Author: jbenton

txcn appearance

If any of you faithful readers tune in to TXCN (cable channel 38 in Dallas, I think) tonight, you might catch a glimpse of me talking about education reform. I should be on at either :20 or :50 after the hour, starting at 7:20 or 7:50 and continuing through the night. (I look hungover, as usual, even though I’m not.) You can also check tomorrow’s paper for my story (front page, I think).

big brothers

Update: Some time ago, I wrote about how I was trying to become a Big Brother for a ninth-grader here in Dallas, and how I was worried because my interviewer asked me all sorts of kiddie porn/drug use/Satan worship questions that a friend of mine going through the same process didn’t get. Well, today, weeks later, I finally got the okay: evidently my past is uncheckered enough for them to let me in the door. I meet my “little” (as they’re known in the Big Bro biz) Thursday. Woo hoo: one more young life to scar!

husker du and mazie project update

For some reason, I popped in Husker Du’s Flip Your Wig last night for the first time in a year or more. Then came the lyrics of the opening track:
Sunday section gave us a mention
Grandma’s freaking out over the attention
…which I figured was strangely appropriate considering the attention the Mazie Project has gotten. (Except substitute Metafilter for the Sunday section. And she’s not freaking out — she’s just confused.)
As I mentioned on the project’s page, Mazie’s gotten three cards so far, and she’s very grateful. She sounded like she had a huge smile on her face when we talked about it earlier today.
Another thought I had when listening to Husker Du: for 1985, they had some prescient predictions about the future. “We’ll invent some new computers / Link up the global village / And get AP, UPI, and Reuters / To tell everybody the news.” Maybe Bob Mould got in on the ground floor of AOL. Maybe Bob Mould was alongside Vint Cerf in the Arpanet days. Maybe Bob Mould invented the Internet, not Al Gore. (And you have to admire anyone who rhymes “computers” with “Reuters.”)
A final thought I had while listening to Husker Du: I’m surprised Bob Mould has any vocal cords left at all. Mine wouldn’t survive a karaoke trip through Side 1. (Then again, neither would the eardrums of whoever was listening to me. Do they have Husker Du karaoke? They should.)

scale at the back dock

The most obvious long-term impact 9/11 had on my place of work is that employees now have to enter through a different door than we always had. The new entry has security cameras, a keycard ID system, and a narrow, fast-closing door so a rogue Al-Qaeda member would have a tougher time skating in behind someone legitimate.
The only problem is that this new employees-only door was once a loading area on the back dock, so there’s a big industrial-size scale embedded in the floor. It’s covered with a scrap of carpet and usually put in some sort of locked position so it doesn’t register weight. But every once in a while, someone unlocks it, and every employee walking into work gets weighed. It’s like we’re walking into a heavyweight fight or something.
Even worse, the scale is way off, so people appear to be 30 to 50 pounds heavier than they really are. (At least I hope so — if not, that bagel I eat on the drive over has many more calories than I thought it did.) It’s great fun to watch people walk in, catch the soaring needle out of the corner of an eye, then depressingly watch it settle at some Shallow-Hal-in-reverse version of reality. Really gets people in the right frame of mind for a productive workday.

short story contest, top discs of 2001

Observations from the weekend:
– When you get on your bike for the first time in months and ride it 18 miles, your hindquarters grow numb quickly. Tomorrow, they will no longer be numb, but numbness will sound like a more pleasant alternative than soreness.
– Short story writing contests that (a) limit you to 1,000 words, (b) require your story to start with the phrase “These were perilous times,” and (c) require it to end with “So, you see it all worked out” are (a) dumb, (b) dumb, and (c) dumb.
– My favorite discs of 2001:
The Magnificent Seven: Spoon, Girls Can Tell and Clem Snide, The Ghost of Fashion (TIE for crabwalk.com Album of the Year); The Dismemberment Plan, Change; Death Cab for Cutie, The Photo Album; The Strokes, Is This It; The Flashing Lights, Sweet Release; Pernice Brothers, The World Won’t End.
Honorable Mention, in alphabetical order: Mark Eitzel, The Invisible Man; The Faint, Danse Macabre; Luna, Live; Stephen Malkmus, Stephen Malkmus; Owls, Owls; Radiohead, Amnesiac; Red House Painters, Old Ramon; Sloan, Pretty Together; White Stripes, White Blood Cells.
Disappointments (none of them bad albums, but less than they should have been; alternately, discs I liked at first that quickly grew stale): Travis, The Invisible Band; Weezer, Weezer; Tindersticks, Can Our Love; R.E.M., Reveal; Champale, Simple Days; Ryan Adams, Gold.

new cell phone

A personal side note: as of today, my old cell phone number no longer works. If you want or need the new one — like, say, if you’re one of the hundreds of people I deal crack cocaine to (oops!) — email me.
This new cell phone is too small. I fear I might wonder where it is one day and realize I’ve accidentally swallowed it.