Thoroughly unacceptable: Richard Perle, member and ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a major architect of government military policy, demands payment from foreign journalists who want to interview him. Talking to Perle carries a price tag of anywhere from $100 to $900.
This is absurd. I can’t imagine how angrily I’d react if I tried interviewing, say, a congressman or a mayor and he told me he’d only talk to me for a fee. Absolutely absurd.
You may remember Perle from when crabwalk.com hero Seymour Hersh wrote a damning piece in The New Yorker on his sketchy financial dealings, crossing between private profit and his government job. Perle blustered that Hersh’s article libeled him and said he would sue Hersh in British court over the matter. (This despite the fact that Hersh, Perle, and The New Yorker are all American. British courts are known for making it easy to sue writers — they require sued writers to prove that what they wrote is true, while U.S. courts require the aggrieved party to prove an article is false.) For good show, he also called Hersh “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” for writing about him — an awfully nice thing for a government official to say about one of America’s most respected journalists.
Of course, Perle was just posing; he chickened out when it became clear that no one believed him and other newspapers started pointing out more conflicts of interest.
Richard Perle: Friend of journalists everywhere!
31 July 2003 |
2 comments
Good piece on Mickey Kaus, a sort of blogfather to crabwalk.com. (For the record, I’d like to point out that I’ve been using the word snarky for years.)
31 July 2003 |
No comments
Whenever I head to a bookstore, I make a few regular stops. Lately, I lead off with the African history section. (That usually doesn’t take very long.) I check the non-fiction new releases, then swing by travel, journalism, music, and contemporary history. I often make a stop by personal finance.
Now, I don’t know Suze Orman from Eve. (I take Scott Burns as my pers-fin columnist of choice.) I’ll admit I’m inclined to loathe her, since I see that one of her bestselling books has the pitiful title of The Courage to be Rich. (Sure, we’d all be rolling in dough — if only we had the courage! At first glance, with chapter titles like “The Courage to Have More and to Be More” and “The Courage to Make Room for More Money,” it appears to be a half-shimmy away from a Prayer of Jabez-style cloaking of greed in self-affirming garb.)
But I’m not here to make incisive social commentary. No, I’m here to point out what I noticed in a recent trip to the bookstore: In every photo on her book jackets, Suze Orman looks like a crazy woman! And not just a crazy woman — a shapeshifting crazy woman, a different sort of crazy on every jacket!
I just got back from the spa and I’m a crazy woman!
I’m a crazy woman who watched Dynasty too much in the ’80s!
I’m crazy — and I like leather!
I’ve been smiling for 19 straight hours, and it’s driven me crazy!
365 days of crazy ol’ me!
The courage to be casual — and crazy!
I hate to think what her audiobooks are like. Read by Bobcat Goldthwaite?
29 July 2003 |
7 comments
How to tell you should have died a long time ago: When the guy who writes your obit dies before you do.
28 July 2003 |
No comments
Here’s my column from today’s paper, on why all kids should be untan summertime geeks like I was. (Okay, that’s not the topic, but that’s the subtext. All writing is personal, you know.)
This is also my first mention of MTV’s Summer Beach House in print. May also be my first use of “picking bellybutton lint.”
You people don’t know how lucky you are. Over the last two days, I bought both electablogger.com and electmecalifornia.org. I had big plans for a guerrilla-democracy project that would involve getting someone on the California recall ballot (as I wrote about a couple of days ago). Halfway through site development last night, though, I realized I’d be too busy over the next two weeks to do it justice. Like I said, you don’t know how lucky you are.
28 July 2003 |
1 comment
The Pope’s not a Catholic! He’s an imposter seeking to destroy the church! So says Mel Gibson’s dad, one of the world’s preeminent retro-Catholics. He’s a Vatican II hater, and thinks performing mass in anything other than Latin is an abomination and a sign of the apocalypse.
Keep Papa Gibson’s background in mind if you go see Mel’s new Christ-on-the-cross movie The Passion — filmed entirely in Latin and Aramaic and without subtitles.
28 July 2003 |
7 comments
Um, this guy’s a creepy principal. Likes to take lots of young girls on unchaperoned trips to Disney World and have “swimsuit changing contests.”
“Former teacher Barbarita Clark thought something was odd in her job interview. [Principal] Baker didn’t ask her much about her qualifications, she said. He asked her if she was more of a Tigger-type person or an Eeyore-type person. She was puzzled, but Baker determined that she was a Tigger person and gave her a stuffed Tigger when she left.”
27 July 2003 |
2 comments
A nice write-up on the Dismemberment Plan’s final days. The D-Plan-as-the-Police, Travis-Morrison-as-Sting metaphor is a nice change of pace from the standard band metaphor, D-Plan-as-Talking-Heads, Travis-Morrison-as-David-Byrne.
Travis also has a great essay up on his web site (which really needs to start archiving past entries so they don’t get lost every time he updates). This week’s topic: why girls shouldn’t be punk. (Here’s a link to the Jessica Hopper/Punk Planet piece he references.)
25 July 2003 |
2 comments
Marketplace fans, it’s time for mourning: David Brancaccio is leaving the show.
I’m not a business junkie, but I’m a huge Marketplace fan. I was thinking the other day that I couldn’t think of another media outlet that was more consistently surprising, engaging, and intelligent. You can learn more in a half hour of Marketplace than you can in two hours of All Things Considered.
It looks like the so-so David Brown will replace Brancaccio. My dream replacement: the brilliant Steve Inskeep. (Mainly because I don’t often get to hear Steve at his main job, host of weekend All Things Considered.)
25 July 2003 |
1 comment
The California recall election of Gov. Gray Davis is such, such fun for news junkies like myself. On October 7, there’ll be a statewide election with two issues: 1. Should Gov. Davis be recalled? and 2. If he is recalled, who should replace him?
Some of the potential craziness:
- There will likely be several Republican candidates for Issue No. 2. The state’s leading Democrats have said they plan on supporting the incumbent by not putting any candidates up for the race. (Someone like Dianne Feinstein would easily win Issue No. 2 if she ran — but she’d also essentially guarantee that the unpopular Davis gets recalled, since a majority of Californians would almost certainly consider her a better option.) So you could have a governor’s race in California — an overwhelmingly Democratic state — with only Republicans on the ballot!
- There will be at least one left-of-center candidate on the ballot: Peter Camejo, a Green Party candidate. If everyone else on the ballot is GOP, could this be the time for a Green candidate to break through?
- The election’s rules are quite clear: There’s no runoff if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote. Whomever gets the most votes wins — even if he/she only gets 10 or 15 percent of the vote! This is the path Arnold Schwarzenegger will expect to follow if he runs — he’s got the name recognition to guarantee 10 or 15 percent of the vote, and if there are enough candidates splitting the electorate, that could be enough to win.
- That possibility grows more likely when you consider how ridiculously easy it will be to get on the ballot. All you need to do to be a candidate for governor is get 65 signatures on a petition and pay $3,500! That’s it! So, will there be some local Dem who says screw the state party, I’m getting my signatures and getting on the ballot? If so, and he’s the only D on a ballot with 15 Rs, he’s your next governor!
So here the big question: shouldn’t the Left Coast blogosphere unite behind someone — a fellow blogger, perhaps — and get them on the ballot? You can get 65 signatures in a weekend party, and $3,500 wouldn’t be that hard to raise in a PayPal account. There could be a virtual campaign! I’m serious — depending on how this shakes out, if the candidate in question is a Democrat, he/she stands a decent chance of being a contender. Any blog-based candidate is guaranteed media attention. (And is there a better resume line than “sixth place, governor’s race, California, 2003”?)
I’m serious here. Who’s going to step up to the plate?
24 July 2003 |
11 comments
For those who haven’t seen it, my newspaper’s editorial writers have a blog. They’re even talking about it over at Movable Type HQ.
I played a tiny, tiny role in setting it up — we’re talking tiny, but not so tiny I won’t mention it here. Unsurprisingly — given that the editorial board’s a conservative bunch and its main poster, Rod Dreher, is a National Review alum — it has a tone similar to National Review Online’s The Corner.
(On a related note, if you haven’t seen our print editorial page recently, check it out some time. It’s miles better than it was even a year ago — the opinions are much crisper, and the new boss is very open to trying new things with what’s traditionally been the most staid page of any newspaper. There’s a lot less of the traditional “on the one hand…on the other hand” mushiness of old.)
24 July 2003 |
2 comments
An addendum to my George Stephanopoulos post yesterday. In June 1993, when I was a freshly minted high school graduate, I had to attend a ceremony at the White House with a bunch of other kids. We stood on an East Lawn stage while Bill Clinton, himself freshly minted as president, gave a nice speech. When he was done, he moved through the crowd, shaking hands with everyone.
(This was a pretty ambitious bunch of kids, so this was a big deal. We all remembered how well Clinton had used that video of the young Bill shaking hands with JFK in his campaign. I in particular felt a certain kinship with Bill back then, as a fellow up-from-poverty Southern boy headed for the Ivy League. I was even contemplating a future political career back then. It was a heady moment.)
Anyway, before he reached me, he came up to a girl who had a simple request:
“Mr. President, I love George Stephanopoulos. Can you bring him out here?”
I don’t remember the girl’s name, but in the days preceding this ceremony, she’d mentioned her plan to find George somehow. This being years before combining the phrases “Clinton administration” and “love with college-aged girls” became taboo, Clinton whispered something to an aide and went on with his handshaking.
A few minutes later, out bounds George Stephanopoulos — the 32-year-old puppy dog George, not the 42-year-old grizzled vet we see on Sunday morning TV today. There were a few squeals from the females in the crowd, along with some appreciative applause from the boys. (Oh, the optimism we had back then!)
George walked up to the girl and shook her hand. She wouldn’t have that and demanded a kiss. He shyly planted one on her cheek. I doubt she ever washed her face again.
24 July 2003 |
No comments
I’m actually kind of excited about CafePress getting into the print-on-demand business. Unlike other p-o-d companies like iUniverse (which charges at least $199 per book — and has a lame dot-com name anyway), CafePress charges no setup fees upfront, the same business model as with their t-shirts and mugs.
So as long as you’ve got software that generates PDFs (which includes anyone running OS X or anyone with a recent vintage Adobe product), you can publish short-run books at a reasonable (although not cheap) price. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of bloggers printing up their best posts. I might pull together a few collections of my better newspaper articles. Power to the people!
24 July 2003 |
1 comment
Gotta love this season preview of the New Orleans Saints. On the squad’s wide-receiving corps, offensive coordinator Mike McCarthy says:
“This is dummy text to use as a gauge for length. Will sub out with real quotes on Monday. This is dummy text to use as a gauge for length. Will sub out with real quotes on Monday. This is dummy text to use as a gauge for length. Will sub out with real quotes on Monday. This is dummy text to use as a gauge for length. Will sub out with real quotes on Monday.”
Strangely, he has similar things to say about the tight ends, the o-line, the quarterbacks, and the running backs.
22 July 2003 |
No comments
Very, very sad news: Three members of the Exploding Hearts dead in a van crash. If you hadn’t heard of the Hearts, they were a great Portland pop-punk band — sort of a geeky Ramones with a power-pop heart. I read an interview with them a few weeks ago — they came across as so endearingly young (and a little immature, but hey, they’re all like 20).
Their first and only album, Guitar Romantic, is available on eMusic. Download away.
22 July 2003 |
1 comment
Attention web gurus: I have a (small) budget to hire someone for a (small) project.
On my hard drive sits a 8,000-record data file (currently in Excel) with about 10 fields in each record. I want to create a web interface to that data file so it would be searchable (by the first and second fields in each record). Said interface will need to plug into the web site of a major metropolitan newspaper (I’m sure regular readers have no idea which one that might be).
Email me (jbenton at dallasnews dot com) if you’re interested. Note: You will not get rich off this — we’re talking loooow three digits. In all likelihood, the lowest of all three-digit numbers. But if I’m thinking about this correctly, it also shouldn’t take very long. Email me if you’re interested.
17 July 2003 |
No comments
We here at crabwalk.com Global HQ are proud to be today’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. This month’s book: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. It’s an entertaining — almost breezy at times — look at the myriad uses to which human remains have been put.
I interviewed Mary by phone last week during one of her non-virtual book tour stops in Minneapolis. Herewith, an edited transcript:
Your background is primarily in magazines and online — both places where short, quick pieces are the norm and editors typically don’t think readers have the stomach for long-form work. What was it like working on your first book-length project?
On the one hand, it’s absolutely liberating and wonderful. You can do whatever you want, go off on all the tangents you want without some editor saying, “I don’t see why this is in there.” On the other hand, they don’t give you a little guidebook of what to expect when writing your first book. You constantly go through tense phases and wake up in the middle of the night wondering, “What am I doing? They’re going to kill this book, reject it.” You’re gripped with this insecurity.
My proposal was vague, not very detailed. I didn’t know where I was going. I floundered quite a bit.
How much did that book proposal change in the process of writing?
There were all these things I came across in researching that I didn’t know existed when that proposal was written. There were a few chapters in the proposal that didn’t make it into the book, and quite a bit of shuffling. The decapitated head chapter [Chapter 9, “Just a Head”], that was not in the proposal. The surgery lab [Chapter 1, “A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste”] might have been something I came across later. The chapter on beating-heart cadavers [Chapter 8, “How to Know if You’re Dead”] I don’t think was in there.
I originally had something on live burial in the proposal, but there’s another book that’s gone into that in detail and it’d be like ripping off his book to have a lot on that. It’d be like doing a book report.
I think your magazine background shows through clearly. It’s very episodic, and you don’t allow yourself long stretches of dull narrative – it’s very bang bang bang.
It’s definitely a book written by someone with a very short attention span and by someone raised on doing magazine articles. I’m always thinking, “Am I going on too long about this?” And the magazine pieces I do tend to be short ones — features in the 3,000, 4,000 [word] range and some that are more like 800 or 1,500.
Did you repurpose any of your columns for the book?
A couple of the topics were Salon columns — the Harvard Brain Bank piece for one. A couple ended up as footnotes. Originally, I was going to do a column for Salon called The Dead Beat. They lost some funding and it didn’t work. But I’d been gearing up to do the column and had done a bunch of research. I had a list of column topics ready, and a lot of that went into the book.
How did the idea for the column originate?
I was riding my bike home on the street and I bumped into a Salon editor. We were joking that David Talbot has a real taste for the macabre and, joking, I said, “We should do a whole column on death.” The editor said, “Why don’t you ask him?” I’d probably already done three columns about bodies: a crash-test dummy piece, the brain bank, and a piece on Thanksgiving and how much food you can eat before your stomach bursts.
Some authors, faced with a book on death, would distance themselves from the narrative and approach the topic with a sort of clinical reserve. Stiff is very first-person — you’re in the middle of everything. Why?
Well, the column was even more Mary-heavy than the book. The tone was flipper, with more of an emphasis on being funny all the time. But I learned very quickly that my columns didn’t make me popular with their subjects. They’d read the column and say, “Oooh, I didn’t know you were going to do this.” It’s hard to get access to these places — these researchers typically don’t like dealing with the media — and I didn’t want to screw them over. I wanted them to like the book. So there’s a lot of me in there and a lot of humor, but not as much as their could have been.
The book’s fast paced and easily digestible. Was there any sort of message you wanted to communicate to the reader, or was a pleasant reading experience enough?
I have a very utilitarian bent. I think the things that people have ended up doing after death, however grisly, are great. It’s good to be helpful to others. So there is that message, that you can be useful after death. I’ve gotten letters from people who’ve said, “Now I’m going to donate my body to science.”
Particularly in the beating-heart cadaver chapter, I really came down strong on the side of being in favor of donating organs. It would be such a waste for someone in that situation not to donate with 18,000 people waiting for organs. But for the most part, it’s meant just as a fun and informative read.
You use a lot of color in your descriptions of corpses and their environments. How did you record those images for your writing? Did you ever bring a camera to snap some photos?
I’m telling you, you don’t need a camera to remember a room full of severed heads. I used to do that, but not any more. I use a tape recorder for interviews and I take notes. The person I’m talking to thinks I’m writing down what he said, when I’m really writing “Ewww, disgusting maggots” and writing what they look like.
Early on, you mention Christine Quigley’s book The Corpse: A History, which seems to cover much of the same turf as your book (although, I imagine, in a different style). How do you deal with knowing you’re not the first to cover a topic? Do you avoid reading the other book to keep the vision for the book your own and not be influenced by how someone else has done it?
It’s funny you mention that, because Christine is retiring from wherever it is she is [Georgetown University Press] and someone said they wanted to give her an autographed copy of my book. I thought, “That’s great, she’s going to hate it.”
I found her book very helpful when I was putting my proposal together. It’s more on the history angle, not on research cadavers, so there’s not as much common ground as you might think. There’s another book called Death to Dust that covers some of the same stuff.
I didn’t want to read them. I had friends who knew I was working on the book who’d buy these books on remainder tables and give them to me. I’d say, “I don’t want to look at it, I don’t want to know about it.” If it was covering the same terrain, I didn’t want to know about it. I did peek a few times, though.
Is there any part of the book you think would really be worth examining in more detail, maybe in a book of its own?
In Chapter 8, there’s the business about figuring out where in the body the soul is located, the heart, brain, or liver stuff. I found that fascinating. I was fine with the brain until Dr. Oz [New York transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz, quoted in the chapter] said he thought that part of us resides in the heart. He takes hearts out of people’s bodies, so there’s something there.
May I make a suggestion? I think you should write an entire book on this one quote from page 77: “Theoretically, it is possible in this way to grow a chicken heart to the size of the world.”
I know! I want to track that author down. [The quote is from Clarence G. Strub and L.G. “Darko” Frederick’s The Principles and Practice of Embalming, and appears pleasantly devoid of all context.] Presumably, this is a man with a degree. I want to found out what he meant. There was nothing more about it in his book – just that line. It wasn’t a joke, because believe me, this guy is not funny. I’ve got no idea what he meant.
I love lines like that. One of the great things about writing this book is that I could go off on little tangents like that. Sort of a “please, reader, indulge me for a moment.” I overuse them. I love parentheticals. They’re everywhere. I love having footnotes in the book for the same reason. I originally wanted to put a note at the start of the book saying, “Reader, don’t skip the footnotes. They’re the most important things in this book.” The publisher wanted to put them at the end of the chapter instead of in the text, and I put my foot down.
You’ve seen Pulp Fiction, presumably, since you mention it at one point. Any thoughts on what happens to Marvin in the back seat of the car?
You know, in my proposal, I wanted to go around with a person like Harvey Keitel who cleans up after grisly deaths. But the book really turned into “interesting things you can do while dead,” and being cleaned up really isn’t one of those.
Hypothetical situation: It’s the 18th century, and you’ve been diagnosed with an illness. Your doctor tells you that you can choose between one of the “treatments” you describe in Chapter 10: mummy elixir, human feces soup, “Poor Sinner’s Fat,” or “Spirit of Skull.” What’ll it be?
Oooh, tough one. I’d probably go with the Poor Sinner’s Fat. Fat is a flavor carrier. Fat tastes good most of the time. Your highly marbled beef, your Kobe beef always tastes the best. Aesthetically, it’s the least disgusting.
Yeah, but the flavor this fat is carrying is of a poor, dead sinner. What about Spirit of Skull? Maybe it’d just be a powder.
Too gritty.
Do you have your next project lined up?
I do have another book in the works.
Your topic?
Well, I don’t want to go into it too much, but it is in the Chapter 8 direction — the issue of where the soul is.
In the final chapter, you argue that what happens to a corpse should mostly be a decision of the survivors and that the dead person’s wishes shouldn’t take priority. That’s why, you say, that your husband will get to decide what happens to your body if you go first. But what if he goes first?
Well, his kids would get a say, too. But I know he’s got no interest in being a research cadaver. That’s the last thing he’d want. He’s very, very squeamish. But he did say, “I don’t care, do whatever you want.”
If he’s very, very squeamish, how’d he deal with being married to someone who spent a year writing about corpses?
He was actually very good about it. He didn’t complain much. He read the book, including Chapter 3 [“Life After Death,” which includes some very detailed descriptions of rotting human flesh]. He was really a good sport. I did feel bad about inflicting this on him. When I’d come back from somewhere, I’d give him a very truncated version of what I saw. I knew enough to spare him the details.
17 July 2003 |
2 comments
Back from Denver. Had a nice enough time, even if my carlessness the last three days limited my funtitude options. Then again, I didn’t have my lung collapse, so that’s something.
On Sunday, with my car rental coming to a close, I went roaming in the Rockies, mostly staying on I-70 west of town for a couple hours. One thing I learned while driving: Denver has the best classic rock station I’ve heard, 99.5 “The Mountain.” (I’ll forgive the name.) Their schtick seems to be playing album tracks and obscure songs from the classic rock catalog, not the same few songs that you hear over and over again elsewhere on the geezer-rock dial.
Some examples: Instead of playing “Like a Rolling Stone” for the four-millionth time, they play all eight-plus minutes of Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” — a song I’ve never heard on the radio before, even during all the movie hubbub around the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter case. (Perhaps because Bob uses no fewer than three not-supposed-to-be-on-the-radio swear words, not to mention the ol’ n-word.)
Instead of “Aqualung” again, they play “Bouree” when they get a Jethro Tull urge. Instead of “Stairway to Heaven,” it’s “The Rain Song.” “Bell Bottom Blues” instead of “Layla.” “Madman Across the Water” instead of “Tiny Dancer.” “There Is No Way Out of Here” (from David Gilmour’s 1978 solo record) instead of “Comfortably Numb.” “The Punk and the Godfather” instead of “Who Are You.” (Actually, this station looooves the Who. In two days of sporadic driving, I heard “The Real Me,” “Can’t Explain,” “Love, Reign O’er Me,” and “Athena.”)
Now, not all of those are improvements over the big hits. (For instance, “Athena” should stay locked in whatever vault every other station in the hemisphere keeps it. If you have to pull something off that album, which I still have on tape somewhere, at least have the taste to pick “Eminence Front.”) But a little variety goes a very long way, and it’s nice to see some personality in what’s traditionally been the most stagnant major radio format.
In totally unrelated news, this site will be tomorrow’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. Last week, I interviewed Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. A transcript will run tomorrow.
16 July 2003 |
1 comment
Reading about Jerry Springer’s planned bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio made me wander to the Springer show site. The show listings have all the Springeresque glory you’d expect (“I slept with my [choose one: brother/father/best friend’s husband/dog]!”). But the July 8 show shook me to my core:
“Bi-curious Carl got more than he bargained for. He slept with a one-breasted man who now won’t go away. So, Carl is forced to come clean to his wife and beg for her forgiveness!”
One-breasted man? Are we talking genetic freakiness here? A sex-change operation that lost its funding halfway through? Someone who takes the whole bi thing very seriously (left side male, right side female)?
I am so confused.
By the way, the exclamation count on that last link: 59.
11 July 2003 |
No comments
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on why girls are better writers than boys, no matter what LiveJournal has led you to believe.
My only complaint: that the phrase “let’s call it Britneyland” was edited out of one of the story’s later paragraphs. See if you can guess which one.
I’m off to Denver tonight and won’t be back until Wednesday evening. Feel free to rock the party without me.
11 July 2003 |
No comments
I’ll be on TXCN tonight talking about test scores. (Like I ever talk about anything else. Even in my private life.) But feel free to not tune in, since it was my worst performance in quite a while.
If you haven’t yet seen the terrifying sausage bludgeoning video, you should. I’m surprised the NIAF hasn’t yet issued an angry statement over the fact it was an Italian sausage that got whacked.
10 July 2003 |
No comments
An addendum to my last post: A six-pack of beer to whomever can actually fix the problem. Now we know what it is (from the comments on that post) — but I still have no idea how to fix it. For one thing, the background image was loaded in just a plain BODY tag, not in CSS (it’s actually loaded in both at the moment, after a change). If I change all my positioning tags from absolute to relative, it screws the whole layout. Ideas?
Again, apologies for the geekiness.
08 July 2003 |
5 comments
Attention CSS experts: If you can figure out why this site’s background disappears when you scroll down in Safari 1.0, I’ll buy you a beer! Hell, two beers! We’re not talking Pabst either — the import or domestic of your choice!
(This is the same problem James wrote about a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t an issue with any of the Safari betas — just in 1.0.)
To make up for this post’s high geek quotient, I offer you these links:
- What happens when you combine a bad man with a camera and two extremely gullible teenaged girls. (For the record, this isn’t the most family-friendly link.)
- The emasculation of Doug Christie continues. (Doug’s the Sacramento King whose wife doesn’t allow him to even speak to other women.)
08 July 2003 |
6 comments
Ronnie Polaneczky, in her column in the Philadelphia Daily News: Distributing condoms in high schools doesn’t encourage kids to have sex.
Her dad disagrees, so he writes a fairly scathing letter to the editor, saying his daughter’s column “contains obvious contradictions.” How’s that for family support? Most creepy: the way he refers to his daughter as just “Polaneczky” throughout the piece.
08 July 2003 |
No comments
Feb. 2003: Why Kobe can’t get a shoe deal. He lacks street cred with the urban demo that buys high-priced sneakers.
July 2003: Kobe’s arrest for sexual assault could help him sell shoes. (The article suggests it probably won’t, but still — what a wonderful world.)
07 July 2003 |
1 comment
If you listen to only one indie rock duo with an 11-year-old lead singer and 9-year-old drummer this summer — make it Smoosh. Seriously, they sound like a pre-teen Quasi. More here and here.
07 July 2003 |
1 comment
Things you learn listening to a Ben Gibbard live radio performance: The last word of Dntel’s “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” (previously spotted on the November ‘02 CDMOM mix) is pronounced “Sean,” not like the last name of Jackie or Charlie.
This increases the chances that the song is secretly about Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, who pronounces her name the same way. I still hold out hope that the Evan is Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh.
07 July 2003 |
No comments
Welcome to the gazillion people arriving here from andrewtobias.com (permalink here) or via this site’s mention in the July-August issue of Harvard Magazine.
For the record: I am not Eric Humphrey Gordon. My name’s Josh. I just copied-and-pasted an email onto a web page.
07 July 2003 |
No comments
Like the designers of the Rolls Royce, I’m always hesitant to change this site’s basic design — it’s difficult to improve upon perfection, both visual and functional. (My tongue is slowly boring a hole in my left cheek, by the way.)
But the new button in the right sidebar indicates my status as a stop on the Virtual Book Tour, the latest brainchild of my buddy Kevin Smokler (stage-managed by Susan Kaup). We’ll see how it works out, but on July 17, I’m supposed to do something on this site related to Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton), by Mary Roach. Just finished it yesterday.
In other news, I’d like to thank whichever government functionary approved the construction on I-20 east of Canton. The two hours and 29 minutes (I counted) it took me to travel 13 miles this afternoon — in an AC-less car, with temps reaching 110 in the front seat — provided much time for quiet contemplation of the universe’s great quandaries. Some swearing, too, but let’s focus on the quiet contemplation.
06 July 2003 |
1 comment
Johnny Bright was one of the greatest football players in American history.
As an Indiana teenager in the 1940s, he was the state’s best high school athlete, starring in six sports. He was fast and elusive, and he could jump so high that he could touch a basketball rim with his elbow — despite being only 5’10”.
He was also black, which was a problem.
No college in Indiana would recruit him. Notre Dame was still white only. Indiana University’s football coach was quoted as saying his team “already had enough black running backs.” So he ended up going to the only school that would have him: Drake University in distant Des Moines.
He was, true to form, a star. Drake (which, while a small school, played in college football’s top division back then) had never seen anything like him. In his first season, he led the nation in total offense. In his second, he set a new NCAA record for total offense, including 1,232 yards rushing and 1,168 yards passing. Drake started running a special spread offense called the “burp” designed just for him: the BRP stood for “Bright, run or pass.”
Before his senior year, he was a favorite to be the first black player to win the Heisman Trophy. And halfway through the season, again leading the nation in total offense, he was meeting expectations.
On October 20, 1951, Johnny Bright and Drake travelled south to Stillwater to play Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State). A&M and Drake were rivals in the Missouri Valley Conference at the time; the MVC was one of the last conferences outside the Deep South to integrate its athletic teams, largely because the whites who ran Oklahoma A&M objected.
Bright didn’t get much of a welcome. A&M offered dorm rooms to house all of Drake’s players — except Bright. A headline in the Stillwater newspaper read “Bright is a marked man,” and the reference wasn’t just to his football skill. The buzz was that Johnny Bright would not be standing by game’s end.
On Drake’s first play from scrimmage, Bright took the snap and handed off to a teammate, who ran around left end. Bright, like all smart quarterbacks when the play is moving ahead without them, slowly jogged out of the way, about five yards behind the play.
Bright probably didn’t see lineman Wilbanks Smith sweeping around the right side of the offensive line. By common football strategy, Smith should have been following the ball carrier. Instead, he ran up to Johnny Bright, cocked his right arm, jumped into the air, and slammed his fist into Bright’s jaw.
These were the days before face masks on football helmets, and Smith was not a small man. Bright’s jaw shattered instantly.
He slumped to the ground in agony. Somehow, after a few minutes, he stood up and, on the next play, threw a touchdown pass. But a few plays later, another A&M player came at him with another dirty hit, and Johnny Bright was done. His jaw had to be wired shut for the train ride back to Des Moines; one of his teeth had to be pulled so he could be fed through a straw.
J.B. Whitworth, the A&M coach, initially denied there had been a dirty hit at all, claiming that Bright’s injury had come in the course of normal play. But thankfully, two photographers from the Des Moines Register, having heard rumors of the threats against Bright, were in attendance that day and took a series of photos proving Smith’s premeditation. The photos made the cover of Life Magazine and created national scandal, forcing Whitworth to finally claim he was “ashamed” for what had happened — despite rumors that Whitworth had ordered his players to attack Bright. (The photos went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.)
The incident had repercussions. Drake ended up leaving the conference and dropped its aspirations of being a national football power. The NCAA instituted new rules requiring facemasks and requiring any player throwing punches in a game to be ejected.
Bright recovered to play one more game that season, rushing for 204 yards. But his Heisman hopes were dashed. The Philadelphia Eagles still had enough faith in Bright’s abilities to make him their No. 1 draft pick. But the Eagles had never had a black player and Bright wasn’t interested in being their first. “I didn’t know what kind of treatment I could expect,” he said years later.
So he moved to Canada, thinking he’d get better treatment playing in the Canadian Football League. He went on to become the greatest running back in CFL history — 10,909 yards rushing, three Grey Cup titles, a Most Outstanding Player award, the single-season rushing record, and a still-standing record for most consecutive games played.
CFL players didn’t make enough money to make ends meet, so he got a side job as a teacher. When his football career ended, he became a junior high principal in Edmonton, coaching the neighborhood high school to provincial championships on the side. He died of a heart attack in 1983. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame the next year.
Why am I typing out this story? While Johnny Bright isn’t well known, it’s not like the story is new. Here’s why: While doing some online research on Bright, I came across this web page. Seems that Wilbanks Smith’s high school class had its 50-year reunion a while back and asked the alums to write up their last half century for each other to read. Here’s how Wilbanks sums up his life:
“WILBANKS SMITH, Kingwood, TX. I am retired from Exxon Industrial Marketing. My spouse is a watercolorist (emphasis on birds). We have two children, Douglas A. and Laurel Smith Tiffin and one grandson, Nicholaus Smith.
“I am interested in playing piano duets, civilization II duels (computer), raquetball games with grandson, Nick, bird watching and flower looking with Joanne, and my favorite sport is cooking and eating with family and friends. Also I have spent many years of unsuccessful attempts to grow black walnut trees in Cleburne County, Arkansas. Our most recent is the completion of a house near the trout hatchery, even I should be able to catch a trout now.”
Elsewhere on the site, we learn Wilbanks was class vice president at Mangum High, that he was in the school play (“Charley’s Aunt,” directed by Mrs. Alexander and Miss Hoover), and that he missed graduation with a bad case of the mumps.
There’s even a picture of Wilbanks from what must be his senior yearbook. He’s got on a jaunty bow tie and has the broad shoulders you’d expect. Even has a goofy grin.
There’s something disorienting about that web page. I suppose I wouldn’t expect Smith to talk about Johnny Bright in his lifetime reunion recap — we all edit out the bumps in our life stories. But his life seems so normal. There’s nothing about torturing puppies as a boy, or joining the Klan after college. Hell, he plays Civ II. Is his normalcy comforting, in that it implies that what he did to Johnny Bright was an aberration? Or is it frightening that someone at first glance so average can, at any given moment, do something so horrible?
I grew up in Louisiana while David Duke was busy almost being elected governor. So I’ve always been a pessimist when it comes to the racial attitudes of most Americans — I always fear that if you scratch the surface of many folks’ commitment to equal rights, you won’t want to see the anger and vitriol underneath. But maybe it’s just as disarming to scratch the surface of a famously violent racist and see something so unremarkable as a love of trout fishing and racquetball.
When the Des Moines Register published its photos of the attack back in 1951, sports editor Sec Taylor wrote an angry column saying Smith’s jersey should be retired, fumigated, and displayed somewhere as a symbol of “things college football does not stand for.” But nowhere in the piece did Taylor mention Wilbanks Smith by name. He simply referred to him by his jersey number. In the caption under a photo of Smith, all the paper said was “Number 72.”
“I won’t sully our clean journal by the use of his name,” Taylor wrote.
Maybe that’s the right approach: celebrate the hero, keep the villain obscure and abstract.
Footnote: I cribbed much of the Johnny Bright story from these four sites.
Footnote: For some reason, this web site about Smith’s hometown of Mangum brags about him like a favorite son: “His actions were, presumably, directed by the coaching staff, but Wilbanks Smith courageously accepted full responsibility. After graduation, he embarked upon a successful career in engineering and community service.” So breaking a man’s jaw because he’s black is fine, assuming you take responsibility for it. Glad to clear that up.
05 July 2003 |
9 comments
In case you need some kick-ass Japanese punk-funk for the long holiday weekend, I can hook you up. Zoobombs rawk.
I’m off to Louisiana tonight; back Sunday night. There may be posts. There may be blogsilence. Only one way to find out: hitting “reload” every hour on the hour, all weekend long.
02 July 2003 |
No comments
It’s a good life lesson for us all: If you’re going to castrate someone, for heaven’s sake, do a good job.
02 July 2003 |
1 comment
A month ago, still drunk on the glories of my trivia bowl victory, I somehow found myself at the Jeopardy home page. I saw there were contestant tryouts this August in New Orleans. I, as a Louisiana native who had already planned a pre-Pew trip home sometime in August, figured I’d sign up.
I got the call today. On August 11, I go for gold.
01 July 2003 |
7 comments
I’m very sad to report that, while it suffers from the typical Pitchfork overwriting and is wrong on a few particulars, William Bowers’ review of the new Clem Snide CD is precisely right. Geez, does it suck. Such a disappointment.
And can we officially ban Joe Chiccarelli from ever producing another album again? Every band he touches turns out a crap record. He produced the last American Music Club record and turned some strong songs into slick, overproduced pap. He produced a crap Poco album in their dying days. He screwed up the Verlaines, which is an accomplishment. And now he’s behind this Clem Snide turdlet. Joe Chiccarelli, thy art my nemesis! Be gone!
01 July 2003 |
2 comments
I’m an utter eMusic partisan. For those who don’t know, you pay them $15 a month (less if you’re willing to make a year-long commitment) and, in exchange, you get to download all the MP3s they have, legally and legitimately. And these are plain vanilla, high-quality MP3s — no restrictive digital rights management.
The one catch that some people get hung up on: the major labels aren’t involved. It’s mostly indies. But who needs Britney, anyway? (Well, besides Justin, I mean.) I’ve downloaded over 200 albums so far; if you’ve got a big hard drive, adventurous tastes, and a fast connection, there’s no better deal out there.
Since some folks have begun to post their eMusic favorites, I figured I’d do the same. (I’d include links to everything, but I’ve got work to do — the eMusic search engine works fine.) Put all these in your download queue and I promise instant coolness. (Note: I’m probably leaving out some great artists whose stuff I bought on good ol’ fashioned CDs, so apologies in advance. The ones in bold are particularly good, and it’s often worth downloading everything they’ve got on the site.)
Tindersticks, The Decemberists, Pinback, Consonant, Badly Drawn Boy, Bauhaus, Matt Pond PA, Isaac Hayes, The Delgados, Stereolab, Mountain Goats, Mclusky, Yo La Tengo, The Promise Ring, The Lemonheads, Ivy, Mojave 3, Belle and Sebastian, Bill Evans, Ken Nordine, Steve Earle, Townes van Zant, and Guy Clark, The French Kicks, Red House Painters, The Strokes, Ass Ponys, Preston School of Industry, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Professor Longhair, Del the Funky Homosapien, Arab Strap, DJ Shadow Presents, The Fall, Spoon, Thelonious Monk, Mark Kozelek, For Stars, Pixies, J-Live, Big Star, Frank Black, R.L. Burnside, Pavement, Built to Spill, Ron Sexsmith, Mogwai, Beulah, Cex, Blackalicious, Radio 4, The Exploding Hearts, David Axelrod, Rainer Maria, Girls Against Boys, Peanut Butter Wolf, Guided by Voices, !!!, Zoobombs, Tahiti 80, Superdrag, The Wondermints, Apples in Stereo, Pernice Brothers, Interpol, Neil Halstead, John Coltrane, Cornershop, The Minders, Destroyer, Ted Leo/Pharmacists, The New Pornographers, Mark Eitzel, Pizzicato Five.
01 July 2003 |
15 comments
