Month: June 2003

The best and worst D&D monsters. (Part two, part three.)

A fun story on steak eating.
Comic genius.

ChandaWatch returns to crabwalk.com! Chanda won her first-round Wimbledon match easily, crushing the once formidable Iva Majoli, 6-3, 6-0. Her path forward doesn’t look too rough: likely Amy Frazier in the second, Silvia Farina Elia in the third, a Maleeva in the fourth. Clijsters looms in the quarters, but Chanda has always done well on grass. I will boldly predict that this is the time for a Chanda breakthrough to the semis, which would be her first since the Australian in 1996.
Meanwhile, I’m back to AppleWatch, my obsessive trait of checking as many Mac news sites as possible during any major Steve Jobs address, this time the WWDC. (Nine Mac-related browser windows open at the moment.) If I weren’t about to live in a hotel room for four months and thus be stuck in a laptop lifestyle, the temptation to buy one of the new G5 towers he’s certain to announce in a few minutes would be overpowering.

A take on the Greg Packer situation. (Packer’s the guy who has committed his life to being quoted as the “man on the street” in newspaper stories.)
“I think the reason Packer is quoted so often is that journalists hate man-on-the-street interviews. It’s demeaning to have to scan a crowd of total strangers, seaching for someone who looks like he or she might have something quotable to say, and won’t tell you to get lost. What a relief to spot a Packer at the head of the line, ready and eager to give you a sound bite.”
So very true — MOTS stories are painful, for me at least. (That’s probably why my education stories always have too many men in suits and “experts” and too few teachers, parents, and students.)
Unfortunately, the author falls into one of the most annoying columnist tics — making a strong, coherent argument, realizing it might be taken as too extreme by your editors, and then completely reversing course with a few “I didn’t really mean it” paragraphs at the end.

Great track listing for the new Locust album (third item):
01 Recyclable Body Fluids In Human Shape
05 Earwax Halo Manufactured For The Champion In All Of Us
09 Teenage Mustache
11 Anything Jesus Does, I Can Do Better
12 Late For A Double-Date With A Pile Of Atoms In The Watercloset
13 File Under “Softcore Seizures”
16 The Half-Eaten Sausage Would Like To See You In His Office
17 Pulling The Christmas Pig By The Wrong Pair Of Ears
18 Can We Please Get Another Nail In The Coffin Of Culture Theft
19 Your Mantel Disguised As A Psychic Sasquatch
22 Priest With The Sexually Transmitted Disease, Get Out Of My Bed
23 Pick-Up Truck Full Of Forty-Minutes
I am confident that the songs themselves will not be as good as their titles.

Here’s my story from Saturday’s paper on Felipe Alanis’ surprise resignation. (Surprising to me, at least. I suppose I’ve overrated my pluggedinness.)

Here’s my story from today’s front page, on what I promise will be my last test-score story for a while. I hope.
Austinites, clear your calendars for next Thursday and Friday, when the Red Stick Ramblers — the official Cajun gypsy swing band of crabwalk.com — will be playing the Cactus Cafe and the Continental Club.
Me, I’m going to Austin tonight to get away from Big D for a while. Back on Monday.

Watch this space in the coming months.

Here’s my story from today’s front page, the eighth and final installment in my Schools That Work series. It’s on an alternative high school in Houston that does great things with kids at risk of dropping out. You can find all eight stories in the series at that link.
I’ll also be on tomorrow’s front page and on TXCN sometime this afternoon, repeating through the evening.

If you were to try — really try — to draw up a more cretinous regulation of Internet content than what the EU’s proposing, I’m not sure you could.
Combined with the silly libel laws over the pond, Europe is hell on media law.