Author: jbenton

You want to know what happiness is? Happiness is getting stuck working the evening shift (1 to 10 p.m.) one night and no one realizing it. The guy who should be my boss just came over to give me some good-natured crap about working late. I didn’t mention it’s because I didn’t come in until 1 p.m. and that I’m supposed to be at his beck and call for the next few hours. His ignorance is my bliss.

Big changes in store for Sesame Street, including more focused narratives and features aimed at a younger audience (2-year-olds instead of three-to-fives). If the sort of child development theory discussed in the article is interesting to you, I highly suggest you check out The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which has a chapter on how children’s TV producers design their programs to match what we know about how children learn. (Very brief excerpt here. The book’s actually mostly about other stuff, and well worth reading even if you hate children and never were one.)

Grrr. Just got word that the problem mentioned below isn’t temporary: the dallasnews.com redesign has permanently broken all story links. Which means that all the links to all my stories over the last few months are useless. And the screwups continue — my Sunday Metro cover story apparently never got posted, and my front-page story in today’s paper is only accessible four or five clicks from the front page, buried in a long list of links.
But enough kvetching. I’m waay too busy to kvetch, what with all the silly things I have to do before my flight to Salt Lake City. (Like get some winter clothes, for one thing.)
Finally, how ’bout that Super Bowl? A great game if you’re looking for drama, a horrible game if you’re looking for quality play. But I suppose even a Pee-Wee football game can be fraught with dramatic tension.

Problem #2,476 with the dallasnews.com redesign: all the links to my old stories are now broken. And I can’t even find my story from today’s paper on the web site. (Print edition readers, all three of you out there, can find it on the front page of the Metro section.)

At the paper, we’re all in a rotation to work weekend and night shifts, and tonight’s my lucky night. Since there’s usually precious little education news breaking at 10 p.m. Saturday night, I write about other, random things, so look in tomorrow’s DMN for a short wet/dry alcohol election piece by me.
And, in other ego news, I should be on page 1 on Monday with a pretty good education story.

More news from the M&M Evil Empire front. First, my friend Kim points out that calling purple a “new” M&M color is little more than a cheap fraud. From 1941 to 1949, a bag of M&Ms featured red, yellow, green, brown, orange, and violet. Violet! A color known by many as nothing more than purple! The M&M-endorsed attempt at global confusion, already powerful via the purple-pink confusion, is reaching critical strength. Are these new “purple” M&Ms really just old violet M&Ms from V-J Day, kept in storage for lo these many decades? Have they abandoned use of the word “violet” because it’s too eerily close to “violent,” and thus might tip the public off to the M&M plans for global domination?
Secondly, that same bit of M&M propaganda pretends to tell the story of the many color-changes M&M has put its customers through over the years: the 1949 violet-to-tan switch, the 1995 blue-to-tan, etc. But it makes no mention of the most celebrated change in the brand’s color composition, the 1976 removal of red M&Ms because of fears they might cause cancer. No mention of the century’s greatest candy-based health crisis! It’s like Stalin erasing his political enemies from Politburo photos after he had them “neutralized.”
It is my earnest hope that the good, noble people of America may rise up and combat this attempt at revisionist history. Just because it melts in your mouth and not in your hands doesn’t mean that it’s not worth fighting.

As Katie pointed out, the folks behind M&Ms are auditioning new colors — pink, purple, and aqua. This may seem like a simple publicity ploy, an attempt to draw attention to a candy some would say has passed its prime. I say: no. This is a sinister plot, nothing less.
You may remember the last time a new color was added to the M&M menagerie, 1995, when purple, pink, and blue were candidates for entry. The “competition” got all sorts of attention from lemming-like media types. But two salient facts usually go unmentioned:
1. The contest was a fix! Purple and pink are far too close together on the color wheel for voters to successfully differentiate them. The pro-purple/pink axis had its votes split, while blue was allowed to run with the support of a united party. Just as Nader cost Gore the election by splitting the liberal vote, pink cost purple the vote by siphoning off its support, leaving blue to romp to an easy victory. I hate to be cynical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if M&M had already bought huge vats of blue dye when the voting began — the fix was in from the very start.
(One could, I imagine, argue that purple cost pink the election, not the other way around. Highly doubtful to these eyes — I’m not sure America is gay-friendly enough yet to go pink.)
Notice that this time around pink and purple are back in the voting, which will no doubt lead to more Florida-style allegations of vote fraud. But at least blue was a legitimate, strong candidate — aqua is such a spectacularly poor color choice that it’s possible purple could pull it out, despite M&M’s best efforts to keep it down.
2. At NO point during the 1995 election was it made clear that the addition of a new color would come at the expense of one of the old ones. While the charade of a fair election was being forcefed to the American public, M&M executives were secretly plotting the demise of that most noble of M&M colors, tan. Had the question been phrased fairly — “Would you, the American public, prefer that we keep the noble tan in our M&Ms, or would you rather it be summarily replaced with the usurper color of your choice, blue, purple, or pink (even though those last two are awfully similar)?” — the groundswell of tan support would have been earthshattering.
Instead, the public was hoodwinked into thinking they were voting for the addition of a color, not the elimination of an old favorite. It’s as if your mom asked you one day, “Honey, would you like a little brother or sister?” You think about it and say, “Yeah! That’d be great — a new little kid to play with! I wonder which one I’d prefer, a boy or a girl?” Then, a year or so later, along comes your new little baby brother — and next thing you know, Mom’s put you up for adoption, ‘cuz she just don’t need you any more. “Oh, sorry, honey — didn’t I tell you that we were just going to swap you out?”
What isn’t the American public being told this time around? If aqua edges in to the pack, who gets cut out? Who’s next on the chopping block, yellow? It’s sort of tannish, a “boring” color that probably doesn’t have the highest Q rating. Or could it be green? Orange? Brown? I bet blue’s feeling pretty good about itself, but the tide could turn quickly — M&Ms could kill off its young starlet awful quick if it wanted to.
Once Congress is done digging through the corpse of Enron, I demand a full investigation. True, some would call it a fishing expedition, and it could touch on other hot-button issues, like the peanut-butter M&M debacle, the E.T Reese’s Pieces scandal, or perhaps even the Good & Plenty money laundering cases of the early 1980s. But justice must be done. Justice must be done.

Best headline ever (in the right frame of this video pop-up): Reno: “I was hot.”

Another busy day at work. One quick note: my ISP is down because of weather-related power outages back in Toledo, so if you need to get something urgent to me today, you might try my jbenton at dallasnews dot com address.

I haven’t yet posted about the other highlight of my weekend back home in Rayne. On Mazie‘s birthday, a bunch of family came over, and conversation turned for some reason to the family vacations we took in the late 1970s. At the time, my aunts and uncles were starting to pop out babies (I’m an only child, so my first cousins are the closest sibling equivalents I’ve got), and we took a couple summer trips across the south. (I’ve mentioned these trips before, although I got the chronology wrong in the previous post — three of the four trips I described were actually combined in one 1978 jaunt.)
Anyway, someone mentioned that my uncle Alton had taken an old 8mm film camera along on these trips. These films hadn’t been watched in at least 15 years, probably longer. Upon learning of these films, I immediately dispatched a search team to Alton’s attic; they returned with four canisters of film and a non-functioning, dust-encrusted projector.
Another uncle managed to get the projector working (through the careful use of a rubber band, I kid you not — try that with a Pentium), and soon enough I was watching the 1- and 2-year-old versions of Josh, enjoying life at some of the region’s great tourist traps. Some observations:
– My grandmother, as much as I love her, should have been punished at some point for the things she made me wear. There’s a sailor suit I wish could be forever stricken from my permanent record. Alas, Super 8 does not lie.
– I had forgotten that I had a thing against going down playground slides the standard, butt-down way. For some reason, I convinced myself at an early age that going stomach-down was much more fun. Inevitably, this led to tummy-burn.
– All of us cousins (there were four born at this time, with three more to come along in the next few years) were cursed with parents dedicated to the forcing the knee-high-brown-socks-with-shorts look upon us.
– A cabbie named Irving Schaeffer showed us around Washington, D.C. one day. I know this because his name was emblazoned on the side of his cab. I also know that he was very, very nice, because his legend has survived among my aunts and uncles to this day, 24 years later.
– Uncle Alton evidently believed that filming endless miles of interstate highway through rural Alabama was a good way to use his precious Super 8 resources.
– My family had a habit of setting down the camera in front of an important building — say, the Capitol — standing shoulder-to-shoulder in line, then walking slowly toward the camera. In other words, my family invented the opening shot of Reservoir Dogs.
– Speaking of legends that have survived for decades: we tried to go to Graceland in 1978. Family legend has it that we waited in line to enter Elvis’ home, but the sky turned a horrific black and we were chased away in fear of approaching rain. Film evidence, however, clearly refutes that notion: the 1978 Memphis sky is as blue as can be.
– Seeing Roy Acuff’s house and the Country Music Wax Museum were clearly formative events in my family’s life.
– When eating cake, my cousin T-Ron had a habit at age 2 of grabbing some icing, looking at it, and smearing it on his right knee.
I’m hoping to get these reels (and others I haven’t yet seen) transfered to VHS so they can be preserved for posterity (and future T-Ron biographers). If anybody’s got a company to recommend to do the job, let me know.