Author: jbenton

After a restful night of sleep (much needed after catching only two hours before leaving at 4 a.m. yesterday), lunch was with Murray, my old boss here in Toledo. He’s a really great guy — besides his days editing, he spends his free time running a non-profit mentoring program for kids in trouble. He obviously cares about these kids a lot; he told me about the problems the kid he mentors is having (not the least being he’s in jail at the moment). I admire the hell out of him. A reminder: Dallas ISD is launching a mentoring program this year, and they’re looking for 1,000 people to give one hour a week to mentor an at-risk freshman. I’m signed up (although still going through the background check process) — please consider doing it yourself. As some one who has researched the dropout problem far more than any human being should, I can tell you that mentoring programs are just about the best way to keep kids in school, and it’s often a load of fun for the adult in question.
(Speaking of the dropout problem, I had another [kinda boring] story in yesterday’s paper about it. Probably for JB completists [and dropout-data-crunching gurus] only.)
Two signs spotted in the last couple of hours:
– Outside a Marshall Field’s women’s dressing room (yes, Kelly roped me into some shopping): a sign warning that “for your security and ours,” the dressing room may be staffed by “female Asset Protection” investigators. I know female is lower-cased, but I had this vision of a corps of Female Asset Protection agents, wandering the earth, searching for anyone threatening the protection of Female Assets.
– On a street sign, across the street from a fire station: “Stop here on fire run.” Unfortunately, it’s an old sign, and the bolt that fastens it to its pole is rusted, and years of rain have made it look just like a comma. So it reads as “Stop here on fire, run.” Which sounds like a good set of suggestions to me. (Although wouldn’t running just fan the flames? What ever happened to stop, drop, and roll? Okay, I’ve taken this too far already.)
Tonight, we’re up to Detroit Rock City to see one of my favorites, Sloan, at the State Theater. (Fans of the very fine movie Out of Sight may remember the State as the site of the boxing match where Snoopy and Jack meet up. And, as an aside, if you don’t have the movie’s soundtrack, you’re missing out on a great party CD.)
I first heard Sloan in 1996, when I was an intern at the Toledo paper. Toledo radio is abysmal, so the only decent station to listen to was 88.7 CIMX, out of Windsor, Ontario. At the time, they played a ton of great Canadian bands, like Jale, the Super Friendz, and Thrush Hermit, and I really got into the Halifax early ’90s scene, which produced a lot of great music. (Unfortunately, the station now just plays the same unlistenable stream of Korn-derived crap every other formerly cool “alternative” station now does.)
Sloan was clearly the giant standing bestride the whole Confederation. One of the few benefits of living in Toledo was easy access to Sloan: on tours they generally stayed in Canada, but they’d usually dip down for shows in Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland. So I think this’ll be my sixth or seventh time seeing them — they’re great fun live. (If you’d like to sample some, this site has several MP3 concerts saved. I recommend the Atlanta 1999 show, and was at the Toledo 1998 show — see if you can hear me in the crowd noise.)
I’ve also started a bit of a crusade to get Sloan to come to Dallas. I interviewed the band once for a story, so I had their manager’s email address. I let him know that there’s actually a Sloan cover band operating in Dallas; that at the Built to Spill show a few months back, they played all of their fourth album, Navy Blues, in between acts; that I’d bring all my friends to the show; and that I really really really really wanted them to come to Dallas. But what do I get for my efforts? Bupkis. Maybe next tour.

Bloggin’ at ya from T-Town, Toodle-ee-do, Toledo, on the workplace computer where I read some of my first blogs lo these many years ago. (This was in the dark ages of Internet access, when there were two computers in the whole newsroom with connections — oops, make that three, because there was one old 386 with a 14.4K modem. Boy, that made for fun surfing.) Unsurprisingly, Toledo hasn’t changed all that much since I left. (A sentence that could have been written at just about any point since 1950.) Downtown is still pretty much abandoned, despite regular pledges from all the right people to do something about it.
The current mayor, the wonderfully named Carty Finkbeiner, has actually accomplished much more downtown than his predecessors — getting a new baseball stadium built, turning some ancient buildings into apartments, etc. — but he’ll be out of office soon, alas. His successor, elected a couple of weeks ago, is a fine guy (if a bit walrus-like), but not the sparkplug Carty was. (I covered Carty on and off for a couple of years — he’s a former football coach known for the occasional physical outburst, and he’s often borderline insane, but he gets things done. Anyway, Carty won’t ever be remembered for his downtown work; he’ll always be remembered for advocating the creation of a deaf-only neighborhood near the Toledo airport, because they wouldn’t mind all the noise. Yes, he seriously said that.)
Anyway, I’m off to Fort Wayne, Indiana, tonight (seriously, do the exotic locales ever stop?) for a benefit dinner for one of Kelly’s friends. (Kelly’s the ex-girlfriend/current very good friend I’m staying with here.) The planned highlight of the event: a performance by a ragtag rock band made up of writers and editors at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, where Kelly used to work. The inspired name of this ensemble? Paper Jam. (Get it? They work at a paper, and they…never mind. If my DMN band is ever revived and I consider Paper Jam as a name, please shoot me.)

If the photo above is changing, that’s your clue that Josh is ditching town. I leave in too few hours for lovely Toledo, Ohio, my former home, to visit friends and generally raise heck (as they’d say in the polite Midwest.) The photo above is of iron ore being offloaded from a ship on the Maumee River in Toledo. I used to live a few blocks from that offloading site, downtown in these apartments. (But wait! That’s not my building! That’s a building that looks a bit like my old building, but with about six extra floors and a slightly different shape. And the page mentions an indoor heated pool; I lived there for almost three years, and I swear there’s no pool of any kind. Clearly there’s some fraud going on — uninteresting fraud, but fraud nonetheless. Harrumph.)
The dfwblogs happy hour was tonight and fun as usual. And the mojitos at the Meridian were as tasty as usual. And I was able to offload all my homeless CDs to worthy homes.

If you’ve got a hankering for some close contact with polar bears, the Mars Society wants you. They’re now taking applications for volunteers willing to spend time at the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island between December and August. (Any place meant to be a model for the Martian winter has got to be a major party locale.) So if you’re 18 to 60 and in good physical condition, do your part for interplanetary travel. Unfortunately, they don’t mention how long of a time commitment they want people to make; if it was short (2-3 weeks), I’d absolutely be applying. (They say they want applicants with “scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills.” Well, I might be able to get away with the last one — don’t they need an intrepid journalist to record the journey?)

As Leia would say, w00t! Just found out I get to go to Salt Lake City in February to be one of the 9,000 journalists covering the Olympics. My run of absurdly good luck continues…

Pedro es inteligente. En senor y la senora Garcia son profesores. Juana y Josefa son estudiantes. Tu perro se llama Galan. Yo preparo la limonada. Gabriel es un gato grande y gordo. Gerardo y Geronimo son gemelos. Donde esta Carmen? Esta en el supermercado. Que compra? Compra leche. Luis usa la computadora. Los muchachos estudian espanol. Yo pregunto en la clase. Ellos caminan en el parque. (In case you can’t tell, last night was Spanish class.)

At the risk of repeating myself: I fully expect all area bloggers to attend tonight’s dfwblogs happy hour at the Meridian Room. And I don’t want to hear that same old “I’m too busy fleeing from the Northern Alliance” excuse.

Been feeling uneasy since 9/11, unsure who America’s true friends are? Well, worry no more — the Principality of Sealand has “communicated directly with the United States of America offering its resources” in the wake of the attacks, along with “its sympathy and concern.” (For those who don’t know, Sealand is an offshore platform built by the Brits in WWII to ward off German air raids. When the UK abandoned it after the war, a man named Roy Bates realized it was in international waters and decided he would occupy it, proclaim himself “Prince Roy,” and declare Sealand an independent, sovereign nation. More info here and here.)
The Sealanders say they can help the anti-terrorist cause because the Sealand Criminal Code “provides for placing any persons suspected of such activities under immediate arrest and detention at the Sovereign’s pleasure.” One hopes the Sovereign doesn’t get too carried away with his pleasure.

People, people — how many times do I have to say it? Let law enforcement do its job. Never take the law into your own hands. Innocent clowns could get hurt. (More details; via the smack.)

Matt and I linked to the same article today. He is hereby jinxed. He may no longer blog until I say his full name; until then, should he blog illegally, I may freely punch him. (Ah, childhood.)
Searching for a couple good jinx linx brought me to a four-square page. Now that is the sport of kings — strategy, cunning, cat-quick reflexes. I’d pay good money to see a professional four-square league. Hell, maybe I could play in such a league: four-square was just about the only successful athletic outlet for a geeky kid like me. I was damned good, I tell you. (Well, I was also quite a star at benchball, an odd sort of volleyball/four-square/tennis hybrid invented one middle-school free period by Josh Caffery and me. Truly a tactical sport, with much more Olympic potential than silly events like synchronized swimming.)
I was disappointed to learn, however, that the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel is not an organization for believers in the sport, like me, but instead for followers of Aimee Semple McPherson. She was one of the first evangelists to learn how to work the media, with stunts like staging her own kidnapping, “faith healing” animals at a Los Angeles zoo, and shilling “Go With Me to the Holy Land!” cruises to the Mediterranean.
Interesting fact about the ICFG: It runs the L.I.F.E. Bible College in San Dimas, Ca., which had heretofor been best known as the setting for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. So they’ve got that going for them. (In case it isn’t clear, San Dimas, not L.I.F.E. Bible College, was the movie’s location. Just to be clear.)