik Charpentier are trying to save an irreplaceable treasure. These are field recordings of non-commercial Cajun and Creole music and storytelling dating back to the 1930s, when most of the performers were carrying forward music from the previous century. Most of the artists captured on tape in the Archive are long departed, and some of them can only be found in this Archive. It is a wealth of music and oral tradition that has never passed through the needle’s eye of the record business, and it enables us to conceive the depth and breadth of our musical heritage.
They are asking for donations; their goal is $50,000. Donation info’s available at that first link. (Alas, no PayPal.) I’m sending in my check — I hope my fellow Cajunphiles will do the same.
“What I do has always been in good fun,” he said, “but some things are no longer funny. My physical resemblance to Saddam may well be one of them.”
I’ve spent the last week learning all I can about the AIDS crisis in Zambia. (This is for a future project that may or may not happen.) Official crabwalk.com advice: If you want to be a happy person, do not spend a week learning all you can about the AIDS crisis in Zambia.
To recap: 21 percent of all Zambian adults are HIV-positive. 61 percent of Zambian teenaged girls think you get AIDS from mosquito bites or witchcraft. About 15 percent of the nation’s children are AIDS orphans. Seven percent of Zambian households are led by a child 14 or younger. Reports of rapes and sexual assaults have more than doubled in the last two years, particularly among young girls. The nation’s educational system, health system, and economy are all bordering on collapse. Average life expectancy has dropped by 11 years since 1990.
The really scary thing: Zambia’s not the worst off country in sub-Saharan Africa. In Botswana, the adult infection rate is almost 40 percent. Of the 15-year-old boys in Botswana today, between 65 and 90 percent will die of AIDS. (Take a look at Figure 7.)
I need a beer.
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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