Month: March 2006

frontburner and barbara davidson

Aw, Adam, you shouldn’t have.
In related news, I can’t believe I didn’t post the terrific news that DMN photog Barbara Davidson was just named the national Photographer of the Year. Barbara’s awesome. She won in part for the great photos she took for my stories in Nigeria last spring, in particular the piece on the Catholic faith-healer Ejike Mbaka.
Quoth one of the contest judges: “It is one of the freshest stories I observed in the entire contest…This photographer has done a wonderful job capturing moments that are very intimate. There’s a wonderful sense of light and composition.”
You can see a bunch of her great photos, including more than a dozen from Nigeria, here.

yay me!

I can finally reveal what that good news was I posted about a while back. I won a first place in this year’s National Awards for Education Reporting.
Funnily enough, I won in the opinion-writing category. I’m not supposed to have opinions. I write a column about once a month, but since I’m a straight-arrow reporter the rest of the year, my columns are supposed to have perspectives, not opinions. Oh, well. Anyway, I won for these columns about bad writing, why the football coach is always a history teacher, the public school edge, fake homeschoolers, and kids on the testing bubble.
Congrats to all the other DMNers and ex-DMNers who also won. My colleagues Pete Slover, Tawnell Hobbs, and Kent Fischer (plus ex-colleague Jessica Leeder, now at The Toronto Star) won second place in the investigative-reporting category for their great work uncovering sketchy financial dealings in Dallas schools. Ex-DMNer Manya Brachear (Chicago Tribune) took second in breaking-news reporting, and ex-DMNer Laura Heinauer (now in Austin) took second in best series.

some random links

How magazines lie to girls.
Australia dodged a bullet.
I was unaware of the existence of Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia (although it’s actually hosted by Wikia, the company founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I particularly like their entry on John Seigenthaler, who famously disputed the accuracy of his Wikipedia entry.
I found YourGMap useful a few months back when I was househunting. Said search has since been abandoned.
What Josh listens to.
Two old white guys whose music from the ’60s and ’70s shows up sampled in a lot of hip-hop: Monty Stark and Galt MacDermot. Stark’s “Comrades” is fun, and “Dreams” is the source of a great lyric previously referenced here: “I might have been a parrot / A gay Brazilian parrot / If someone hadn’t wakened me and / Pulled me out of bed.” MacDermot is most famous for “Hair.”

vagabonding across europe

Went to the local used-book megaplex a week ago and found a copy of Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa, a 1971 travel book by a man named Ed Buryn. (The book should not be confused with Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, the very fine book by Friend of Crabwalk Rolf Potts.) Ed Buryn seems like a fairly strange fellow; at least judging by Google hits (a paltry 568), he has been largely forgotten. But his book — a hippie-fied guide to a groovy continental tour — has some gems. For instance:

  • Under the heading “Availability of Dope”: “In Poland I met a soldier and his girl in a bar one night and got to talking (in rudimentary words and sign language) about grass, which they’d never heard of before. He said he’d like to try it sometime. By an odd coincidence, about then I happened to find a few joints in my stash. So we retired to his girl’s house, whose father (an army sergeant) was already asleep.
    “To make a long story short, she wouldn’t try it, but he and I got ripped. Soon he got sick from too much vodka beforehand and started to moan. His girl immediately freaked out and woke her father, who drowsily listened to her tattling about how I’d messed her cat with my ‘funny cigarettes.’
    “I could only speak a few words of the language to try to quiet her down, keep the sergeant from calling the cops and reassure the soldier he was not going crazy — all while I was totally stoned. The sergeant finally concluded we were all pie-eyed drunk (he had never heard of grass either), shrugged his daughter off and went to bed. Be careful who you stone!”
    (Buryn tells this story as an example of why Eastern Europeans “frequently haven’t even heard of [drugs]…if they have, they tend to put them down as capitalist decadence.”)
  • Buryn on why traveling women should always bring enough birth-control pills to last the trip: “If you’re absolutely certain you’ll remain chaste no matter what happens, then you’re too uptight. Life is strange…anything can happen, even the best of things. Be tolerant enough to allow them to happen.”
    The “Sex and Romance” is divided up into two parts: “Part I: Sex, or How to Get Laid” and “Part II: Romance, or How to Find Love.” You will not be surprised to find that Part I is aimed at men and Part II is aimed at women. (Sexual revolution, schmexual revolution!)
    To sum up his advice to men: You’ll have a hard time scoring with Euro women because American men are “coarse, neurotic, materialistic and superficial” in the Euro stereotype. Which is a shame because Euro women “are more likely to be sexually liberated,” “will go to bed sooner and enjoy it more,” and “are confident of their femininity and sexuality, sophisticated and sensitive.” Best option, according to Buryn: Go after American chicks, who are easy when they’re on the road. “Like you, they are eager to spice their European adventure with the salt of sex, and the resultant action is heavy.” (Italics his.)
    His advice for women: You can snag a man with no problem, but you may need to buy him dinner. “European lovers are traditionally impoverished, and need their meals and expenses paid to keep up their strength. There is a large informal army of gigolos stationed throughout Europe, looking for American women to service, usually in hopes of making a little spare change as well.” But that’s not a bad thing, Buryn says! “Part of the excitement of travel and vagabonding is unquestionably a sexual excitement, so don’t try to repress it out of existence. As a free person in Europe, you will know the heady sensation of being stared at, appreciated, desired. Dig it.”
    But Buryn argues that American women shouldn’t become so focused on their “dark-eyed Lotharios” that they ignore their horny American male counterparts. “These are the cream of our society, so don’t short-change our own out of mere cultural prejudice. Love an American; they’re clean.”

Ed Buryn is apparently still around, and has been noted for his tarot-card creations.

apple store opening

So I went to the opening of the new Apple Store in Dallas on Saturday morning. Didn’t camp out or anything; just drove up around 9:55 for the 10 a.m. opening.
On the (not very long) drive over, I was thinking that there might not be the legendary lines and hubbub around this opening that there have been historically. An Apple Store is a lovely thing for Mac fans who have historically felt isolated in a sea of PC users. But Dallas already has two Apple Stores, one of them less than five minutes’ drive from the new location.
After all, there’s nothing really special about a new Apple Store. They sell the same stuff as everywhere else. So while I was angling to get one of the t-shirts they give out at grand openings, I wasn’t expecting to see many other people.
Um, I was extremely wrong. What a sea of people! I left my crowd-estimating skills in the car, but it was certainly into the several hundreds of people waiting in line — a line that extended the length of that section of the mall and looped around. I couldn’t even see the store from where I was through all the people.
There was no way I was going to stand in line, but I took out my cell phone, turned on its camera, and snapped a pic of the line from a distance. And not two seconds later, a thug security guard comes up to me and gets in my face. “Who are you with? What news organization are you with?”
Huh? I mean, normally I have a good answer to that one. But in this case, I wasn’t with any news organization. I was a guy going to the Apple Store and taking a crappy picture with his crappy phone.
Anyway, I was sternly ordered to never take a photo in the NorthPark mall again. God forbid that NorthPark get good PR for hosting a big event. I turned around and left.