Author: jbenton

Somebody didn’t follow his own ’80s advice (“In a big country dreams stay with you / Like a lover’s voice fires the mountainside / Stay alive“): Big Country vocalist found dead.

Saints-Rams tonight! Today’s Times-Picayune sees something bigger than just football happening: “It’s not just a game. It’s a collision of ideologies, a clash of beliefs, mentalities and playing styles.”
The Monday Night Football site has lots of info up, along with their standard weekly Q&A with Melissa Stark. For the non-football fans out there, she’s the sideline reporter for MNF. She’s perfectly fine at the job — not great, but perfectly fine — but there’s a sneaking suspicion out there that her main qualification for the job is that she’s really, really cute.
Now, if I’m her employers at ABC, I’d be doing my best to get across the idea that she’s really very qualified, has a great football mind, etc. So why is the first question she gets in her Q&A “Have you started your Christmas shopping yet?” I doubt Al Michaels would get the same questions, or if he did, I doubt his editors would let him answer it.

Check out today’s metro section for another one of my stories.
Saw Amelie last night — terrific movie, highly recommended. To anyone who enjoyed it, I’d highly recommend Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s earlier film The City of Lost Children, which is infinitely more dark and twisted but has his same marvelous visual style.

How super-secret are America’s vaunted Special Forces troops if a New York Times reporter can determine where they’ve been by “a tell-tail trail of piles of plastic Poland Spring mineral water bottles in the mountains“?

Someone found this site earlier today by searching for “belgians famous uninteresting.” Not my intention, but I’ll take the hits however I can get them.
This site attempts to catalog the “242 Famous Belgians.” Although I doubt that some of them pass famous-person muster. On the list: “Samson, famous Belgian TV-dog,” “Jo R

Just had a business lunch at Palomino in the Crescent. (Alaskan sea scallops — mmmmmmm.) When they bring the check at Palomino, evidently, they give you a little card with a saying on it — a fortune cookie without the cookie. Mine: “A status symbol is anything you can’t afford, but did.” Sheesh. I think I’d rather get something boring like “Today is your lucky day,” with “Learn Chinese!” on the flip side.

Warning: sports entry ahead. Non-sports fans: nothing to see here, keep moving on.
Monday night will likely be the highlight of the sports year for me: my beloved New Orleans Saints take on their hated (recent) rival, the St. Louis Rams. Some background: Last year, the Rams were the defending Super Bowl champion and looked unstoppable. The Saints were coming off a 3-13 season and weren’t expected to go anywhere. The week before the two teams played for the first time, the Saints’ starting quarterback, Jeff Blake, was injured and lost for the season. His backup, Aaron Brooks, had never started a game in the NFL before.
Anyway, the Saints went into St. Louis and whooped ’em, 31-24. They ended up beating the Rams for the division title, then beat the Rams again in the first round of the playoffs in an amazing game, 31-28. (The Saints almost blew a 31-7 lead with 11 minutes left to play; it was the first win in Saints playoff history and the last time I cried with joy. There, I admitted it.)
This year, the Rams were again supposed to be much better than the Saints — and, in fact, they are: they’re the best football team in the world. But in October, when the Rams were 6-0 and on top of the world, the Saints whooped ’em again, 34-31, coming back from being down 24-6 in the second half and winning on a field goal with one second left.
The Saints host the Rams for the last time this year on Monday Night Football. The Saints are switching divisions next year, so it’ll be the last critical game of this rivalry for a while. As you can tell by scores like 31-24, 31-28, and 34-31, it’s always a great game when these guys play. The Rams are a very precise, amazing passing team; their specialty is the 80-yard touchdown pass. The Saints are a sloppy, smashmouth football team that’s aggressive, quick, and brutal. Plus, they hate each other. The war of words has already begun:
Saints WR Joe Horn: “The Rams know what time it is. We have their number.”
Rams DL Tyoka Jackson: “I know exactly what time it is. And we’re going to see if we have a nice clock to clean when we get down there.”
Rams DE Chidi Ahanotu: “It’s time to shut these guys up. It’s like this is the only game they live for, for some reason. And all the rest of the games they lay eggs.”
Horn: “We’ve won three out of the last four so Anakakoonachoo or whatever his name is, I don’t know why he would say something like that. Who’s Ananookagoo?”
If anybody wants to come over and cheer my boys on to victory Monday night, lemme know.

I’m volunteering for the Dallas school district‘s ninth-grade mentoring program, which is run by Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Last week, I had my interview to determine if I was fit to be a mentor. Lots of detailed, embarassing questions: Do you possess any child pornography? Have you, as an adult, ever physically beaten a child? How did your last significant relationship end? Have you ever worshipped Satan? What are your views on the use of illegal drugs? Have you ever been drunk?
The guy two desks away from me at work is volunteering, too, so when I heard he was going to have his interview yesterday, I warned him to get ready for these sorts of questions. After his interview, though, he tells me he didn’t get any of those questions. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that, to my interviewer, I just looked like a kiddie-porn-loving, Satan-worshipping, child-abusing drunken druggie. I’m not taking it as a compliment.

Winona Ryder arrested for shoplifting. A thousand male hearts, stunted emotionally the moment they saw Heathers, are now breaking. (Luckily, I’m not one of them — never got the appeal. Bonus fact: her real name is Winona Horowitz.)

Talk about your busy news day! The bin Laden tape. The end of the ABM treaty. Somebody shoots up India’s parliament. Israel formally cuts off Arafat. (And let’s not even talk about the really big story, CSI’s rising ratings.) That’d be a busy news week most times, not just a busy news day.
Reminds me of Dec. 19, 1998, the day when Clinton was impeached, the ascendant Speaker of the House resigned, and the U.S. bombed Iraq. (Speaking of resignation, this site has the resignation letters of a bunch of 20th century politicos. Oh, and Ginger Spice.)