An Island to Oneself, the story of Tom Neale, who spent parts of three decades living alone on a South Pacific island. (This one’s for you, Gary, the lover of all things island.)
By the way, I’ll be on TXCN in the 7 o’clock hour, talking about test scores. It’ll repeat through the night. Not one of my best performances, though, so feel free to skip it.
I told you Chanda would be taken to three sets by the worrisome Laura Granville. But she rallied to victory, 2-6, 6-1, 6-3.
And my other prediction (“[Anastasia] Myskina won’t be a problem in the next round”) has proven accurate, since Myskina didn’t even make it out of Round 2. Instead, Chanda gets the malignant Magyar, Petra Mandula. Don’t know much about her, but she did make the quarters at Roland Garros two years ago. Prediction: Chanda, 6-1, 6-4.
Just so you know, I’m not some Johnny-come-lately jumping on the spelling bee wagon just because my main man Sai Gunturi has delivered glory to my employer. This is the fourth spelling-bee related entry in crabwalk.com history. The others: this link to a great story from the New York Times Magazine on America’s premier spelling bee family (unfortunately, only the abstract is available now) and this link to what remains the best spelling bee video ever.
Hallo Deutsche! Willkommen zu crabwalk.com. Genießen Sie Ihren Aufenthalt. (Translation by Google.)
(Also according to Google, here’s the paragraph in question: “Some fuel circles boomten occasionally even in such a manner that they had to take the initiators off-lines, as for instance CDMOM. Operators Joshua Benton from Dallas according to were exchanged over this Web exchange round between Octobers and February over 1300 CDs. In March it had to pull the plug, since it had not simply any longer been up to to the attack.”)
Oscar Schmidt, the greatest basketball player in Brazilian history, is retiring.
This is only interesting to me because we learn his nickname is “Mao Santa,” which in Portuguese means “holy hand.” Me, I’m having a great time picturing “Mao Santa,” which in English means “brutal yet eternally smiling Chinese dictator who brings presents to good revolutionaries and lumps of coal to bad ones.”
Chanda had a little more trouble with Cara Black than she should have — winning 7-6 (8-6), 6-3. Fifty-one unforced errors’ll do that to you. As predicted here yesterday, Laura Granville is up next after her easy dismissal of Iva Majoli. (Doesn’t it feel like Iva Majoli is 83 years old? Seems like she’s been around forever. Of course, she’s only 25.)
Prediction: I bet Granville takes her to three sets, but Chanda’ll pull it out. Myskina won’t be a problem in the next round.
Well, the reunion was a qualified success — qualified only because a few people had to cancel at the last minute. (We had only 38 students in our class, so even a few cancellations can have an impact.) No radical departures; most folks are doing roughly what I would have guessed a decade ago. Also had some nice meals, most notably at Cafe des Amis — yum. Seafood corn bisque, crawfish cornbread topped with grilled drum and crawfish etouffee, and absolutely insane white chocolate cheesecake — perhaps the greatest dessert in global history.
I was particularly pleased to see that my old high school newspaper, The Eclectic (motto: “Rhythm and News”), has been revived. The most recent issue even reprinted an old article of mine and ran a brief (and somewhat fictional) biography of me — proving that the Eclectic legacy of questionable editorial decisions lives on.
One of the no-shows at the reunion was Chanda Rubin, who (as has been well chronicled on this site) used to have the locker underneath mine. She had a better excuse than most no-shows, though, being in Paris for the French Open. (Actually, at the exact moment I was downing cheesecake, Chanda was winning the Spanish Open.)
This latest crabwalk.com edition of ChandaWatch begins with her easy first-round win over the apparently cheery Slovakian Henrieta Nagyova. Up next: the Zimbabwan Cara Black. (Who is white, and thus perhaps not all that welcome any more in her troubled homeland.)
After Chanda eases past her, her likely path to the quarters will go through up-and-comer Laura Granville and the Rooski Anastasia Myskina. And (as a reward for Chanda’s climb in the world rankings — she’s up to No. 8) she won’t have to face a Williams sister until the semis, assuming she can get through Justin Henin-Hardenne.
Thanks for the kind words, everybody. If anyone’s got any good advice for living in D.C. (or Zambia, for that matter, although I suspect that’s in shorter supply among my readership), it will be welcome in the coming months.
I was in Houston yesterday for a story (which explains my absence from last night’s DFWblogs soiree), and now I’m back home in Rayne for a long weekend. At the moment I’m eating fresh Louisiana strawberries and listening to KSIG-AM with Mazie. Good times.
That may or may not change tomorrow, when I go to my 10-year high school reunion. We shall see.
Today is a good day.
Check that: today is an extremely good day. Best day in a long while.
Today I was named a fellow of the Pew International Journalism Program. I’ll be spending September, October, and part of December in Washington, D.C., researching and taking classes at Johns Hopkins. And in between, I’ll spend five weeks in Zambia, writing about (okay, read these next few words in a much more somber voice) AIDS and the sexual abuse of school girls.
Like I said, today is a good day.
One more reason to like the Pernice Brothers, particularly brother Joe Pernice: this email.
It’s Tuesday, May 20, 2003, which can only mean one thing: Ashmont Records releases the Pernice Brothers’ Yours, Mine and Ours today. Perhaps the greatest positive effect of the release is as follows: Nine months from today, a bumper crop of love-children, a baby-booming new wave will spring forth to save the Social Security system. They will have first names like Monahan and Pinkerton and Stein. They will be as gentle and firm as Superman’s father. They will always look good, and do even better. You might not live to see them come completely into their own, but what you do see will be enough. That nagging something or other that dogs your every step will seem laughable post-YMO. All of your policies will be mature and your soufflés timed perfectly. You will have a new appreciation for just about everything. And should you encounter the odd speed bump in the road (which may or may not happen), you’ll learn from it. You’ll learn like no one has ever learned before. But you’ll remain humble, never forgetting what things used to be like.
(Monahan and Pinkerton and Stein are the names of Joe’s bandmates.)
Bonus knowledge: Joe Pernice, writer of depressingly beautiful songs, has also been a proofreader at Cosmo Girl.
CanRock historians will note that Joyce Linehan, Joe’s manager and partner in Ashmont, was Sub Pop’s woman-on-the-scene in Halifax in the early/mid-1990s, where she signed bands like crabwalk-fave Sloan to the label. (Laura Stein, the Pernices’ keyboardist, is an ex-member of Halifax’s Jale.) Joyce also signed Joe’s old band, the Scud Mountain Boys.
And just for fun: the video for “Working Girls,” off their last album. Not many videos end with band members playing a game of stickball with Death.
You think people don’t read newspapers in the U.S.? Try France.
A recent study showed that barely 15 per cent of French adults read a daily newspaper, the lowest rate of any industrialised nation. French newspapers are more expensive…This is largely because of higher distribution costs, an average of eight weeks holiday for journalists, and a 1970s-style union-dominated print system. No French paper ranks among the world’s 30 best-selling titles.
Eight weeks?! Damn.
Sadly, it looks like Eat More Words has gone under. (If it was ever “over” to begin with.) An email just went out to us early adopters detailing how we can get refunds.
See, when I get rich (as all newspaper reporters do, of course), I’m going to start a fund to support things like Eat More Words — nice little labors of love that could be pushed into reality with just a little financial incentive. Some rich guy should do that now.
Watched The Pledge today. Good movie. But I still have a question, for those who’ve seen it: At the end, do we find out who the bad guy is? If so, who is he? Please leave comments, more observant viewers. (Warning: That means that if you haven’t seen the movie and hope to someday, don’t read the comments.)
Strange happenstance: I remember looking at this web page back in 1994. I even stole one of the images for my very first web page (which was, mercifully, lost to the ages long ago).
Super Friendz update: Their new album, Love Energy, is due out on June 24 (in Canada, at least, those lucky Canuckys). Says majordomo Matt Murphy:
“One difference that people will see between the last records we’ve made and this one is it’s less an homage to sixties pop and better reflects our record collections. It’s a lot more seventies new wave. There’s no keyboards. That’s kind of a rule we made when we came into the studio this time. It’s guitar driven but we’re also focused on the rhythm too and Kraftwerk ideas without the keyboards.” Interesting.
One of the great Cajun storytellers, Mary Alice Fontenot, has died at 93. She wrote the Clovis Crawfish series of children’s books, which I devoured as a kid. They featured a menagerie of swamp creatures — Christophe Cricket, Gaston Grasshopper, Rene Rainfrog, and of course the moral center Clovis (pronounced klo-VEECE). They also featured both dialog in both English and Cajun French — one of the earlier and more successful attempts to pass some of the language along to the next generation of Cajuns.
The books do sort of blend together at this late age, but I particularly remember Clovis Crawfish and the Big Betail, Clovis Crawfish and Etienne Escargot, …and the Curious Crapaud and …and the Singing Cigales. The ultimate classic, of course, is Clovis Crawfish and the Orphan Zo-Zo. (Zo-Zo is the Cajun dialect’s word for “bird,” short for the French “oiseau.” Kelly’s pet cockatiel is named Zo-Zo in his honor.)
Mary Alice also wrote the only history of Acadia Parish (where we both grew up). She lived about five miles from my house, and she was the first real writer I ever met.
(Cajun aesthetes all know that the Clovis books were miles ahead of their so-so rival, the vaguely insulting Crawfish-Man superhero series. Although I must admit fond memories of Crawfish-Man Rescues Ron Guidry, the story of how our swamp hero saved the 1978 AL Cy Young winner from some sort of peril caused by the villainous Dark Gator.)
Chinese city bans spitting to combat SARS. I’ve got no idea if this’ll help with the disease, but could Chinese officials please consider making this ban permanent and nationwide? I’ve spent about five weeks in China, and I don’t think there was a single day I wasn’t a few inches away from an errant sputum missile. It made those eight-hour bus rides particularly fun; by the end, the bus floors would be coated with loogies.
Speaking of Chinese hygiene, one of the few times I’ve been truly disgusted was at a wet market like the one Laurie Garrett writes about. I mean seriously — ewwww. I hope to never see animals gutted, their entrails spread out on dirty pavement, and then prepared for human consumption again. The flies, the blood, the filth — quite a spectacle. (Other than that, Songpan was quite nice.)
Monkeyphonecall.com. When I learned of this site, I was amused and strangely excited — there is actually a person, somewhere in this world, who for the low cost of $10 will call up anyone you’d like and make monkey noises.
Then I noticed this on the FAQ page:
Question: What name and number will show up on my caller ID when Monkeyphonecall.com calls? Answer: It will either say anonymous number, blocked number, unknown, or possibly “Elvis Ulrich” from the 214 area code.
214! 214 is Dallas! I had to investigate further.
A quick Googling found that there is indeed an Elvis Ulrich in Dallas, at 5200 Martel Avenue. Then checking the whois entry for monkeyphonecall.com gave me this:
Registrant:
Lars Hundley
5200 Martel Ave #6Q
Dallas, Texas 75206
United States
Whether Elvis and Lars are roommates or it’s a Jekyll/Hyde thing is still to be determined. But another quick Googling lets us know that monkeyphonecall.com is not Lars’ only online business:
Lars Hundley received his entrepreneurial epiphany while mowing the lawn. It wasn’t his lawn; it was his landlord’s. But Hundley was responsible for mowing it, and gosh darn it if he was going to spend $1,000 or more on some gas-belching mower to cut grass he didn’t even own. Hundley bought the cheapest push reel mower he could find, an $89 Home Depot special. Then he started mowing. He couldn’t believe how easy it was.
It’s not as though Hundley, 31, had always dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. “If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be in retail selling lawn mowers, I would have laughed you off the planet,” he says…
Three years later Hundley’s site, CleanAirGardening.com, is the number one online U.S. dealer of Brill push reel mowers, a top-of-the-line German brand.
To sum up: On the streets of Dallas walks a man who is both a giant of the online lawn mower sales industry — and a man who shrieks like a monkey to strangers for cash.
I love this town.
Addendum: We learn from that last link that Lars has a “10-inch cardboard Elvis” in his home office. Of course, the most famous Lars in this country is Lars Ulrich, drummer for Metallica. So my guess is Elvis Ulrich is just a facade — perhaps the name of the “sleeping border collie” mentioned in the story, the one he takes to White Rock Lake? Lars, if you’re out there, clear this all up!
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on parents scrambling to prepare for college tuition hikes. If you’re in Texas and you’ve got young kids, May 23 is an important deadline for you.
Here’s why you shouldn’t drop out of high school, kids. (I love that the web page files video of people suffering crippling injury under the “Entertainment” category.)
Watch tomorrow’s front page for a story of mine and — much more importantly — one of the cutest kid photos you’ve seen.
Hilarious: Unused audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, recorded summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) DVD. An excerpt:
Zinn: Well, power needs to have its proxies. That way the damage is always deniable. As long as the Hobbits have the ring, no one will ever question the plot Gandalf has hatched. So here is the big scary ring, and all that happens when Gandalf moves to touch it is that he sees a big flaming eye. And notice it is a… different kind of eye — not like our eye.
Chomsky: Almost a cat-like eye.
Zinn: It’s on fire. Somehow being an on-fire eye is this terrible thing in the minds of those in Middle Earth. I think this is a way of telling others in Middle Earth to be ashamed of their eyes. And of course you see the Orcs’ eyes are all messed up, too. They’re this terrible color. And what does Gandalf tell Frodo about the ring? “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”
Chomsky: “Let’s leave the most powerful object in all of Middle Earth with a weak little Hobbit, a race known for its chattering and intoxication, and tell him to keep it a secret.”
Zinn: Right. And here we receive our first glimpse of the supposedly dreadful Mordor, which actually looks like a fairly functioning place.
Chomsky: This type of city is most likely the best the Orcs can do if all they have are cliffs to grow on. It’s very impressive, in that sense.
“jbenton-at-toast.net is Suspended from eBay: You have been suspended from eBay because our records indicate your account was involved in activities that violate our policies.”
Um…okay. I’m very curious what someone has been doing with my account. (I haven’t bought anything on eBay in many months, and I’ve never sold anything there.)
Here’s my column from yesterday’s paper, on whether or not standardized tests should be timed. Look closely and you’ll find (gasp!) an actual opinion!
Also, I should be on TXCN tomorrow afternoon for a story in Thursday’s paper.
Finally, perhaps if I link to Kelly’s site enough in advance of her Sunday birthday, perhaps she’ll update her blog.
Fametracker on teen cable starlets getting their own movies:
When we were kids, no one paid attention to cable shows because there was no cable. When we were kids, there were only three TV channels that mattered — ABC, NBC, and CBS — and only about eight TV stars in total. And TV only came on for two hours a day, from 10 AM to noon, and then it went off again and we all went back to tilling the fields.
And in our day, all the children on TV shows were played by adults, and the only “child”-star was Plug Whompers, the rascally urchin from the hit show The Ruinous Plow. And he was played by a forty-three-year-old actor named Scollard “Five Fingers” McCaffrey, who caused a national scandal when he married a horse, and who later drank himself to death.
Worst band name ever: Benton Falls. I don’t know what they’re trying to imply.
Careful readers of the Wall Street Journal — a demographic that almost completely overlaps with crabwalk.com readership, I might add — saw this story about linguistic shifts in the meaning of “Shut up!”
Particularly careful readers may have noticed the second person quoted is one Erin McKean.
But only I would be in position to know Ms. McKean is, in fact, the same Erin McKean who was until its demise an active trader in the CD Mix of the Month Club. You never know what celebrity CD you’re going to get in the mail!
As the kids might say, mad props to her. Next thing you know, she’ll have morphed into the next Robert Thompson.
Should-be rock star Joe Pernice (of the Pernice Brothers) on being offered a book deal:
Well, I was certainly intrigued. Even a little flattered. But to be honest, I had suffered through my share of paper writing in graduate school and had spent my last drop of critical juice back in 1997. By the time I finished my graduate degree, I was so burned-out on paper writing that I actually convinced an unsuspecting professor who was a distant fan of my first two records to let me write a ten page paper (my last) on postmodernism IN MY OWN MUSIC! Give me a break. I don’t know who deserves the bigger throttling for that one. Probably me.
By the way, you should buy Joe’s new album, due out on May 20. The two previous albums are also gems.
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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