Month: October 2002

Anyone else notice that when Yahoo! Maps redesigned not long ago, they started getting drive times close to correct?
Example: I’m driving to Rayne tomorrow night, a trip that Yahoo used to claim took eight hours. Now it claims six hours and 15 minutes — not far off, particularly if you count the traditional Wendy’s break outside Terrell, Texas. (For the record, competitor Mapquest calls it a 6:58 drive.)
Austin — previously listed as 5-plus hours from Dallas — now clocks in at under four at Yahoo. (It’s really closer to 3:15, and weirdly Mapquest is dead on.) It’s good that Yahoo no longer assumes we’re stuck behind a left-lane Pinto at 35 miles per, I suppose, even if I’ll no longer get to feel cool for shaving a cool two hours off the expected time. It’s the little things in life, people.

Excuse me, Mr. New York Times, but I think someone mixed up Maureen Dowd’s column photo with Joker Jack‘s.
(To fend off any accusations of sexism for making fun of Maureen Dowd’s mug, I happily present a retired junior hockey coach and John Turturro’s dad. It just seems they’re trying to make ol’ Maureen look awful next to her peers. Check out that princess-of-darkness black background she gets!)

I think there should be more room in public discourse for the phrase “shit the bed.”

I normally don’t express my opinions on matters involving my employer, but geez, that Dick Armey can be a little silly at times, can’t he?
For those not following this matter with eagle-eyed precision, Armey is the retiring House majority leader. He wanted his 32-year-old son Scott to succeed him, but my newspaper wrote a few stories exposing things he had done in his previous job of Denton County judge. (In Texas, the county judge is the chief executive of the county, not a judicial figure.) These included giving government contracts to his buddies, steering public cash to a charity a friend ran, and pushing to allow alcohol sales in a neighborhood that didn’t want them after working in a questionable position for a beer company.
In any event, Scott Armey got an old fashioned Texas whoopin’ at the polls, losing by 10 points to a political unknown. This despite an enormous fundraising advantage, support from folks like Phil Gramm, and, well, the fact that his last name is Armey.
This made Dick Armey mad. He accused Belo of having “an outragous vendetta against me that was focused on my son.” This was interesting, considering (a) Belo is not known for its radical leftist, playa-hatin’, GOP-bashing tendencies — if anything, it’s much more commonly accused of being a lapdog to conservatives in power, and (b) the Morning News has endorsed Armey every time he’s been up for election for a long, long time.
(The 2000 editorial endorsing his last run for office: “Mr. Armey is a smart, consistent fiscal conservative who too often has blunted his voice with intemperate remarks and partisan disputes. Still, as House majority leader, Mr. Armey is a valuable asset for North Texas. He is an influential advocate of free trade and free markets, both of which are important to the region. He is a savvy economist and could do much to elevate the discussion on Social Security reform and tax reform.”)
Anyway, Dick Armey’s solution to his son’s whoopin’? Slip a clause into a military spending bill that would do only one thing: force Belo to sell one of its three Dallas-area businesses. Those would be The Dallas Morning News, WFAA Channel 8, and The Denton Record-Chronicle. They’re a “dangerous monopoly,” he claims, that needs to be broken up.
What bull. Monopoly? Let’s see:
– WFAA is one of five TV news operations in town. It doesn’t even have the highest ratings of the five.
– The Dallas Morning News is indeed the only newspaper in Dallas (although, of course, anyone is free to start up another one). But Dick Armey’s hometown of Flower Mound is closer to Fort Worth than it is to Dallas. Fort Worth, of course, has its own (middling) newspaper. I’d bet it has more subscribers in Flower Mound than the Morning News does; if not, it’s awful close.
Yep, sounds like a monopoly to me. At least others are seeing through his facade.
I end this entry with a link to a great, funny anti-Armey piece from the Post, including some of his past greatest hits (like calling Barney Frank “Barney Fag” and Hillary Clinton a Marxist).

Those worried about the death of Arts & Letters Daily shouldn’t fret too much — it appears that Philosophy & Literature is a carbon copy, produced by the same people. It’s good to see A&L’s tradition of long, annoying-to-type URLs continues on.

We’re very sorry: “The story ‘Filipino-American history recognized’ stated that the ‘Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza,’ the galleon on which the first Filipinos landed at Morro Bay, Calif., loosely translates to ‘The Big Ass Spanish Boat.’ It actually translates to ‘Our Lady of Good Peace.'” (Here’s the original story they’re correcting.)
This doozy of a newspaper correction goes on to say the ill-advised translation was “plagiarized from an inaccurate Web site.” That would be this one, I presume. That site proposes other ways of celebrating Filipino American History Month: “Making Jack O’ Lanterns out of corned beef and/or Spam,” “Decorate the house with asparagus,” and “Find a Spaniard and boss him or her around for 333 minutes: That’s one minute for every year of Spanish rule.”
Apparently, October is Filipino American History Month because that’s when the first Filipinos arrived in the U.S., on board the aforementioned ship. Wrong! Filipino history fact of the day: The first Asian settlement in what’s now the United States came in 1765, when the first Filipinos settled in beautiful south Louisiana. (More info here and here; map here.)
South Louisiana history is fascinating stuff, particularly in that part of the state, just south of New Orleans in the delta. That’s also the area where you have the Islenos from the Canary Islands. I was looking at a map of that area earlier today and saw Judge Perez Drive — named for Leander Perez, one of the most fascinating and repugnant figures in Southern political history.
Perez was the political boss of Plaquemines Parish for five decades. Corrupt as all hell, he made millions by stealing oil-rich land from the state and quashing all opposition that might arise. He ran that parish like a personal fiefdom — statues to his glory everywhere, streets like Judge Perez Drive to leave his cancerous mark on the landscape. He took the money he stole and used it to fund the pro-segregation battles of the 1950s and 1960s; he was a big George Wallace supporter, among others. This film has some of the details. The fascinating Perez tale’s best found in Glen Jeansonne’s book.
Enough Louisiana history for one day, I promise.

Football update: Saints win a thriller, 32-29, to stand at 4-1, best record in the conference. It was very considerate of the Saints to give storm-torn Louisiana a victory this week.
In contrast, the Ragin’ Cajuns of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette didn’t fare as well against the ogres from Baton Rouge. 48-zip. Ouch. Some highlights from the AP story:
– “Louisiana-Lafayette (1-4) has been outscored 542-0 in the last 10 meetings with LSU. The last time they played was 1938.”
– “The only time Louisiana-Lafayette reached LSU’s side of the field in the first half was when they recovered a fumble on the Tigers’ 44 late in the first quarter. The Cajuns fumbled it back to LSU on the next play.”

NOOOO! Where will I steal my links from now? A truly sad day.

The September mix is up for all to see, FYI. And the Rocktober mix is all ready to burn — both literally and figuratively.

Well, Mazie’s survived. “I have never been through something so scary my whole life,” she said — and this is from someone who went through the trauma of raising me! Rayne took a real beating: lots of debris everywhere, roofs torn off, a few building collapses, and (says Mazie) “the water plant got torn in half.” Today’ll probably go down as the worst day in the city’s history.
But, for my more parochial concerns, Mazie’s house and the two next door suffered only minor damage. The house I grew up in had its back door blown off, an old tree is mostly uprooted, part of a tin roof was ripped off, and part of a carport is teetering on the edge of collapse. But all the walls are still standing, in roughly the same locations they used to. Disaster seemingly averted.
A PR flack today told me I sounded “grumpy as hell,” so I apologize to anyone who’s talked to me in the last two days or (in advance) to anyone who’ll talk to me in the next couple.
I know I just had one, but damn, I need a vacation.