I can’t remember how I came upon this, and it’s a few years old, but this Terry Castle piece on Susan Sontag is really extraordinarily well done. (Also, subtle use of the word “titbit.”)
It’s interesting, after reading the piece, to consider Castle uses a Sontag plaudit quite prominently in her official bio.
Man, I wish my city had a bunch of knock-knock jokes on its web page. (Although I think they screwed up the “Lois” one.)
For the hip-hop nerds in the house: Mos Def covering Madvillain’s “Rainbows” with live horns:
The horns are courtesy the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, who kind of kick ass. Check out their version of Tony Allen’s “Losun” and just try to make me understand why Afrobeat isn’t bigger than T.I.
Google just made it a lot easier to publish customized Google Maps. So this is just a test — a quickie map of some notable locations around my hometown of Rayne, Louisiana:
Click on placemarks, drag it around, zoom in — everything should work as in Google Maps. Shame the placemark bubbles don’t get resized to fit the smaller viewing window, though.
Well, I’m officially a Harvardite, I suppose. Got my ID today. Would be interesting to dig up my old Yale ID from 1993 and compare and contrast. For one, I wasn’t such a damn longhair hippie back then. What are those hair handles behind my head?
Best (Spoon + dancing robot) video evah, for the song “Don’t You Evah”:
That would be off Spoon’s awesome new album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. And, for the record, I believe it was somewhere around Virginia on my recent East Coast drive — after listening to Girls Can Tell, Gimme Fiction, and A Series of Sneaks repeatedly — that Spoon became the incumbent Favorite Band of Crabwalk.com. (The position had been vacant for sometime, since my love of Calexico shrank a half-size.)
Playing basketball with Barack Obama in the late ’80s, when he was at Harvard Law.
Their games were held at the MAC, which I walked past yesterday. Under renovations — supposed to open in the fall sometime.
(Did I mention that I’m in Boston now? Details eventually.)
I tried to get the DMN to write this story — on the typeface change on American highway signs — a couple years ago, when I noticed the change on I-20 in east Texas. I was told it was a little too dorky.
Now I see it’s the most emailed story at nytimes.com.
Who’s too dorky now? (Wait, don’t answer that.)
I can give a hearty crabwalk.com thumbs up — er, pouces vers le haut — to The Story of French, a surprisingly enthralling book about the history of the language. (Okay, it wasn’t surprising. I’m a geek.) Really interesting stuff about the language’s development out of Latin and various local tongues, its expansion and diffusion through the colonial era (first in the Americas and, later, in Africa and Asia), and the tension between purists and realists that defines the modern face of the language. Sort of the classic descriptive-grammarian-vs.-prescriptive-grammarian food fight. writ large. I really, really dug it.
Plus, it taught me for the first time about verlan, the bizarre French version of Pig Latin.
Time for some Saintsblogging. (And you should be forewarned, they may be more of this Saintsblogging as the leaves turn.)
Being as I am stuck in Louisiana, beseeching the Mazda gods for relief, I’ve gotten to see both Saints preseason games, each a loss. The Steelers game was downright discouraging, but our boys were back in kick-ass form versus the Bills Friday night. Best line of the media coverage was from David Gladow in the T-P, expressing an emotion that Saints fans know too well:
Who is going to step up at cornerback? Whenever a defensive back would get beat or make a bad play, every single fan around me would ask if it was Fred Thomas. Thomas is not Satan, people. The problems run deeper than that.
Fred Thomas, for the record, is not Satan. I can agree. I just wish he could occasionally stop the gentlemen on the other team from catching so many passes. That, lately, has been a problem.
(By the way, praying to the Mazda gods isn’t such a crazy idea. For instance, Freddie Mercury probably did it as a child.)
My final column (for a while, anyway) ran in today’s paper. Let’s see if this opener can get you to read it:
We here at The Dallas Morning News do not, traditionally, consider it our role to dictate the details of your sex life.
The closing graf, for those who haven’t been paying attention:
Finally, an announcement: This will be my last column for a while. I’ll be spending the next academic year on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. There I’ll practice wearing tweed jackets, hating the Yankees and pronouncing “chowder” in a comical Kennedy accent. We’ll meet again on these pages next summer.
I’m currently in Rayne, my staging-area-of-choice for the drive up the coast to Boston. I would be hitting the road this morning…except for the fact that my car chose an extremely poor time to have its transmission go all flunky. So I’m here for at least another day or two. In related news, I’m now driving a Mazda-provided rental — a giant pickup truck. I feel like a true Louisianan.
R.I.P. Michelangelo Antonioni. I knew him mostly as a kid via his interactions with Pink Floyd. But here’s one of his last great moments: the closing of The Passenger, from 1975, a six-minute tracking shot that seems to defy physics.
The trailer for Bad Timing, the first feature film ever filmed in Zambia. (Previously mentioned here. For those who watch all the way through: One million kwacha is about $250.)
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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