Trailer for A Good Band is Easy to Kill, a documentary of the final tour of Beulah. Beulah was awesome, and they put on a great, horn-enhanced live show. (Plus there’s a small chance I’ll be in there, based on my vigorous hopping in the third row of a show last year. Although it’s more likely my friend Nicole will be in there, since she somehow ended up on stage, playing tambourine.)
The Sea Nymph Eats Paul Giamatti Alive, a series of possible twist endings to the next M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Not-tremendously-interesting story from today’s paper. Another not-tremendously-interesting story coming in tomorrow’s.
Just as I previously said all right-thinking Dallasites should have been at the Clem Snide show a couple weeks ago, all right-thinking Texans should be at the Decemberists show tomorrow night. You shan’t regret it — they’re terrific live and the new album is aces.
Why the Washington Post is losing circulation. This is the most depressing part of the decline of my line of work: The Post is an amazing newspaper, led by very smart people, and in the perfect newspaper market, but it’s still dropping readers. Awful stuff.
The most annoying part of the article is the scene from the non-reader focus group: “Former subscribers complained unread papers piled up at their homes, making them feel guilty because they hadn’t read them. The responses were not ‘No, I don’t like the Post.’ They were ‘No, I don’t want that hulking thing in my house.’”
I’ve sat in on those focus groups, and I can verify that’s an incredibly common complaint. That idea — that it’s not the content that’s keeping people from reading, it’s the sheer physical artifact — is soooo maddening, since it means there’s not much we on the content side can do to make things better. Harrumph.
Cameron Diaz tries to hip up environmentalism. Line most likely to be quoted from this article: “Ms. Diaz said she and the actress Jessica Alba shared a bed night after night.”
Two more stories today:
- From the front page: “The number of ‘academically unacceptable’ schools in Texas could grow by a factor of 10 under a tougher set of standards approved by a Texas Education Agency committee.
“There are now 92 Texas schools labeled unacceptable, the state’s lowest rating. But if the proposed new rules had been in place last year, more than 1,100 schools would have earned the label and faced possible state intervention.
“‘We’re going to have to go after more schools,’ said Sandy Kress, the former Dallas school board president and Bush adviser who is among the new standards’ supporters. ‘We’re going to have to go to a place we have not gone yet if we really want youngsters to succeed in these ineffective schools.’”
- From the Metro section front: “Former Wilmer-Hutchins Superintendent Charles Matthews was indicted Tuesday for allegedly ordering employees to falsify attendance data.
“The indictment, by a Dallas County grand jury, is the second in the last five months for Dr. Matthews, a former state superintendent of the year. His leadership of the troubled district is the target of numerous federal and state criminal investigations and has led the Texas Education Agency to take over district operations.”
I’m off to New York in a few minutes. Drop me a line if you want to get together while I’m in town.
And oh yeah: I was on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning. Well, I wasn’t — I was in Mexico when Claudio was in Dallas recording audio — but the whole piece is based on my cheating stories from the last few months.
(There is one kinda funny error in the piece, though: The fellow Claudio calls “Mike Drago,” er, isn’t.)
The reason I was at work until 10 p.m. tonight, from Tuesday’s front page:
The Wilmer-Hutchins school board will soon be out of work.
State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley has decided to dissolve the troubled district’s board because state investigators found widespread cheating by Wilmer-Hutchins teachers on the state’s TAKS test.
The investigation – prompted by a series of Dallas Morning News stories in November – found that more than 20 Wilmer-Hutchins teachers and administrators gave answers to students.
According to a confidential Texas Education Agency report obtained by The News, teachers ordered students who finished the test early to fix answers on other students’ answer sheets. Some students were required to have their answers checked before proceeding to the next question. And some teachers prepared answer keys for students.
In all, 22 educators were fingered by the investigation – two-thirds of all the educators who administered tests in the district’s elementary schools.
“This significant number appears to indicate a pervasive lack of oversight at three of the four elementary campuses and at the district level to such an extent that the validity of the test results is compromised,” the report said.
In case you thought I was just kidding in all those previous stories about cheating in Wilmer-Hutchins (and elsewhere).
Crabwalk.com hero Dana Milbank does a good job defending the mainstream media — a cause with which I heartily agree.
An unreserved crabwalk.com rave to Naturally, the new disc from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Sure, it’s backward-looking and proudly retro, but damn is this some fine-ass soul music. Sounds like the best outtakes from an early ’70s Ike & Tina session; the Dap-Kings are tight and Sharon’s got a pleasant dominatrix vibe to her voice.
Certain songs (“My Man is a Mean Man”) really make me wish I was into recreational drugs, because I’m sure the trance-inducing qualities of the walking bassline would be quite swell under chemical influence.
Put this album on at your next party and I guarantee you people will start having red-hot monkey sex, right there on your Ikea coffee table. Anyway, you should buy it.
(This is in keeping with my recent fascination with all forms of black music circa 1972, which I’m starting to believe may be the peak of human cultural achievement. As the liner notes posit: “Somewhere between banging on logs and the invention of MIDI technology we have made a terrible wrong turn. We must have ridden right past our stop. We should have stepped down off the train at that moment when rhythm and harmony and technology all culminated to a single Otis Redding whine.” This was previously explored as part of my Madlib fixation of late.)
(Update: MP3 samples here, although “Mean Man” sadly cuts out just when it’s entering the stratosphere.)
A BitTorrent of the Decemberists’ new Model U.N.-themed video for “16 Military Wives.” Sort of Wes Anderson meets Noam Chomsky.
For those of you who couldn’t make it to SXSW, the fabtabulous Kevin Lawver has gathered summary notes for fost of the panel discussions.
Aside: If you see more strange typos here than usual, it’s because I got a new keyboard at work. My Home/End/Delete/Insert/PgUp/PgDn keys have all moved around (a la Greywolf here). So random letters may end up missing during an adjustment period. Consider yourself forewarned.
One man’s life, as told through late-period R.E.M. releases.
All right-thinking Dallasites will be at the Clem Snide concert tonight.
Just got back from SXSW. A lovely experience, as always. Seemed a bit more muted in some ways, but that’s probably just my arteries hardening and my youth disappearing.
For those interested: DallasNews.com has assembled all the stories that won the National Awards for Education Reporting. In case you (somehow!) missed all those links the first time around on crabwalk.com.
A Century of Candy Bars: An Analysis of Wrapper Design: Proof that master’s theses need not address issues of global import.
For those who followed my stories about AIDS’ impact on Zambia’s educational system: This story from Tanzania.
“HIV/AIDS is also a major cause of absenteeism and has affected the provision of education in various ways. First, experienced teachers are dying in droves. Tanzania’s Education Minister Joseph Mungai recently announced that more than 140,000 teachers had died of AIDS-related diseases in the past two decades…
“This attrition and absenteeism due to illness has increased workloads on the other teachers. ‘I am teaching Kiswahili and mathematics and I have 16 periods a week,’ a female, Grade A teacher in Ludewa urban district said. ‘In the classes that I teach, there are between 120 and 150 pupils. This is a very unsatisfactory situation.’”
Another travel alert: Turns out I will be in New York in a couple weeks, from March 23 through 26. (Amusingly enough, an NYU professor/crabwalk.com reader has asked me to speak to her writing class. Little does she know that this blog is actually written by seven poorly-paid Cambodian day-laborers. I am, in fact, functionally illiterate.)
Any NYC readers of el crabwalko who may wish to share a meal or beverage should make contact through any of the various well-established methods.
A pre-SXSW alert, for any homies slinging back Shiners in the Austin sunset who wish to request my presence:
My cellular telephone can be reached by typing the following numerals into your own cellular telephone: 214-914-9998.
The dashes are optional, although pleasantly horizontal.
Here’s my column from today’s paper. Not my finest work, I think, but some folks liked it. The opener: “I’d like to apologize in advance for the quality of this column. I just ask that you keep in mind that I have the writing ability of a below-average 15-year-old.”
Also, for the first time in Dallas, my name appears in today’s paper in a spot other than the byline.
True story: I was giving a little talk to a third-grade class a few weeks ago. I was supposed to be explaining how a story gets put together and explaining its different parts: the headline, the dateline, the byline, etc.
Anyway, the kids were all supposed to be finding each of these elements in a story in the paper. I was wandering around the class and stopped at one little girl’s desk. “Okay, in this story, show me the dateline,” I said. She pointed to the byline (“By John Doe”).
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I think that’s the byline.”
“No, that’s the dateline,” she replied. “It has the writer’s name so someone can ask him out on a date if they want to.”
Kids, they say the darnedest things!
Music fans with a phat broadband pipe: Download this BitTorrent file to get 2.6 gigs (!) of MP3s — 750 tracks from just about every band playing at SXSW this month. And it’s even legal!
(I pulled it down last night — took about eight hours on a cable modem. It’s a good thing to get going before you go to sleep at night — free music when you wake up.)
Long-time readers may remember that I snagged a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism back in the fall of 2003, which allowed me to spend six lovely weeks in Zambia.
They may also remember that I blogged about my travels there at zambiastories.com.
They may also remember that I have also set up blogs for close to a dozen other journalists going overseas. And if they’ve ever gotten me drunk, they may also have heard me ramble on about my grand plans for ReportersAbroad.org, a site of mine that has been for some time and very likely will always remain In Development. (Nothing to see there now.)
Anyway, I mention all this because I am currently hosting blogs for four more globetrotting journalists, all of them current IRP Fellows (IRP being the new name of what used to be called the Pew). These fine reporters just left for their target countries Saturday, so their blogs are not yet overflowing with local color, but they will be soon — all have had promising starts. They are:
- Pakistan: Subcontinental Drift, by Aryn Baker
- Colombia: 8,300 Feet Above Sea Level, by Fernanda Santos
- Mozambique: To Mozambique, by Adam Graham-Silverman
- Ghana: West African Days, by Cathryn Poff
You should read them all over the next five weeks. You shan’t regret it.
Interesting piece on the battles between the Washington Post and the Washington Redskins. But my real interest is in these two facts the piece reveals:
- The official spokesperson for the Redskins is based in Los Angeles.
- Sally Jenkins, one of the Post’s sports columnists, is based in New York.
So if the Washington Post’s sports columnists wants an official comment from the Washington Redskins, she calls a guy in California from Manhattan.
Strange.
I’m trying to think of what the local equivalent would be: The Dallas Morning News’ top sports columnist being based in Miami and the Cowboys’ chief spokesman being based in Seattle, I guess.
While you’re contemplating that one, here’s an MP3 of Clem Snide segueing from “Moment in the Sun” to a cover of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Here’s my Wilmer-Hutchins story from today’s front page. I think you’ll enjoy it.
This sure would have come in handy when I was in New Haven. Would have saved me $16K in student loans and a lot of long hours shelving books in the law library.
Pre-release video of “Rappcats Pt. 3,” from Madlib’s alter ego Quasimoto, whose new album The Further Adventures of Lord Quas comes out May 3.
Matt points out a Salon review/author Q&A with John Mack Faragher, author of that history of the Acadian expulsion I’ve written about here. It’s mostly good, although it’s downright amusing how Salon, in its inimitable way, tries to turn everything into an attack on George W. Bush.
“Q: In your account, the Acadians were repeatedly blamed for events they had nothing to do with, or could not control. Indians attack settler villages in Maine or Massachusetts, and Puritan preachers stir up hatred against the “neutral French” because they’re seen as sinister figures, possibly in cahoots with the Indians. You don’t want to look into the past and see the present, but I don’t know: the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin, the spurious connection between al-Qaida and Saddam. Is this a pattern in American history?”
Or this classic gratuitous slap:
“Q: When you describe, very powerfully and painfully, how the expulsion of the Acadians was actually carried out, you write that this was one of the most horrific episodes in American history. That’s a startling statement, isn’t it? We’re talking about a continent that had slavery for more than 200 years, and a continent where the native peoples were more or less wiped out. I mean, there’s a high bar to get over here, in terms of horrific episodes.”
Hey, readers! Anyone going to SXSW next week? I’ll be down from Friday evening to Tuesday noonish. If you’re a crabwalk.com reader and we haven’t met, first beer’s on me.
Gene Kelly loves himself some pop-lockin’ beats.
Now that Sea Ray has played its final show, there is an opening for Best Band Whose Members Josh Lived Down The Hall From In College. Clogs may fill that void. (Particularly since their new album is also released on the Best Label Whose Founder’s Album Reviews I Used To Edit At The College Paper.)
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.)
Links
About | Archives | Contact | Writing | Photos | Links | Wish
RSS feeds 
Recently played tracks
- Rhys, Gruff – This Is Just The Beginning
- Air – Universal Traveler
- Blind Lemon Jefferson – Prison Cell Blues
- Cibo Matto – Know Your Chicken
- The Dismemberment Plan – The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich
- Stephen Malkmus – Out Of Reaches
- The National Lights – The Dead Will Walk
- Afghan Whigs – The Vampire Lanois
- Devo – Mr. B's Ballroom
- Isimo, Takkyo – Stereo Nights
Most recent stories
06 Aug: COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
Archives
Search
Disclaimer
Any opinions expressed here are solely mine, and not those of my employer. In many cases, they may not even be mine.
