Author: jbenton

Busy day…little time to post. Today’s highlight: holding the resumes of eight bright young people in my hand, knowing I have full and total control over which one gets hired for a brief stint at the DMN. [insert evil cackle here] Power…

Best Unitarian/Universalist joke of the day, courtesy Post Bohemian Artifact: You know how you get a UUist out of your neighborhood? Burn a question mark on their front lawn.
My nominee for best non-haiku blogpoem of the day: Jonah Goldberg

For those of you who read my Pitcairn Island stories (linked a couple of entries below), you may have noticed my reference to the island’s honey. Since the few bees on the island have been segregated from other populations for so long, they haven’t developed a couple of diseases that, evidently, have afflicted just about every other bee in the world in the last century. Plus, all the fruit that grows on Pitcairn (which all tastes absolutely amazing) has always been pesticide-free, so the bees have only top-notch stuff to pollinate.
The result is that Pitcairn honey is probably the best honey in the world. I brought some back from the island (I had to sneak it through customs at LAX, since it was an unacceptable agricultural product from overseas). A coworker of mine who loves honey — he buys the imported French stuff for beaucoup bucks — said it was far and away better than the honey he pays top dollar for.
I mention all this because you can now buy the honey for a very reasonable price, $5 a jar. If you’re a honey lover, it’ll be worth it, I can assure you.

It’s a new look for my employer’s web site. Critiques? I’m mixed: I think the bolder type on the front isn’t bad (if a little too MSNBC, down to the typeface), but the color scheme makes grey a little too dominant, and the yellow story boxes beneath the main header (and all over pages like this) look a little amateurish. Actually, that yellow looks awful in bulk, sort of jaundicey. And there are uneven-white-space-around-text-box issues all over the site.
Okay, maybe my feelings aren’t all that mixed at all, but really, it’s not so bad. (Anyway, TXCN needs a facelift much more than dallasnews.com or wfaa.com did.)

Want to email a dangerous Islamic militant? Well, according to the New York Times, you can send your missive to kidnapperguy@hotmail.com — that’s the email address used for hostage negotiation by the militants who’ve kidnapped a Wall Street Journal reporter.
It’d be great if someone could hack into that account — aren’t there enough holes in Hotmail security for someone to get in? Or maybe someone should just start trying passwords, like “iloveosama” or “unveiledgirls” or “diegreatsatan.” (Or “d1egre@ts@t@n”?)

New Yorker readers: I direct your attention to the piece on page 46 of the Jan. 28 issue. It’s a funny bit by my hero Calvin Trillin on the hunt for the best boudin in south Louisiana. (Boudin, if you don’t know, is a delicious Cajun sausage made of rice, pork, liver, and seasoning. Calvin’s been writing about the wonders of Cajun food at least since The Tummy Trilogy in the ’70s.)
The main character in the tale is James Edmunds, one of Calvin’s friends in New Iberia, former head honcho of the once-great Times of Acadiana weekly newspaper, and (oh by the way) a blogger his own bad self.
I was once lucky enough to eat a seven-course meal of nutria rat with Calvin and James, which remains one of the highlights of my life. But that’s a story for another day.
My favorite quote from the story: “When I am daydreaming of boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of Louisiana have had visited upon them — being booted out of Nova Scotia, being ridiculed as rubes and swamp rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the schoolyard — nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside South Louisiana present as Cajun food.” Too true.
In related news, Calvin’s got a new novel out.

I’m sure all my millions of British readers will be happy to learn I was quoted in The Independent (UK) newspaper last week.
The story’s about one of the few topics I can claim any degree of expertise on, Pitcairn Island. Depending on your definition, it’s the most remote inhabited place on earth, a mile-wide speck of volcanic rock in the South Pacific, many miles from anywhere else. Its inhabitants are not natives in the traditional sense; they’re the descendents of Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers on the HMS Bounty, who crash landed onto Pitcairn in 1790 after famously shipping off the tyrannical Captain Bligh. The mutiny on the Bounty has, of course, become a famous tale in Western culture; Fletcher’s been portrayed in movie versions of the story by Mel Gibson, Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn.
About 40 Pitcairners live alone on the rock their forefathers settled. There’s no airstrip, no harbor, no regular transportation to the rest of the world. They rely on the generosity of passing freighters and yachtsmen to get supplies or people in and out. It’s a thoroughly bizarre place, impossible to get to and impossible to understand once you do.
I managed to go there in 1999, for a week. I wrote a bunch of stories about it (the main story: part one and part two). Since only a handful of writers have been allowed onto the island in the last few decades, I occasionally get calls from other reporters working on Pitcairn stories.
Lately, the stories haven’t been very positive. As Kathy Marks writes in The Independent, there’s a huge, awful, nasty, disgusting child abuse scandal there. The island might be empty in another year or two, since a significant portion of the island’s male population stands accused of sex crimes. It’s a sad, sad story.

I finally updated the Mazie Project page. Total cards received: 47. (That’s as of Saturday, which was her birthday; I’m sure more will trickle in over the next week or so. I would get an update on today’s arriving cards, but Mazie’s getting a colonoscopy today — fun! — so I won’t be hearing from her for at least a few more hours.)

Conclusive proof that being an Ivy Leaguer does not require intelligence: Yale senior arrested for asking police to test purity of his heroin.
Tippy was arrested at 5 a.m. on Jan. 17 after he allegedly brought a small bag containing white powder to the Yale Police substation at Phelps Gate. “He said that he had just purchased what he thought were drugs and wanted to test their purity,” Yale Police Lt. Michael Patten said. Police administered a field test to the substance and discovered that it tested positive for narcotics. Tippy was charged with drug possession and arrested at the scene.

I’m back in Dallas — more to come on the now 70-year-old Mazie, newly discovered childhood home movies, and other weekend topics. For now, a simple link to the Red Stick Ramblers, the band I was supposed to see this weekend.
See, the Ramblers — a self-described “authentic Cajun gypsy swing” band — feature an old high school friend of mine on mandolin. (There was a period of time in our youth when there seemed to be a doppelganger thing going on between us — both named Josh, both going to the same small school, both blond and with mothers named Debbie, even both having at the time one tooth oddly out of sort with the others. At at least one point, we also had a crush on the same girl, although that’s a battle he won. Now all we share is ill-advised facial hair.)
My friend Lauren and I were supposed to go to see them play Friday night, but alas there was a miscommunication and I was under the impression the show was Saturday. (We could play a little edition of the blame game, but who would gain from that? Harrumph.) So all I could do was read up on them a bit more, listen to one of their MP3s, and make plans to buy their new CD.
One final note: the Ramblers will always have an edge as long as Josh’s mom continues to let them use her amazing photos as their album art. The new CD’s cover uses one of my absolute favorite photos of hers. (Which I’d love to get on my walls if it didn’t cost, um, $2,000.)