Author: jbenton

crappy new york times story on teachers

Whine, whine, whine. This story’s all about a young teacher who doesn’t like his job, but for all the wrong reasons.
“Teaching is an undignified, unglamorous profession,” Mr. Plaks, a 27-year-old Harvard University graduate, said the other day. “It’s been a big negative factor for me.”
Mr. Plaks imagined himself at a party with his college classmates, now lawyers and investment bankers. “‘Hi, I’m Eric Plaks; I’m from P.S. 192,’ is not going to inspire fear in most people,” he said. “It’s neither a famous school, nor an excellent school.”
Sure, teachers have a lot to complain about, but I hardly think the self-worth issues of Ivy Leaguers is in the top 300. This story doesn’t pass the smell test. There’s absolutely no evidence here for the story’s main point (“By all accounts, the teaching profession is at a crossroads”) — how about naming one of those accounts? Was this guy the reporter’s friend from college? This unfocused crap shouldn’t be in the New York Times.

tornado and dropout czar stories, katie’s flame war

Here’s my storm story from yesterday (although they’re already updating it today, so it’s not all mine anymore). And here’s another, shorter story of mine from today’s paper.
This site’s readers may be interested in seeing the lame volleys Katie is launching my way in a pathetic attempt at a flame war. So far, her most stinging criticism is that I don’t have enough up-close familiarity with rats. Ouchie.

tornado story

Unexpected Turn of Events Dept.: I’m still at work, pushing midnight, because I had to write the main story on the tornadoes that hit Fort Worth tonight. A little deadline adrenaline never hurt anybody, right? The only downer is that I wrote just about the whole damn thing, all 1,500 words, but I can’t have my name on it because of an obscure newspaper rule. Oh, well — at least my faithful crabwalk readers will know it’s me. (I probably shouldn’t argue with getting no credit, because it didn’t turn out particularly sparkling.)

onion on record store clerks

One of the funniest Onion pieces I’ve seen in a while: 37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster.
…Also believed to be among the missing are seven freelance rock critics, five vinyl junkies, two ‘zine publishers, an art-school dropout, and a college-radio DJ. [How they forgot the four bloggers I’ll never know. -ed.]
“I just had to help,” said Andy Ringler, an assistant manager at Wuxtry Records, listed in stable condition at a nearby hospital. “I saw all these people coming out bleeding and dazed. I gave up my vintage Galaxie 500 shirt just to help some guy bandage his arm. It was horrible.”
Added Ringler: “I just pray they can somehow get this club rebuilt in time for next month’s Dismemberment Plan/Death Cab For Cutie show. That’s a fantastic double bill.”
As of press time, police and emergency rescue workers were still sifting through the wreckage for copies of Magnet, heated debates over the definition of emo, and other signs of record-store-clerk life.
“I haven’t seen this much senseless hipster carnage since the Great Sebadoh Fire Of ’93,” said rescue worker Larry Kolterman, finding a green-and-gold suede Puma sneaker in the rubble. “It’s such a shame that all those bastions of indie-rock geekitude had to go in their prime. Their cries of ‘sellout’ have been forever silenced.”

katie’s bitching about no updates

An email conversation, in non-haiku form.
Katie: Have they broken all your fingers? Are you now forced to pound out stories with bloody stumps? Have you gone into mourning over the death of Robert Urich? For the love of God. This can not continue. Where are the posts?
Me: Jesus Christ! What do you expect from me?! 1,000 words in the last two days!
Katie: I want obsessive, hourly postings. I want to know what you had for breakfast and how many licks it takes for you to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. Updates. Dammit. Updates.
To satiate Katie’s desires: my traditional glass of water, and 1,239.

austin trip, texas state history museum, no race violence

I had no idea what procrastinators you CDMOM people are. Today’s the last day to sign up for April. 35 people signed up in the first couple of weeks of the signup form being posted, then a sudden rush of 14 more in the last couple of hours before the midnight deadline. (If you miss out, there’s always May, or June, or July, or…you get it.)
Just got back from Austin. Unbeknownst to me, some government official declared today Don’t Secure The Random Objects On Your High-Speed Vehicle Day on Interstate 35, and I was dodging things great and small all the way down and back. The highlight: a pickup truck that for some reason had a full gallon of milk in the back, tailgate lowered. An untimely bump sent it smashing to the asphalt, about five feet from my car. Was I concerned? Hell, no. That’s what rentals are for.
Julie and I went to the Texas State History Museum. It’s impressive from a purely museum-science point of view: cogently assembled and filled with nice graphics and signage. My inner historian, though, kept noticing what was left out or glossed over. (One might include the Kennedy shooting, for instance.) Since it was my main area of interest in college, I was mostly turned off by the near complete absence of race as an issue after, oh, 1876.
Southern historians/apologists too often get away with framing the race issue thusly: Some bad Southerners owned slaves. Then there was a big war, where everyone was very heroic. But in the end the North won, and times were hard here for a while. But look, we elected a couple black people to the legislature in the 1870s! The whole race issue was pretty much solved, okay? Get off our backs!
It’s a convenient way for a museum or a historian to put all the blame for racial wrongdoing on people who’ve been dead for 150 years. There’s no mention anywhere (that I saw today, at least) of the violent means whites used to take the vote back from blacks, the way Reconstruction’s race-blind laws were replaced with Jim Crow, and basically the way white supremacy returned, triumphant, to power in the 1880s-1910s, almost as if the Civil War had never happened. If you believe the museum, we all pretty much got along after 1876.
(Texas isn’t alone in this; there’s an African-American history museum being built in south Louisiana now that got community funding only after essentially promising it wouldn’t deal with anything racially charged from the 20th century. James Loewen goes into this issue in his two books, which are quite fascinating and only rarely lapse into the leftist rhetoric you might expect from a historian of his views.)
I suppose I shouldn’t expect complete honesty from something state-run that serves as a rah-rah postcard for the state, and it was certainly more honest than it could have been. And to be fair, Texas’ record wasn’t as bad as some other Southern states during the period. But it does remind you of the power of history, historians, and museums. What they say happened is what people learn, and in this instance, revisionist Southern historians did a job on the truth.

best of av geeks 3

I’ll be in Austin again Monday, so a quick post to tide you regular readers over. (Wouldn’t want you to think I was dead or something after a four-day no-posting streak.)
Went to see Best of AV Geeks 3 at the MAC Friday night. It’s a highly amusing traveling roadshow of six “mental hygiene” films, of the sort shown to bored schoolkids in the ’50s and ’60s. The films all had important messages to communicate, but sadly, the roadshow may not be coming your way anytime soon. So, as a service to my readers, I summarize the important moral lessons I learned from each film:
More Dates for Kay (1952): Girls, if you want to get dates, make sandwiches for boys. You can choose the boys and the type of sandwich at random. Have as many dates as possible so you won’t be tempted to see the same boy too many times and have sexual intercourse with him.
Teeth (1970): Dental care can be hip! Kids, if you’re in one of these new rock and roll bands, your future will be determined by the brushing patterns you make on your incisors each morning — after breakfast, not before. Girls who take care of their teeth are hot. (There was also something here about former Pres. William McKinley, but I couldn’t quite make it out.)
The Lunatic (1972): Try not to get V.D. Guys with beards and slightly shaggy hair have V.D., so you should avoid having sex with them. (Hey, wait a minute.) Men in turtlenecks are to be avoided. If you get V.D. and are ever on camera, look terribly depressed. All the people who work at the local clinic are either sweaty bald men with freakishly large love handles or nice black men with glorious Ben Wallace-style afros.
Purely Coincidental (an ’80s industrial-safety film): If there are metal shards mixed in with your dog’s food, he could die. Don’t drop spark plugs into barrels of ground meat. If you urinate on your hands, you should wash them, not run them through a vat of baby food. If your dog has died, the only appropriate thing to do is drink heavily, then shoot guns at smaller animals.
Parent To Child About Sex (1967): Masturbation is a perfectly natural thing. If a four-year-old asks how babies come out of their mommies, make the having-sex gesture with your hands and use the word “vagina” a lot. If the child doesn’t understand, she’ll probably just lose interest and move on to some other, more enjoyable topic. Sex education comes best from curt 60-year-old men who look like extras from Oliver Stone’s JFK.
The Huntsman (1972): If a bunch of Canadian hippies get your cowboy boots wet after stealing two golf balls from you, you have license to push their car into a river. But you’ll probably feel guilty afterward.
Not that you needed to be told that.