Author: jbenton

The crabwalk.com Summer Tour 2002 is set to begin! From August 9 to 18, I’ll be touring our nation’s northern tier (and Ontario’s southern tier), meeting with friends and readers and probably drinking too much. (Call it a “listening tour.”) I’ll be stopping in Boston, Toronto, and Toledo. Parties interested in buying me a beer are asked to file the appropriate paperwork soon.

One-armed man gets hole-in-one, arrested for murder of Mrs. Helen Kimball.
(BTW, there’s an Associated Press style error in the story — they call it “hole-in-one,” when new AP rules say it should be “hole in one.” I like the hyphenated version better.)

Lots of folks have been mourning the loss of Alan Lomax, one of the great figures of American music. But in all the obits, I haven’t seen much mention of his role in popularizing Cajun and zydeco music.
His role was smaller in Cajun music than in zydeco, since Cajun music was already being recorded in the 1920s (first by Joe and Cleoma Falcon on Columbia Records in 1928). Some black Creole musicians were recorded in the 1930s, but Lomax and his father really birthed recorded zydeco in the late ’30s.
Among their accomplishments: the first recording of zydeco’s signature song, “Les Haricots Sont Pas Sales.” (The phrase means “the snap beans aren’t salty” — a statement of poverty, since it meant you couldn’t afford salted beef to put in your stew. You just had beans. The word “zydeco” is a bastardization of “les haricots,” pronounced lez-ah-ree-co.) More info for those interested in Michael Tisserand’s excellent The Kingdom of Zydeco.
There was a brief period in 2000 when I was considering quitting journalism for a couple of years, moving back to Rayne, and starting a Cajun/zydeco music museum. Rayne has as strong a claim as anyplace to being the birthplace of Cajun music; Joe and Cleoma Falcon were from Rayne, for instance, along with big names like Belton Richard, Amedee Breaux, Lionel Cormier, and Happy Fats LeBlanc. LeBlanc’s band, the Rayne-Bo Ramblers, was the first Cajun act to be broadcast on national network radio.
One problem: there already is a Cajun Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which I finally visited when I was in Louisiana earlier this month. But it’s deeply unimpressive. There’s clearly no one with museum experience involved; there’s no signage, no music (!), and the displays are little more than shelves of old accordians and 78s. The “hall of fame” is a series of poorly framed photos, with a sheet of white typing paper taped to the wall underneath each one.
It’s an admirable but limited all-volunteer effort — interesting to look at, but not particularly instructive. More a hobbyist’s attic than a museum, really. The volunteer the day I went (the widow of Austin Pitre) said they get four or five visitors a day.
And it’s in Eunice, which while a nice little prairie Cajun town, is in the middle of nowhere — an hour’s drive over bad roads from Lafayette, where all the tourists stay. (Rayne’s about 15 minutes from Lafayette, right on Interstate 10.)
Plus, the Eunice museum suffers from the age-old divide between Cajun [i.e., white] and zydeco [black] musicians. There’s no zydeco here, and only the slightest evidence that black people had any role in Cajun music. (There really isn’t a good zydeco museum anywhere, to my knowledge, even in Opelousas, the town that would make the most sense.)
So there’s plenty of room for a well-done Cajun/zydeco museum. Tourists would come. I already had my first two exhibits planned out in my mind. First would be a permanent exhibit comparing Cajun and zydeco music to its influences — Nova Scotian ballads, German polka, French chansons, West African rhythms, R&B, Native American songs. And the first temporary exhibit would be on the early duo of Amedee Ardoin and Dennis McGee — the first and most important pairing of black and white musicians in south Louisiana. The exhibit would conclude with Ardoin’s beating at the hands of a white mob and eventual death. (Okay, that might have been a little heavy for the first exhibit.)
In the end, I took another journalism job and put my plans on hold. But I’d still love to get it done, if I could find a couple donors willing to preserve south Louisiana culture and part with a little dough. (Wealthy crabwalk.com readers take note! Wouldn’t you like your name on a nice big plaque in the lobby? It can be yours for only a few tens of thousands of dollars!)

Found while looking for something else entirely (really!): the one-shoe-on, one-shoe-off fetish. The site’s slogan: Wear one shoe only…just to be feminine…just to be natural!

It turns out that British doctor who liked offing his patients ended up killing at least 215 of them. That’s getting into real-life Henry Lee Lucas territory.
If you’re crazy and would like to kill lots of folks, becoming a doctor’s a pretty good way to do it. Reminded me of the last big story I did for my old newspaper, about Michael Swango — the British doc’s American counterpart. (James B. Stewart from the Journal wrote a great book about the Swango case.)

Another assignment for faithful crabwalk.com readers! As part of the newspaper‘s continuing youth push, I’ll be writing occasionally for the Texas Living section. My first assignment is for a new occasional column called “Cheap Date,” in which Your Hero goes out on a date somewhere in the Metroplex and spends less than $30. Creativity is encouraged.
If anyone has a great idea on how to have a night on the town for two on three sawbucks, please let me know. I need inspiration. (By the way, evidently one quick path to a cheap date — she pays — won’t work here. We’re talking $30 total expenditure. I guess that means The Mansion‘s out.)

Reason No. 3,972 Google is better than cheeseburgers: I’m sitting at someone else’s computer this week as I work on a dallasnews.com project, and his version of IE is hosed. Everytime you enter a URL in the address bar, it crashes. But you can click through links on other pages with impunity. So (a) Google’s skill at “I Feel Lucky” lets me skip the address bar in most cases, and (b) when I can’t, all I have to do is enter the address in the search field — the error page always includes a link to that URL.
Sorry, folks — this may be the most boring post in crabwalk.com history. They can’t all be about murderous relatives, you know.

It’s always good to read your first cousin (twice removed) has been arrested for hiring a hit man to kill his daughter.

Even an Apple nut like me can’t help but be underwhelmed by today’s Macworld keynote. OS X 10.2 looks nice and all, but $129? For a 10.x upgrade? When the whole operating system, built from scratch, cost only $99? No discount for early adopters? Geez. I might just wait for 10.3 — the feature set seems underwhelming. (An AOL-compatible IM app — already plenty of those out there. Sherlock 3 — blah. A better Mail.app — still not up to par with Eudora or Entourage. Et cetera.)
The only highlight: the entry-level iPod is finally down to $299, which might make me turn my technolust into credit card debt.
(In other OS X news, RealPlayer is finally in beta — that leaves Photoshop as the only Classic app I ever use. And Palm sync for Office v.X is also finally a reality.)

Anybody notice that Morocco invaded Spain the other day?
Other fun geography links:
– How did I miss the creation of a new ocean? What was I doing in the spring of 2000 that was so distracting that could make me miss a new ocean?
– Who owns the Northwest Passage? (I vote Jamaica.)