Month: December 2003

Reason No. 6,430 to always trust crabwalk.com: Remember a few months ago, when I mentioned that Dead White Male Strom Thurmond had fathered a black daughter? I told you so!
I’m back in Dallas, still unpacking. No one [choose one: broke into/torched/filled with packing foam] my apartment while I was gone. I did, however, return to a freezer holding a single link of boudin. (I thought I’d thrown it out. I can’t imagine pork products bought in July would still be edible in December, no matter how frozen solid they may be.)
Mickey Kaus has defined an admirable goal for Internet journalists (although I think it can apply just as well to all us journos): “Leibling Optimality,” named in honor of the late New Yorkerist A.J. Leibling. Its definition, based on a famous Leibling quote: “being better than everyone who’s faster than you are and faster than everyone who’s better.”
I finally got a copy of Panther and installed it on my laptop. First negative reactions: that left column in the Finder is annoying as hell on a small screen; there appears to be no way to override the absurdly large white space Panther puts between icons in icon view; the new x-height settings for Lucida Grande and other typefaces makes everything in Safari just a touch harder to read. On the plus side, it did make my iBook/G3 500 faster, as promised. We’ll see how this all works out — I’ll wait a little while longer before upgrading my desktop.
Have I mentioned how nice it is to have a desktop with a big monitor again, after 15 weeks of living on a 12-inch screen? It’s nice.
Finally, Sen. John Breaux, The most powerful Cajun in American history, is retiring. A sad day for us Cajuns — whatever you think of his politics, he’s a good guy. Breaux’s from Crowley, about five miles from my house. It’s strange to think that when he was my age (28), he was already a congressman.
At least it appears there’ll be three strong candidates in the race to succeed him: Republicans David Vitter (a Rhodes Scholar I interviewed a couple years back) and Bobby Jindal (another Rhodes Scholar and 32-year-old wunderkind who almost got elected governor last month) and Democrat Chris John (who’s also from Crowley and has a good reputation around my neck of the woods).

My friend Jeremy is a fellow Pew Fellow and just got back from six weeks the Ivory Coast. Until now, you’ve been able to read about it on his blog.
But now you can read about it in his five-day series of “Dispatches” on Slate. From a blog I host to a legitimate, respected publication! Sniff — I’m tearing up with pride!
Jeremy and I did some drinking this weekend, and he showed me some admirable techniques for crashing parties where you know no one. We stumbled out of one house party near Capitol Hill Saturday night and wandered down F Street until we heard Outkast blaring from a random apartment. Jeremy took it upon himself to invite us both in. After equipping ourselves with some mulled wine, he decided it was time to set up our defenses with his patented two-step method:
– Introduce yourself to someone who looks like he won’t be too inquisitive. Preferably someone involved in an activity (in our case, closely watching a game of beer pong), so he’s likely to be too distracted to ask what your connection is to the party’s hosts.
– Then move away from that guy to another room. That way, if someone does later ask why you’re at the party, you can say, “Oh! I’m a friend of [insert name here]!” and hope you’re out of his earshot.
Worked well. Too bad they were almost out of mulled wine by the time we got there. We left after 20 minutes or so. Jeremy did make sure to say goodbye to our new friend, who was very sad to see us go.

An alert for Washington, D.C., area readers: tomorrow (Monday) I’ll be one of three Pew Fellows giving a brief presentation on my recent reporting in Zambia. (For those of you who haven’t been close crabwalk.com readers of late, you can read all about that over here.) All are invited.
The details: It’s from 12:15 to 2:00 p.m., and you even get a free lunch. It’s in room 806 of the Rome Building at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which is at 1619 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
(And you might want to bring a coupla Prozac, since you’ll be hearing about mass AIDS death in Zambia, the fume-choked streets of urban Iran, and the mass murder of artists in Cambodia. It’s a feel-good affair!)
If you do show, please come say hello.

Saw Kill Bill yesterday. I’m not quite a full-fledged Tarantinista, but I’ve enjoyed his work enough in the past to be somewhat amazed at the visceral, intense rage in some of the movie’s reviews. I mean, this was the SF Chronicle:
It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage…Let’s just call it pornography. And let’s just admit it’s indefensible.
And this was the New Yorker’s David Denby (he of the crippling Internet porn addiction!):
Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing