Author: jbenton

This is the kind of apology you have to write when your newspaper runs a story on a fire at a mental hospital and you put the headline “Roasted Nuts” above it.

There’s a great piece (not online) in this month’s Spin (Red Hot Chili Peppers cover) on an astounding phenomenon: Morrissey’s fanbase has evidently shifted almost completely from weepy, sensitive white folks to young Latinos. I’ve got a few Smiths/Morrissey albums, but this was complete news to me, and I’m strangely fascinated by it — the thought of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” booming in the barrio is just too wonderful for words. I bet Spanish translations of Oscar Wilde are jumping off the shelf, too.
While the Spin piece isn’t online, its reporter (I think this guy) is referenced in this LA Weekly piece on a Morrissey convention in Los Angeles. Quote: “We order drinks and grab a table in the smoking lounge, where we sit and eavesdrop on a Spin reporter, nominally conducting interviews about ‘the Latino angle,’ but mainly just macking on the ladies.”
Spin, which went through a truly crappy period, actually has some terrific features nowadays, some of the best music journalism out there. If only you didn’t have to wade through 80 pages of Incubus and Korn to get to it.

A sad so long to Kelly, one of my favorite DFWbloggers, who as I type is moving to Virginia. We’ll have a drink to you at the next happy hour.

Just because I have to embarrass my friend Lisa, I feel obligated to report her dad will apparently be on Good Morning America and the Connie Chung show tomorrow. Click the link to see why.
By the way, has anyone seen that Connie Chung show? Watched it once last weekend in Rayne — that may be the worst hour of television in history. Painful to watch. I’ve always been a Chung hater, but geez, it almost seems cruel to put her out there every night. Ed Bark, as usual, has it right.

In tonight’s Braggart Watch: I’m somewhat proud to report that my partner Dena and I kicked a little ass tonight, winning the inaugural Dallas Association of Young Lawyers Trivia Bowl. Pitted against the finest young legal minds of the Metroplex, Dena and I somehow came out on top. (In answer to your obvious thought — “Wait, I didn’t know Josh was a lawyer!” — yeah, I’m not. I was brought in as a ringer.) We finished the season with five straight wins, then went 3-0 to win tonight’s playoffs.
It was fun bringing all the old quiz bowl reflexes out of storage. The most fun, as it did in high school, came in beating the team that took things waaaay too seriously — the one that actually held pre-match practices, the one that clearly had their firm’s reputation and their entire self-worth on the line. I am accepting all Trivial Pursuit challenges.
In unrelated news, I was told tonight that I looked like a cross between Bono and Patrick Swayze. Hmm. I’m not feeling particularly flattered. Those who know me are free to comment on the comparison.

All right-thinking people should be listening to the sun-baked cinematic sounds of Tucson’s Calexico. Such great stuff; I’d heard a little by them, but it took a few inclusions on CDMOM discs to get me hooked. Here’s a review of their latest EP.
Several webcast concerts available here. I recommend the audio from Morning Becomes Eclectic and the video from this Paris show.

If you’re going to pull a B&E, at least get your money’s worth: Green Bay Packers fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman’s closet.
According to police, Davenport crept into a dorm room at Barry University around 6 a.m. on April 1. A woman sleeping in the room, Mary McCarthy, told police she was startled by a strange sound and saw Davenport squatting in her closet. Davenport then allegedly defecated in a laundry basket, McCarthy told detectives.

Sammy Sosa hit seven 500-foot home runs last night at the All-Star Home Run Derby, if you believe the newspapers. Luckily, you and I know better.

Finally — really, finally; I’ve been posting too much today — two more entries from the Embarrassing Early Josh files. I had lunch with an old teacher Saturday. She taught me from second to fifth grade, and she dug out an old class newsletter from 1983, in which we students had to write little poems or one-paragraph essays. Here are my two poems:
Computers
Black and colorful
Goto 100, Run, Print, Gosub
Take over the world
Robots
Commentary: The author was learning BASIC on a then-cutting-edge TRS-80 — hence the programming lingo in line 3. The inherent contradiction of “black and colorful” evokes the classic semiotic phrase “colorless green ideas ideas sleep furiously” (itself hijacked for the sidebar of salmon’s site). The sudden evocation of robots taking over the world brings us to Yeatsian territory. In all, a stirring early work.
We’ve had 40 presidents,
And they’ve all been great
But some were like Taft,
They ate, and ate, and ate!!!!
Washington wasn’t the first
president, believe it or not.
The first president of the
colonies was: John Hancock!!!!
Commentary: Clearly the author is trying to attract attention through his liberal use of exclamation points — perhaps more exclamation points than he has used in the 19 years since. The reference to William Howard Taft could be construed as a prediction that the author would end up attending Taft’s alma mater, or that he would, in 1998, cover the Ohio gubernatorial campaign of Taft’s grandson Bob. Alternately, it could be a prediction that the author would some day weigh 340 pounds. One hopes not. The blanket support for all presidents would not last long — roughly six years, until he got a subscription to The Nation. The author is also in error in line 8: it was John Hanson, not not the floridly-signing John Hancock who deserved the rightful title. But the poem loses none of its power because of the error.

Who convinced R. Kelly — soon-to-be-convicted child pornographer, acknowledged lover of barely post-pubescent girls — to name his new song “Heaven, I Need A Hug“? (“From a Hot 12-Year-Old,” he did not add.)