Month: November 2005

The 100 greatest Finns of all time. Heavy on politicians and military types. Only names I recognized are Jean Sibelius, Linus Torvalds, Paavo Nurmi, and Mika Hakkinen. Speaking of Finland: The Continuation War, one of the best-named wars of all-time.
Did you know that, linguistically, Korean is closer to Finnish than it is to Chinese? True.
The best yo-yo work of 2005.

A different kind of white flight. Fascinating. The Journal does such a good job with stories like this.

Curious who your wife has been calling on her cell? Apparently, for $110, you can find out. Creepy. More here.
If you were trying to name your new school of architecture, wouldn’t brutalism be just about last on your list? Particularly if “oppressive” and “inhumane” were the top terms critics used to deride it?

A sub N squared times delta (S plus 1) over the root of L times V sub O = that girl at the bar is kinda hot, isn’t she?

Quoth our elected leaders: “Butt fucking. You think that’s art?” With a special appearance by an 18-inch walrus penis bone. More on Alaska.
Cheerleaders as drug dealers. Of a sort. The pharma sales industry has always seemed like one of the most superficially corrupt around. Note photos by ex-DMNer (and neo-Avedonite) Allison V. Smith.
Related: The trailer for Side Effects, an indie film on pharma sales. Man, it looks bad. Dogmatic.
Speaking of Good Records, they’re moving to a new location on Greenville at year’s end — which means current inventory is all at least 30% off. EVERYTHING MUST GO! Hurry over to build your indie cred in as cost-efficient a manner as possible.

The best novelty rap records of all time. Including “You Didn’t Use Your Blinker Fool!” by Rappin’ Granny, “The Contra Rap” by Rich Little (doing the voices of Oliver North and Ronald Reagan, among others), and “Check It Out” by Wayne and Charlie The Rapping Dummy (“dummy” in this case meaning a ventriloquist’s dummy, not a slur on the less academically able).
Sad fact: I’m 99% sure I had a 45 of “Ronnie’s Rapp” by Ron and the D.C. Crew in the mid-1980s. I thought it was so damned cool.

The Christmas truce.

Amazon has the DVDs for seasons 1 and 2 of Arrested Development on sale for $31.94. That’s quite a discount from the $80 retail. And you should buy them, because they’re the best 40 episodes of television you’ll see.

Good story in the Sunday Chronicle.
Link Wray died, only three weeks after I linked to a cover of his “Falling Rain” by Calexico.
A few items that I’ve found sufficiently interesting to put on my Amazon wish list:
– Hey! It’s That Guy!: The Fametracker.com Guide to Character Actors.
– Tiny Cities, the new album of Modest Mouse covers by Sun Kil Moon (a.k.a. Mark Kozelek, a.k.a. Red House Painters).
– Gary Benchley, Rock Star, the new novel by Paul Ford.
– The Edge: David Axelrod at Capitol Records 1966-1970, a great comp of the great soul/jazz/funk producer. Produced by Egon.
– Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope, Douglas Coupland’s bio of the greatest Canadian (Tommy Douglas be damned).
– Louis Riel : A Comic-Strip Biography, Chester Brown’s bio of the 11th greatest Canadian (or one of the worst, depending on how you define “treason“).
– A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes, by Frederick Allen.

So very sad. I nearly coughed up my lemonade last night when I heard Paul Slavens announce on his show that Glenn Mitchell had died. Glenn was a very fine interviewer, booked consistently interesting guests, and just seemed like a really, really nice guy. Radio piece here.
There’ll be a memorial broadcast during what would have been the first hour of Glenn’s show today, from noon to 1 p.m. on KERA 90.1. Give it a listen.
On another depressing note, Glenn’s noon-to-2 show was the only locally-produced news/talk show left on KERA. When I got to Dallas five years ago, you had the Evening Talk Show each night and The People’s Agenda on Friday mornings. Neither was great, honestly — Marla Crockett is a smart lady, but she could never wrangle her TPA guests into interesting radio, and I’m on record stating the evening show was a snorefest. But they were local and on the air, and now they’re gone. I’m really curious to see what KERA does to fill Glenn’s void.
I’ve always thought that it would make perfect sense for my employer to cosponsor a show with KERA. First, there’s a big overlap between KERA listeners and Dallas Morning News readers — and the KERA listeners who don’t read our paper are prime candidates we should be chasing. Second, we, like every other newspaper under heaven, are in the midst of a multimedia push to get reporters more comfortable with working in other media. Radio counts as other media, I think. Third, it’d be a good opportunity to push DMN reporters and editors out into the public eye; with the demise of TXCN, we don’t get out nearly as much as we used to.
(My Grand Theory On The Future Of Newspapers, which will someday be revealed here, emphasizes the importance of branding your reporters as public figures — humanizing them in the reader’s eye so they provide the sort of value-added that TV reporters do. People look forward to a Brett Shipp story on WFAA or a Robert Riggs piece on 11 — just as they look forward to a Steve Blow or Jack Floyd column.)