I volunteer at Sunset High School here in Dallas. Every week, I have to walk right past the home-ec room (or whatever it is they call home-ec rooms nowadays). They have the best-smelling cookies for sale, every morning. You can smell them three hallways away. I don’t see how anyone gets any work done.
On an unrelated note, everyone reading this should go to SXSW Interactive in Austin this March. Yours truly will be opining on a panel (alongside Matt Haughey and J.D. Lasica) about…um…something or another.
Author: jbenton
mr blackwell’s list
Mr. Blackwell’s annual list of worst-dressed celebs is out again. Anyone else wonder what Herr Blackwell does for the other 364 days out of the year, when he’s not thinking up bon mots about the ill-attired? (“Anna [Nicole Smith]’s fashion follies are the worst of the year…don’t bother with a new designer, Anna, just hire a structural engineer!”) Seems like a somewhat sad existence.
One thing we know he’s not busy doing: fixing his web site, last updated in 1997. And seriously, this man is a self-appointed arbiter of style? The man looks like the announcer on a Game Show Network rerun.
david samuels
Is it just me, or is David Samuels the worst rock critic writing today? (One of life’s mysteries: how Slate can be so smart on political and business analysis and so bad on cultural coverage. I mean, abysmal.) He’s just so consistently disappointing — you can almost see the boys in Redmond thinking, “That David, he must be plugged in to what the kids like these days.”
This “indie-rock year in review” was an embarassment. (“The most important story of the year in indie rock is that Elliott Smith didn’t release a record…Only the redoubtable Cat Power (whose new record will be coming out in February on Matador), the queen of sadcore, continues to make the case for indie rock as a world apart.” Puh-leeze. Elliott Smith spending the year with a heroin needle in his arm instead of recording is the biggest story of the year? Only Cat Power is “keeping it real” [chest thump] by staying on an indie? The Guided By Voices record was the “best rock record of the year”? Somebody, pull this man out of 1996!)
And let’s not even discuss his claim that the Vines are better than the Strokes, the White Stripes, and the Hives. (“As a result, Highly Evolved now stands a mere 12,000 units away from the magic 500,000 threshold required for earning a gold record. So go buy it. That’s my advice. The Vines deserve a gold record as much as any band in the business
louis escobar
Good for Toledo — not every city could handle having a gay Hispanic ex-priest as the president of city council. I used to cover Louis Escobar, and he’s a good man.
evan smith profile
Good profile in Sunday’s paper of Evan Smith, the New York-bred editor of Texas Monthly. Scary anecdote:
In 1994, when he briefly thought he would like to return to the East to work for another magazine, Mr. Smith and his future wife packed up to leave Austin. But first there were the magazines in the closet.
Over the years they had piled up
back from blog vacation, sam roe’s series
Happy new year! My blog vacation is ending with a vengeance, I promise you. (It was partly caused by a host snafu, joined with a forced but complicated switch from Berkeley to MySQL databasing on the backend of this site. Non-technical readers: I promise no more posts about Berkeley or MySQL for the rest of winter.)
If you’re (a) an environmentalist, (b) a car enthusiast, or (c) a policy wonk, you’ll be interested in Supercar: The tanking of an American dream, a series that just ran in the Chicago Tribune. It’s by my ol’ bud Sam Roe, who I sat next to at my old job. It’s all about how a project to build an 80-mpg family car got scuttled by government and industry intrigue. (Warning: like all Sam Roe stories, this one’s an epic. Read it in chunks, or be prepared to set aside a decent percentage of your day.)
december mix
Now it can be revealed: the December mix of the CD Mix of the Month Club.
lsu story
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on the history of the LSU-Texas football non-rivalry.
Questions you may be asking: Why did Josh, an education reporter by trade, write a sports story? And how did it end up on the front page, considering how very middling its quality is? These questions, alas, have no answers.
strom and bad bloggers
An interesting piece on Strom Thurmond’s 1948 run for president, including some interesting context on the “gendering” of Southern politics. (See the “Importance of Virility” section.)
On a completely unrelated note: I suppose one should expect it, what with the holidays and all, but haven’t there been a lot more “woe is me” blog posts of late? You know, the sort of teenage drivel that, before the Internet, was left quite happily in private journals? “My life is sooo bad, so much worse than any other life that’s ever been lived!” “My life is so fraught with drama!” “To an unnamed individual: I hate you, hate you, hate you!” “Should a movie someday be made about this period in my life — as it surely must! — only Meryl Streep would be able to fully embody the dramatic tension that lay within my very soul!” Geez.
dropout stats story
Here’s my boring story from today’s front page, on the vagaries of dropout statistical analysis. (Whoo!)