Month: May 2005

Paul Slocum — self-described “geek artist/musician/hacker” — is the man behind Tree Wave, the closest thing to a music phenom Dallas has produced post-Spree. They make skittish electronic noise-pop out of obsolete computers, including an Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64.
Now he’s started printf(), “a recently formed organization whose goal is to bring electronic musicians and new media artists to perform, exhibit, and lecture in Dallas, Texas. We feel that in a time when our lives are affected dramatically by computers and digital networks, Dallas arts do not adequetely reflect that fact. Initially our focus will be on musicians whose performances are as much about music as they are about video, performance, or process.”
printf()’s first show is May 19, with performances by Tree Wave and DAT Politics, a bunch of Frenchies. Unspeakably awesome video of theirs here.
In case you had any doubts about Paul’s geek cred — if his use of an old programming command in his group’s name and his musical repurposing of dot-matrix technology wasn’t enough — he even javascript-encodes his mailto tags.

Signs you might be eating too high a percentage of your breakfasts at McDonald’s: When the woman at the drive-thru notices you’ve bought a new car and gives you a high five.

Bunny suicides.

Okay, I’ll stop the self-fellatio someday, but I thought I should mention that on Saturday I won the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, which is the top award in my line of work. (Web site not yet updated.)
This is related to these two awards I wrote about a couple months ago. In the National Awards for Education Reporting, there are a number of categories (feature writing, breaking news, etc.) for a number of different media (newspapers, radio, TV, magazines). I won the top prize in investigative reporting and beat reporting. The Hechinger Grand Prize goes to the best of all the winners in all the categories.
While I’m stroking my ego — a habit I really should get out of — I might as well post a couple of the judges’ comments in the competition: “This is great and sophisticated journalism. They caught the cheaters, exposed them and got the system to change as a result of their stories. It’s some of the best investigative work I’ve ever seen in this contest, and very worthy of [the Education Writers Association]’s highest annual honor.”
And: “The Dallas Morning News team exposed what many may have suspected by few wanted to acknowledge: cheating by teachers to boost test scores. Their exhaustive research and clear, compelling writing has forced state officials to confront a troubling trend…Throat-grabbing work!”
And: “Far and away, this entry is the best of the bunch in the beat reporting category. Joshua Benton gives us a powerful portrait of how AIDS is taking a toll in Zambian schools. We liked his hard-hitting pieces on the worst school district in Texas and his statistical analysis of state test scores, which uncovered widespread cheating.”

The worst two logos ever.

“Houston school officials said Wednesday that they have found evidence of cheating and other TAKS testing improprieties at 10 more campuses. In three schools, the evidence is so strong that officials are moving to fire four teachers, demote a principal and an assistant principal and discipline three employees. The action follows a similar announcement in February focusing on Sanderson Elementary, a National Blue Ribbon campus where investigators found that teachers gave students answers on the TAKS tests. A total of 12 employees now face discipline or termination, after an inquiry triggered by a Dallas Morning News investigation.”
Or the CNN/AP version.

The blog of Darth Vader, “Lord of the Sith and Servant to His Supreme Excellency the Emperor Palpatine.”

Stephen Colbert to get own show to follow The Daily Show. Good news, that, although it would be better news if I had cable.
Little-known fact about Stephen Colbert: He attended the hoity-toity Porter-Gaud School in South Carolina when one of its teachers was sexually molesting more than 40 of its male students. (And school leaders knew about it.) Colbert himself got caught up in it:
Stephen Colbert, a classmate and close friend of [victim Guerry] Glover’s then, remembers feeling sick to his stomach one day and being sent to [molester Eddie] Fischer’s office, which had a door and no windows.
“He checked me for a hernia. He said, ‘Turn your head and cough.’ And he was thorough. I’m 16, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I just don’t see how it could be a hernia.’ But he’s the trainer. It was so clinical. He says, ‘No I don’t think it’s hernia. You know what, go to the nurse’s office and get an aspirin.'”
Colbert remembers an assembly during his senior year when someone went on stage and did an imitation of Fischer asking a boy to drop his pants. Everyone laughed. “There was no embarrassed hush.”
Colbert, a writer for The Daily Show on the Comedy Central channel, said that while the jokes were common, people didn’t really think that an older man might be having sex with boys. “They didn’t make that connection. There was the sense that ‘there’s crazy Mr. Fischer,’ not ‘Hey, that guy’s a pedophile.’
“But if this story is true, there is a large segment of people who live in downtown Charleston, who work with each other every day and share a common secret that they’re desperately trying to hide. There’s a tremendous wound in the community that has never been addressed.”

Best phrase Googled that found this web site, Vol. 46: “is there pork in skittles candy?”

FYI, CNN Presents will be running a documentary Sunday night about cheating in schools. My understanding is that a significant chunk of it will be based on my cheating stories from the last year. (If you see anything about cheating in Houston ISD or at Wesley Elementary, that’ll be mine.)
I’m off to St. Petersburg, eff-ell-ay, in the morning. Will return Sunday.