Month: November 2002

I’m headed to El Paso for the first time next week. Any suggestions for things to do?

If you watched SportsCenter last night, you may have seen l’il ol’ me during the Mavs-Blazers highlights. I’m the guy in the grey shirt, just to the right of the Mavs basket on the floor level in the second half.
One of the perks of being a Big Brother is that folks like the Mavericks give tickets so you can take your kid places. Unfortunately for Bocephus (as we call my Little Bro here on crabwalk), he had to cancel at the last minute, leaving me with a free ticket. Matt was the lucky one.
Face value of these two seats: $1,000. Seriously.
Highlights: The oft-maligned Rasheed Wallace playing basketball catch during a timeout with a seven-year-old. Several Mavs Dancers. Red Dot whoopin’ up on his brothers Blue, Yellow, and Green. And of course, the Mavs winning, 82-73.

In a way, it’s for the best that the Senate races didn’t end up being closer nationwide. If it was currently 49 Dems, 49 GOP, 1 Independent, the runoff race in Louisiana, my home state, would be absolutely crazy. Still, lots of reporters are descending on my old turf for the next few weeks. I predict a average net gain of 10 pounds in the D.C. press corps.
The Times-Picayune has a great set of advice to those reporters. Among the hints:
– “Please try to avoid food metaphors when discussing Louisiana. Howard Fineman of Newsweek referred to our open primary as a ‘jambalaya primary’ — whatever that’s supposed to mean — in an interview on MSNBC. You also may be tempted to throw in words like “cayenne,” “Tabasco” and “spicy” when you’re talking about our politics to a national audience. Please don’t.”
– “You also should keep in mind that although New Orleans has a French history, it’s wrong to think of it as a Cajun city. Despite what you may have seen in some movies and TV shows, people in New Orleans don’t usually call each other ‘cher.'”
– “New Orleans is in the South, but not really of the South. Except for “y’all,” you’re not likely to find much in the way we talk that sounds like what you’d hear in Mississippi or Alabama or on reruns of ‘The Andy Griffith Show.'”
– “But if you go north of, say, Alexandria, you may come across areas that seem more ‘Southern’ to you. Northeastern Louisiana may seem like a westward extension of Mississippi, while northwestern Louisiana may seem like eastern Texas. Boy-howdy, you might even find some people up there who cheer for the Dallas Cowboys instead of the Saints. We are constantly looking to see if there’s any legal way to revoke the Louisiana citizenship of Cowboys fans.”

Here’s my story from today’s front page, on a Dallas-area school that (close your ears, children) kicks a little booty. It’s the third story in my Schools That Work series.
By the way, I’ve been crazy busy the last month or two, and I’m way behind in my email correspondance. My apologies if I owe you a missive or eight. All I can promise is that my life is supposed to let up briefly in a couple weeks, and I’ll be better then.

Fools! You decide not to go to the Calexico show, and you miss a special guest appearance by Richard Buckner! Richard Buckner, singing a cover of Tom Petty’s “The Waiting,” with either very little or lots of irony! You fools!

Today I was interviewed as an “expert” on domestic partnership laws in northwest Ohio — a matter I had given no thought to before today — and as a “cool older guy” by a Pennsylvania high school newspaper.
I need a drink.

An unfortunate accident has befallen my previous date for tomorrow night’s Calexico concert — namely, that she won’t be able to attend with me. (Could there be anything more unfortunate?)
For those not familiar with the pure magic of Calexico: “conjures images of sand-blasted fence posts, cattle skulls, and wind-blown expanses of rock and sand…draws nearly as much from Mexican musical traditions as it does from American indie rock…Burns and Convertino have rapidly crafted what began as a side project into one of the best bands on the American indie rock landscape…great lyrics…resonates in gloriously cinematic tones…virtually everything bears an obscene attention to detail.”
If anyone else wants to join me, lemme know. After a few days of working on this beef jerky project, I need a little mariachi-postrock.

I’m working on another supersecret project this week. I can’t tell you much, but it involves a superconducting supercollider, a bunch of PhDs, and two piles: one of scrap tin, the other of beef jerky.
All I can say is the tin pile keeps getting smaller, and the jerky pile keeps getting bigger.

And oh yeah, happy birthday to me.

Strange how the newsroom’s a lot quieter at 7:30 a.m. after an election than it is at, say, midnight the night of.
No big surprises here in Texas: a G.O.P. sweep statewide, all the local incumbents winning without difficulty. (Here’s my uninteresting contribution to the day’s news.) Nationally, the Dems got whooped up more severely than I’d expected, but then again, that’s why I cover education, not politics.
Unfortunately, last night was just hectic enough that I couldn’t do a bunch of things I needed to, so after a few hours sleep, I’m back. After mid-morning, I may be out of the office for the rest of the week, so posting may be minimal.