Author: jbenton

some random links

How magazines lie to girls.
Australia dodged a bullet.
I was unaware of the existence of Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia (although it’s actually hosted by Wikia, the company founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I particularly like their entry on John Seigenthaler, who famously disputed the accuracy of his Wikipedia entry.
I found YourGMap useful a few months back when I was househunting. Said search has since been abandoned.
What Josh listens to.
Two old white guys whose music from the ’60s and ’70s shows up sampled in a lot of hip-hop: Monty Stark and Galt MacDermot. Stark’s “Comrades” is fun, and “Dreams” is the source of a great lyric previously referenced here: “I might have been a parrot / A gay Brazilian parrot / If someone hadn’t wakened me and / Pulled me out of bed.” MacDermot is most famous for “Hair.”

vagabonding across europe

Went to the local used-book megaplex a week ago and found a copy of Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa, a 1971 travel book by a man named Ed Buryn. (The book should not be confused with Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, the very fine book by Friend of Crabwalk Rolf Potts.) Ed Buryn seems like a fairly strange fellow; at least judging by Google hits (a paltry 568), he has been largely forgotten. But his book — a hippie-fied guide to a groovy continental tour — has some gems. For instance:

  • Under the heading “Availability of Dope”: “In Poland I met a soldier and his girl in a bar one night and got to talking (in rudimentary words and sign language) about grass, which they’d never heard of before. He said he’d like to try it sometime. By an odd coincidence, about then I happened to find a few joints in my stash. So we retired to his girl’s house, whose father (an army sergeant) was already asleep.
    “To make a long story short, she wouldn’t try it, but he and I got ripped. Soon he got sick from too much vodka beforehand and started to moan. His girl immediately freaked out and woke her father, who drowsily listened to her tattling about how I’d messed her cat with my ‘funny cigarettes.’
    “I could only speak a few words of the language to try to quiet her down, keep the sergeant from calling the cops and reassure the soldier he was not going crazy — all while I was totally stoned. The sergeant finally concluded we were all pie-eyed drunk (he had never heard of grass either), shrugged his daughter off and went to bed. Be careful who you stone!”
    (Buryn tells this story as an example of why Eastern Europeans “frequently haven’t even heard of [drugs]…if they have, they tend to put them down as capitalist decadence.”)
  • Buryn on why traveling women should always bring enough birth-control pills to last the trip: “If you’re absolutely certain you’ll remain chaste no matter what happens, then you’re too uptight. Life is strange…anything can happen, even the best of things. Be tolerant enough to allow them to happen.”
    The “Sex and Romance” is divided up into two parts: “Part I: Sex, or How to Get Laid” and “Part II: Romance, or How to Find Love.” You will not be surprised to find that Part I is aimed at men and Part II is aimed at women. (Sexual revolution, schmexual revolution!)
    To sum up his advice to men: You’ll have a hard time scoring with Euro women because American men are “coarse, neurotic, materialistic and superficial” in the Euro stereotype. Which is a shame because Euro women “are more likely to be sexually liberated,” “will go to bed sooner and enjoy it more,” and “are confident of their femininity and sexuality, sophisticated and sensitive.” Best option, according to Buryn: Go after American chicks, who are easy when they’re on the road. “Like you, they are eager to spice their European adventure with the salt of sex, and the resultant action is heavy.” (Italics his.)
    His advice for women: You can snag a man with no problem, but you may need to buy him dinner. “European lovers are traditionally impoverished, and need their meals and expenses paid to keep up their strength. There is a large informal army of gigolos stationed throughout Europe, looking for American women to service, usually in hopes of making a little spare change as well.” But that’s not a bad thing, Buryn says! “Part of the excitement of travel and vagabonding is unquestionably a sexual excitement, so don’t try to repress it out of existence. As a free person in Europe, you will know the heady sensation of being stared at, appreciated, desired. Dig it.”
    But Buryn argues that American women shouldn’t become so focused on their “dark-eyed Lotharios” that they ignore their horny American male counterparts. “These are the cream of our society, so don’t short-change our own out of mere cultural prejudice. Love an American; they’re clean.”

Ed Buryn is apparently still around, and has been noted for his tarot-card creations.

apple store opening

So I went to the opening of the new Apple Store in Dallas on Saturday morning. Didn’t camp out or anything; just drove up around 9:55 for the 10 a.m. opening.
On the (not very long) drive over, I was thinking that there might not be the legendary lines and hubbub around this opening that there have been historically. An Apple Store is a lovely thing for Mac fans who have historically felt isolated in a sea of PC users. But Dallas already has two Apple Stores, one of them less than five minutes’ drive from the new location.
After all, there’s nothing really special about a new Apple Store. They sell the same stuff as everywhere else. So while I was angling to get one of the t-shirts they give out at grand openings, I wasn’t expecting to see many other people.
Um, I was extremely wrong. What a sea of people! I left my crowd-estimating skills in the car, but it was certainly into the several hundreds of people waiting in line — a line that extended the length of that section of the mall and looped around. I couldn’t even see the store from where I was through all the people.
There was no way I was going to stand in line, but I took out my cell phone, turned on its camera, and snapped a pic of the line from a distance. And not two seconds later, a thug security guard comes up to me and gets in my face. “Who are you with? What news organization are you with?”
Huh? I mean, normally I have a good answer to that one. But in this case, I wasn’t with any news organization. I was a guy going to the Apple Store and taking a crappy picture with his crappy phone.
Anyway, I was sternly ordered to never take a photo in the NorthPark mall again. God forbid that NorthPark get good PR for hosting a big event. I turned around and left.

the osmonds, back on crabwalk

An unfortunate fact of Internet life is that links, no matter how clever, sometimes expire. (You take the good, you take the bad. You take them both and there you have: The Facts of Internet Life.)
I get emails every few months from people who come across this post from 2002, in which I linked to video of the Osmonds rocking out on the BBC in 1972. (I was covering an Osmonds concert while in Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics. That ended up being this story.) Unfortunately, the BBC took the video down some years ago.
But now I can proudly present: the Osmonds playing “Crazy Horses,” probably their biggest hit and part of their early-’70s dalliance with Black Sabbath guitar.
And you know what? It kind of rocks. I mean, if you look past the the outfits and the hair and the teeth. And if you get rid of the lead singer Alan O., who is cosmically bad. And kill the lyrics. And I never thought I’d say this, but that song could use some more Donny, who isn’t a bad little rock bassist.
And, as a bonus, here’s a photo from the Osmonds show I covered four years ago, taken by the most excellent Damon Winter, who is both probably the best photographer I’ve ever met and the only man I know who guarded Tim Duncan in a high school basketball game.

mr. saturnhead, wide gauge

Mr. Saturnhead, a blog in which the author, Ed Park, performs acts of close literary analysis upon the primitivist comic strip he drew (?) for his college newspaper. (Which happens to be my former college newspaper.) “Those stiff, wooden-looking hands in the final panel look like they’ve escaped from the Museum of American Folk Art.”
Ed is now a senior editor at The Village Voice. His regular blog is over here.
Mr. Saturnhead, sadly, is no competition for the greatest comic in college newspaper history, the inimitably puerile “Wide Gauge” by Ken Moon. Ken’s scanned in a few old strips at his site — check them out. The day-after-Valentine’s one is particularly great in its puerility.