Author: jbenton

I’ve added a new page dedicated to our little CD Mix of the Month club (linked at right). Check it out for more details on the project. And if you’re one of the traders listed and we still haven’t swapped discs (and you know who you are!), drop me a line.

If someone buys me this office chair, I will pay them at least $10. “This user-friendly chair promotes active seating” — a nice way to say “This chair is so uncomfortable that you’ll be constantly moving and thus unable to stay long enough in one position to get carpal tunnel.” (ripped from the always entertaining mister pants)

My sources within the Rock Community tell me that all DFWers (that’s pronounced duh-phew-ers, by the way) should clear their calendars of inessential appointments on the evening of March 5. On that night, the Ridglea Theater in Fort Worth will host two of the finest collections of musical performers known to man: the Dismemberment Plan and Death Cab for Cutie. (One hopes they have the sense to call it the Death and Dismemberment Tour.) Trust me when I tell you that, should you choose to attend, your $10 would not be spent unwisely. Be there, or be, um, rhomboid.

Reuters reports that the leader of Richard Reid’s mosque in Britain basically thinks Reid was too much of an idiot to come up with the shoe-bombing business on his own. “The way he tried to commit this act shows his gullibility,” he said. “He was sent as a tester…I would say he was very, very impressionable.”
Richard Reid, a dumbass being used by others? Gosh, who’d have guessed? He so looks the part of brilliant terrorist mastermind, no?

Ah, nothing better than holiday work shifts when your boss is on vacation. Come in 20 minutes late? No problem! Now that I’ve got a laser printer, I’ve rededicated myself to a more organized life, starting out with the massive printed To Do list I’ve got sitting at my right side.
Belated Lord of the Rings thought: Was I the only one who found it a tad unconvincing that this merry band of nine warriors kept running into armies of 10,000 orcs — and I mean nasty, ill-tempered orcs, not the kind of orc you’d invite over for Christmas dinner — but always seemed to emerge unscathed? That the body count was always 10,000 dead orcs in one corner vs. a couple of scratches, boo-boos, and owies in the other? Even the shrimpy little hobbits, whose asses I could no doubt have soundly kicked, managed to fend off constant waves of orcishness?

Yesterday was our family’s Christmas gathering. They’re much more fun now than they were five or ten years ago because there’s a new generation of kiddies running around. (I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got five first cousins that lived within a few blocks of me growing up, so they’ve historically served as demi-siblings. And they’ve been spouting out kids like a water fountain the last few years.)
It’s nice to see all my old toys — the Star Wars stormtrooper, the giraffe stuck in a tiny little cage (PETA Alert!), the Tonka jeep — getting some use again. If you guys are lucky (I mean, really lucky), I might post some pictures of my cousin’s kid Cody, who a recent Rand Corp. study determined to be the Cutest Kid in the Western World. (Reports of a slightly cuter kid in rural Mongolia could not be confirmed by researchers; personally I give them little credence.) Cody also has impeccable taste; when it came time for him to invent an imaginary friend, he sensibly named him Josh. A wise, wise boy.
My grandmother, as much as I love her, showed questionable gift taste: an ironing board. She told me she’d been meaning to get me one for a while because I needed one. My first thought: what kind of an insult is this? I look so damned wrinkly that I obviously need holiday help? My second thought: I have an ironing board. Sometimes I even use it. Did she know this? Was my ironing board somehow inadequate? Was the symbolic import of the gift so critical that it made my sudden two-ironing-board setup acceptable?
Anyway, today she sheepishly asked: “Wait, you already have an ironing board, don’t you?” I admitted that, yes, I did. Maybe I could try ironing in stereo or something.

Man, I am pissed. Time picked its Man of the Year today, and it’s Rudy Giuliani. Not to take anything away from Rudy, but is there any conceivable argument that it’s not Osama bin Laden? Who influenced the course of world events more this year, Osama or Rudy? It’s not even close.
If the people who run Time were even remotely honest with themselves, they’d admit as much. But they knew that naming bin Laden would have gotten lots of folks mad, so they chickened out. That kind of cowardly behavior has no place in journalism — you report the news no matter who it’s going to piss off. (I guess there goes my chance at a good AOL Time Warner job.)
Update: Josh Marshall agrees. “Time’s decision to make Giuliani its Person of the Year represents a colossal failure of nerve and honesty. And it may even be a small sign of the baleful effects of media industry conglomeration.” (An interesting idea I hadn’t thought of. If Time was just Time, withstanding a public backlash would be easier. Now that it’s CNN/AOL/Time/WB/etc., (a) a backlash could be much more broadly based, and (b) the journalistic ethic is more diluted within the megacorporation.)

My two pretty-long Sunday stories became one really-quite-long Sunday story, which I think was an improvement. Feel free to judge for yourself.

Am I the only one frightened by the prospect of John Turturro playing Howard Cosell? When a classic overactor plays, well, a classic overactor, isn’t there some sort of black-hole-creating infinite loop?
From the link above, winner of the Golden Globe for Most Overheated Rhetoric In Promotion of a Television Movie (Cable): “The chemistry between Howard Cosell, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford was a key ingredient, as they brought even the most lackluster football game to life. They were the voice of a generation of journalists who were not afraid to ‘tell it like it is’” (italics and smirking mine).

This morning, my mother came into my room at about 8:30 a.m. This being a Saturday, I was fast asleep. She said she and a friend were going to see Lord of the Rings this afternoon at the nearest movie theater (which is in the next town over, Crowley) and wanted to know if I wanted to come. I said okay; she said she was planning to show up an hour early at the theater and camp out for tickets.
As I said, I was essentially still asleep, but I was conscious enough to think: “Huh? Camping out for movie tickets for a matinee in Crowley? Crowley, city of maybe 13,000 people? That little four-screen movie theater, which probably didn’t sell out a single screen for Titanic or Harry Potter or Star Wars?” I don’t there’s ever been an hour-long line for anything in Crowley — not for boudin at the Rice Festival, not for diplomas at Crowley High graduation, and certainly not for a movie.
I somehow through the haze negotiated her down to showing up at 1:30 for a 2:00 show. Of course, we were the first people there and looked pretty damned silly standing in our little three-person line waiting for the ticket window to open. Only 12 or 15 people showed up for the movie at all. I’d say I told you so, but I’m above that, of course. (So I just blog it instead.)