Month: April 2003

I’ll be on TXCN sometime tonight talking about the war and where Saddam Hussein’s cronies are all hiding. (Yep, I figured it all out, from right here at my desk in Dallas.)
My debut as a war analyst will also be on tomorrow’s front page, strangely enough.

Sadness is spending $83.00 on 100 83-cent stamps…then getting home to discover they gave you 100 76-cent stamps instead.

Now that CDMOM is over, there’s time for a little statistical reflection. I made 16 monthly mixes, with a total of 316 songs. Here are the artists who appeared most often:
5 appearances: American Music Club.
4: Clem Snide, Death Cab for Cutie, Sloan, Spoon.
3: Calexico, The Dismemberment Plan, Enon, Luna, Pavement, The Pixies, Velvet Crush.
2: Beulah, Big Star, Blackalicious, Richard Buckner, Built to Spill, Call and Response, The Clash, Evan Dando, Devo, DJ Shadow, Mark Eitzel, The Faint, The Flashing Lights, Ben Folds Five, Freelance Hellraiser, The French Kicks, J Mascis, The Minders, Morphine, Mos Def, New Wet Kojak, David Poe, Quasi, Rainer Maria, The Red Stick Ramblers, Saint Etienne, Sea Ray, Seam, Sebadoh, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth, Superchunk, Tahiti 80, Rufus Wainwright, The Weakerthans, X, The Young Fresh Fellows.
Unsurprisingly, that list’s a pretty solid reflection of my tastes. You should buy all their CDs. (Okay, not all — even these giants have produced a few stinkers. But most are great, and all are worth supporting.)

Hold your horses, people — the March CDMOM discs should be in the mail tomorrow. There’s a war going on, ferchrissakes! Doesn’t that give me a little wiggle room?
I can mail them now after spending 30 minutes negotiating with the folks at the post office over whether I should be allowed to buy stamps or not. (They had the stamps I needed, but were unsure whether someone else might need them more than I did later.)

Why don’t the White Stripes just hurry up and endorse Target already? We all know that’s what the red-and-white color scheme has been about all these years.
By the way, that new White Stripes record is going to blow up. I swung by Tower to pick up my copy over the weekend and it was the only CD in the player anyone was listening to. Every five minutes I’d look over and someone new would have the headphones on and a copy of Elephant in their hands: a paunchy, fortysomething soccer dad; a dorky 15-year-old trying his damnedest to be cool; an ancient old lady with a bun (seriously).
By the way, sorry for the silence — technical problems.

Big day: Here’s my story from today’s front page on East Dallas Community School, a great Montessori school founded by a bunch of ’60s idealists. It’s the latest installment of the Schools That Work series. (Even if it did suffer some last-minute surgery in order for it to fit in today’s packed A-section.)
And on the cover of the Metro section is the debut of my column, Thinking About Education. (Well, it’s not just my column — three colleagues and I are writing it in rotation.) Those wondering what I look like in real life can pick up today’s paper to see my ugly mug. For some reason, I chose a very nerdy, wonky, numbers-based topic for my first column. Don’t worry, that’ll change — my next one’s about a show on the WB.

“William Whyte’s rule: virtually all corporate relocations involve a move to a location which is closer to the CEO’s home than the old location. Whyte discovered this principle after an extensive study of Fortune 500 companies that left New York City for the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. They always had big, complicated Relocation Committees which carefully studied all the options and chose, coincidentally I’m sure, to move to within half a mile of the CEO’s home in Danbury, Connecticut. Whyte also showed that these companies all tanked after the relocation.”

Dude, am I the only one who didn’t know Christopher Reeve is bald? (Here too.) Nothing wrong with it, of course, but at least kill the bad toupees.

Longtime readers will remember my mix of excitement and fright at the filming of my favorite book, A Confederacy of Dunces. Matt informed me today that the movie’s shaping up: Stephen Soderburgh writing and producing, Drew Barrymore as Darlene. Philip Seymour Hoffman is rumored for the lead (just as I proposed ten months ago!), which would be a relief. And ex-Dallasite David Gordon Green, whose George Washington got great reviews, is set to direct.
Thankfully, he seems to have the right idea.
“It’s a book I’m very invested in. I’m not a big reader, but it’s the greatest book I’ve read. I mean, I got it when I was 15, and I’ve read it every year since. It’s a different game but something I’m totally excited about trying to do. It’s pretty awesome to have a movie that from the get-go is gonna have a certain profile.”

I’m not a coffee drinker. Sure, if a bunch of people are heading for Starbucks, I’ll blow a few bucks on some long-named drink. But coffee is a few-times-a-year thing for me.
But this week has been crazy busy, and I figured I might need a little extra pep. On Tuesday, I started drinking a cup in the morning.
Last night, I slept perhaps 10 total minutes. I also had a very vivid dream that the Dallas schools web site had been redesigned in Soviet constructivist style — lots of strong reds and blacks, Cyrillic block letters, abstracted forms, the whole nine.
I think I’m going to stop drinking coffee.