Author: jbenton

The tentative Crabby(TM) for Best Christmas-Related Web Idea goes to Secret Santa. Yep, it’s just like you remember it from grade school, except your gift gets chosen from your Amazon wish list instead of the fevered imagination of a 12-year-old.
I remember my first and only Secret Santa experience, sometime around eighth grade. We had a $10 spending limit, but were supposed to buy three things to give over three days. The guy I had picked was into music, so I hatched a brilliant scheme: buy two really crappy gifts for the first two days, to fool him into thinking he was getting screwed over, then spring a shiny new tape from one of his favorite bands on Day 3. (I remember the tape well: Pink Floyd’s Animals.) So on Days 1 and 2, he got books straight from the 50-cent shelf at a Lafayette, La. bookstore — I think one was on raising goats, maybe the other one was a Victor Borge bio, I don’t remember.
Anyway, so this guy spends two straight days complaining about how crappy his gifts are to everyone within earshot. I felt like explaining: Don’t you get irony? The humor inherent in intentionally bad gifts, soon to be redeemed by a slice of Floyd? By the time Day 3 arrived, I was completely disspirited, and the guy wasn’t all that impressed — he already had a copy of Animals.
So everybody sign up for Secret Santa, on the off chance we might pick each other and I might have a healing experience.

Attention Harry Potter fans: you may not know what evil you have unwittingly been exposed to! The always (unintentionally) amusing fundamentalists at ChildCare Action Project has come out with a scathing report on the new movie. Some of its startling findings (all italics mine):
– Harry Potter is “a colorful display of goth art.”
– “Harry Potter present[s] evil as something to admire and emulate.”
– “[W]hat better time to embrace evil in entertainment than now when we have kicked God out of schools, government and many, many homes and what used to be the family. I guess Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a logical extension of I Dream of Genie, Bewitched and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, all benevolent on the surface and all since we kicked God out of our schools.”
– “Part of the rivalry is expressed in broom-riding sports much like roller ball with as little concern for the safety of fellow players.”
– “By the way, Harry converses with a snake in this movie. Not a cow, not a dog, not a cat, but a snake. And one of the characters is 665.5 years old.”
The CAP scoring system dings movies for crimes against Christianity; in Harry’s case, these include:
– in the “Wanton Violence” category: “floating evil being drinking blood from an animal’s neck,” “ghost removing his head,” “great falls, repeatedly,” “beating of a child with a club by a giant troll, seeing the club hit the child, repeatedly,” and “crumbling flesh.”
– under “Impudence/Hate”: “brutal sports tactics with audience of children cheering it on,” “encouragement by an adult to a child to break the rules to get even,” “parents submitting to child’s creaming.” (I assume they meant screaming; if there was creaming in the movie, maybe it really should be banned.)
– under “Offense to God”: “magic to grow tail on a boy,” “magic to change flag colors,” “paintings with moving subjects, repeatedly,” “broom riding,” “cat with red eyes,” “Christmas without Jesus.”

I know times are tough for everybody, and that Oval Office gig he’d been betting on fell through unexpectedly, but it sure is odd to think of Al Gore taking a job with a diversified financial services firm. He’ll be vice chairman of Metropolitan West Financial in L.A. (Since he did invent the Internet and all, I hope he can improve their sorry web site.)
This makes me think Gore won’t run again in 2004. It really wouldn’t make sense politically for the guy who ran on a “I’m for the people, not for the powerful” platform to run after three years of working for The Man.
My favorite quote from the article: “Gore, who has been teaching college courses since he narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election, will focus on developing private equity strategies in the biotechnology and information technology fields as well as explore international markets for MetWest.” Oh, please! Gore’s a smart guy, but he knows roughly as much about developing private equity strategies in biotech as I do. Nice gig, if you can get it.

A lot of what we reporters do is awfully easy. What guys like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh do is awfully hard — digging out facts, linking them together, exposing things powerful people don’t want exposed. Felicity Barringer has a great piece in today’s NYT on what Bob and Sy, two old rivals from the ’70s and two of the greatest journalists of the last century, are doing in the wake of 9/11.
(Woodward, of course, is most famous for breaking Watergate. Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre, among other things. I’ll always root for Hersh over Woodward, if only because of what you can tell about them from this one great Barringer paragraph: “Those describing the 64-year-old Mr. Hersh dip into the basket of adjectives usually applied to small dogs

The latest issue of Editor & Publisher magazine features a (lengthy) profile of the Block family, who own my old employer, the Toledo Blade. I don’t get mentioned directly, but my 1999 trip on the company’s dime to Pitcairn Island in the south Pacific does, and I was involved, to varying degrees, in several of the stories mentioned.

Hello, Toledo! (Saying that’s just one small step below my ultimate fantasy, yelling “Hello Detroit! Are you ready to rock?” to a crowd of millions.) To the Toledoans who are reading this page for the first time — and I’m betting there are a few of you — welcome to my humble abode. Just so you know, you should feel free to leave comments on my stupidity by clicking on the link at the bottom of each entry. Suggested topics of discussion: that llama incident in 1998; my tendency to shake uncontrollably at the mention of Kid Rock; the Toledo five-day forecast. (Actually, everyone should feel free to leave comments: they’re the gasohol on which this fuel-injected blog runs.)

A new photo above means I’m on the move again. I unexpectedly have to work tomorrow, alas, but as soon as I’m done with a Japan story and fill out some Olympics-related forms, I’m off to my home town, Rayne, Louisiana, to be among my fellow Cajuns for a week of vacation. Among my projects for the week: a freelance Q&A with Michael Beschloss for the DMN, a bunch of freelance marketing copy for a Toledo company, sleep, a couple of new web projects, lots of Louisiana historical research, too many po-boys, too much crawfish etouffee and rice dressing (which uninformed New Orleanians and Popeye’s franchisees call dirty rice). It all sounds wonderful.

Moosedogtoo (who needs an about page, btw) got a nastygram from some British lawyers. Of most interest to me was the way the barrister closed his letter, after the usual array of legal language, veiled threats, etc. Where one might expect a “sincerely” or a “best wishes” or whatever, this letter has “Govern yourself accordingly.”
I think I’m going to start using that. Maybe at the end of every DMN story I write, after I calmly lay out the pertinent facts, there’s a little kicker: “Govern yourself accordingly.”
I’m back in Dallas, having forgotten only my cell phone, which Kelly has promised to FedEx to me in Louisiana. (Kelly, by the way, will soon be the parent of her own brand-spanking new blog. Oh, you watch — it’ll be spectacular. More to come on this front later.)
Conversation overheard on the Air Tran flight from Atlanta to DFW:
Off-duty pilot: Have you ever flown with Mark W—? That guy never shuts up. “Hello from the cockpit, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got nothing important to say, but I want to keep disturbing you by talking to you throughout the whole flight.”
Off-duty flight attendant: I hate it! It’s like he thinks the passengers bought their tickets to hear him, not to get where they’re going. After a while, I just tune him out, because I know when he’s talking it can’t be important.
ODP: The only good thing about it is that he’s so busy talking to the passengers that he never talks to me, even though I’m sitting next to him.
ODFA: It’s like, “To those passengers who are trying to sleep — fat chance! I’m gonna keep talking!”
Conversation overheard in line, waiting to board the plane:
College student who appeared to be of Arab descent: (sarcastically) Gee, I wonder if they’re going to pull me out of line and search my bags.
College student who appeared to be of Indian descent: (even more sarcastically) Yeah, that never happens to guys like us. They wouldn’t do that just ’cause we’re dark-skinned, right?
CSWATBOAD: (dripping with sarcasm now) No! Of course not! If they want to look through my bags, I’m sure it’s just random, silly ol’ bad luck.
CSWATBOID: (puddle of sarcasm now forming around his feet) Absolutely! And they’d certainly never pick both of us to get inspected, because I’m sure they’re just selecting every tenth or fifteenth or whatever person.
Of course, they both got picked. Govern yourself accordingly.

Now that I’ve given away my weakling CDs to fellow DFWbloggers, I’ve got room for some more, courtesy Toledo’s Boogie Records. Freshly purchased used: Kool and the Gang, Live at the Sex Machine ($3!); Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come; Treble Charger, Self=Title (more Canadian rock); David Holmes, This Films Crap Lets Slash the Seats (from the man who did the Out of Sight soundtrack linked below); Chocolate Genius, Godmusic; DJ Deep, Respect is Burning Presents: Respect to DJ Deep. (And freshly purchased new: Radiohead, I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings.)

John Denver used to sing a song called “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio.” The lyrics go:
Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, is like being nowhere at all
All through the day how the hours rush by
You sit in the park and you watch the grass die
Ah, but after the sunset, the dusk and the twilight
When shadows of night start to fall
They roll back the sidewalks precisely at ten
And people who live there are not seen again
You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio
Well I spent a week there one day
They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes
Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise
Is there any greater insult than to have John Denver — John Denver! — slag on your city as not being sophisticated or interesting enough? John damned Denver! Like most people who’ve lived in pretty lame places, I alternate between attacking it wholeheartedly and righteously defending it whenever anyone — particularly a dead folk singer — dares attack it.
I’ve actually wanted to write a story for sometime about Toledo’s place in music history — it’s always been the stand-in (alongside maybe Peoria) for the most boring, awful place imaginable. The Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach album a few years ago had a song called “Toledo” insulting the place. Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” doesn’t insult the place per se, but it does make the city the place where people “pick a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” (Aside: for years, I thought the next line — “With four hungry children and a crop in the field” — was “With four hundred children and a crop in the field.”) And earlier this year, when I thought Toledo had finally dropped off the national radar enough to put an end to these references, the White Stripes’ new disc comes out with “Expecting,” which uses the lyric “You sent me to Toledo” as a metaphor for being dumped. It’s just not fair.
(I wanted to write that story until I realized no one but me would be interested in reading it.)
Anyway, last night I had dinner at the one decent Indian place in town, where I am proud to say the waiter/owner remembered my standard order, despite my not having been there in more than a year. (Mmmmm…chicken tikka massala.) Then it was up to Detroit to see Sloan.
For some reason, it was an early show — we got there around 8:30 and the opening band, Ultimate Fakebook, was already done. (The show was over by 10:30!) It was interesting seeing Sloan play a big venue like the State Theater; I’d only seen them at the cramped Main Event in Toledo (along with one outdoor show in Detroit), but here they had their full rock-star treatment going — big lighting, films projected behind them, a huge crowd, etc. About half the crowd was Canadian, although I detected no Quebecois separatist sentiments. Great show, as always, although Andrew, the drummer, was sick, so his songs were a bit off. (All four Sloaners write and sing about a quarter of their songs, and they rotate instruments a lot.)
One puzzling feature, though: a guy not far in front of us on the floor kept raising a sign that said “Eat Beef.” Was there some sort of mad-cow incident in Canada that I didn’t hear about? Is the Beef Council resorting to guerrilla marketing? The only possible explanation I could think of came during the set closer, the classic 1991 boy-wants-girl grammar-police anthem “Underwhelmed,” when Chris sings: “We were talkin’ about people that eat meat / I felt like an ass ’cause I was one / She said, “It’s okay,” but I felt like / I just ate my young.” Maybe.
The absolute highlight of the show was during “It’s In Your Eyes,” my favorite song from the new album, when they showed what looked like a late ’80s/early ’90s short film made on the cheap. The “protagonist,” if one could call him that, of the movie looked familiar. “Hey, I think that’s Matt Murphy, lead singer of the super-tuneful Flashing Lights, and ex- of Halifax stalwarts the Super Friendz,” I told Kelly. “Wow, you’re such a Canadian rock geek,” she didn’t reply, but should have. Then, after the song, Sloaner Chris mentions that it is indeed Matt Murphy in that 1991 film. Score! I think I deserve Canadian citizenship for that level of obscure Can-rock knowledge.
This morning, we had breakfast with friends Jennifer and Chris, then went off with friends Luke and Leslie to the Toledo Museum of Art, which is just about the only thing Toledo has going for it culturally (other than lots of Sloan shows). It’s really a top-notch museum, and worth a couple of hours if you’re ever passing through. (And since the country’s longest north-south interstate, I-75, and its two longest east-west interstates, I-80 and I-90, all intersect here, there’s a good shot you’ll be passing through sometime.)
The main exhibition now is Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which, while much less high-art than most of their stuff, was still quite entertaining. It’s a collection of all the drawings, paintings, storyboards, models, and costumes used to create the Star Wars movies. (We didn’t get the audio tour, mainly because we didn’t find out until later it was voiced by Darth Vader his own bad self, James Earl Jones.) It’s amusing to see what passed for futuristic in 1977: the Tie fighter pilots had these big clunky “computer” switches on their uniforms that look taken off an early Coleco machine. (And did you know one of the transport ships was called the Mos Calamari? Did George Lucas have some bad squid one night?)
I left the museum with good memories, and three Star Wars Pez dispensers (Chewbacca, Boba Fett, and a Stormtrooper.)
Toledo Blade party at Kelly’s tonight (see? Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, isn’t so bad!), then back to Dallas tomorrow.