Author: jbenton

I found a bouncy rubber ball on the football field yesterday. I am now a very dangerous man. (Not that I wasn’t before.) My day has been divided into four basic parts: bounce-off-the-wall, bounce-off-the-ceiling, bounce-off-the-floor, and (most thrillingly) bounce-off-the-point-where-two-walls-meet-to-try-to-get-it-to-bounce back-directly-at-me. If I had a pet, it’d be injured by now.
Congrats to Erica on her new look. (Both the new look of her blog and, if one can believe this photo, the haircut she got sometime after age 17 — a nice improvement. 🙂 )
(Has there ever been an official declaration of proper parenthesis use when a clause ends in a smilie? Is that “:) )” double usage correct? Where’s the W3C when you need them?)
I start Spanish class Tuesday night. Today, I went to the SMU bookstore to buy the textbook and had to ask someone with a straight face, “Excuse me, but do you have ‘Spanish Is Fun’?” I felt like a second grader.

Congratulations to whoever’s behind the keyboard at 216.192.91.26, a.k.a. as.wcom.net. At 8:32 p.m. last night, he or she became the 1,000th unique visitor to crabwalk.com. And to think, only about 873 of those are me hitting reload.
Football today wasn’t pretty at all. Just one lonely TD (although another one, off a pickoff, did get called back on a crappy call). A few nice defensive plays, including a key fourth-down goal line-stand deflection, but nothing to write home about. Not the way I wanted to enter my three-week Japanese layoff from the sport.
Saw Mulholland Drive last night with my friend Natacha — odd movie. (Somehow, I’d never seen a David Lynch film before, so I’m happy to have that gap in my cultural resume filled.) If anyone has any theories about what it all meant — in particular the cowboy and the inch-tall old people — please forward them along. My favorite scene, early on in the movie, featured the truly great Dan Hedaya, the former Nick Tortelli of Cheers fame.
Finally, I had another story in today’s paper.

More music news: the Dismemberment Plan, one of my very favorite bands, is coming out with a new album, Change, on Tuesday. And the band is streaming the album via RealAudio. They’re also coming to Rubber Gloves on Dec. 1 and I sadly will be in Boston that weekend. But party on without me — I saw them there earlier this year and it was a great show.

It appears our anthrax scare was just crushed aspirin in an envelope, sent by someone who thought it would be amusing to drive a workplace into panic. Dear whoever sent it: Thanks for screwing up our day! Really, we appreciate it. Jackass.

Well, that was exactly what I didn’t want to see on my way out the door to lunch: three firemen, in full protective regalia, wearing gas masks. I tried holding my breath all the way down from the third floor; I nearly made it, but ended up taking a few breaths near the front door.
I just got back and thought everything was clear, but I just noticed the entire business department’s been evacuated and cordoned off with “hazardous materials” police tape. (Could that have been the phantom brownie smell from this morning? Anybody know if anthrax smells like brownies?) Evidently we got a letter with a white powdery substance. Lucky us! I’m sure it’s just another hoax, but I’ll be taking shallow breaths just in case. (If you don’t remember, my employer has been the subject of protests in the past over its reporting on local Muslim groups and their alleged connections to terrorist activity.)

Two thoughts, before I crank out a lot of work today (and thus have little time to blog): I have to walk through the business department every morning to get to work. About halfway through, for the last week, there has been the unmistakable smell of brownies — really gooey, fudgy brownies. But when I look around, no brownies. It seems like a cruel joke. Is it the legacy smell of brownies past? There’s nothing worse than phantom brownies.
Finally, this Halloween decorations story in today’s DMN is promoted on the front page with this sentence: “Build a cave in your living room for an unforgettable party setting.” Am I the only one who immediately thought: Wow, I can’t believe the paper is promoting an Osama-themed Halloween!

It’s interesting to see what exactly the leaflets we’re dropping on Afghanistan say:
“Attention Taliban! You are condemned. Did you know that? The instant the terrorists you support took over our planes, you sentenced yourselves to death. The Armed Forces of the United States are here to seek justice for our dead. Highly trained soldiers are coming to shut down once and for all Usama bin Laden’s ring of terrorism, and the Taliban that supports them and their actions.
“Our forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? Our helicopters will rain fire down upon your camps before you detect them on your radar. Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows. Our infantry is trained for any climate and terrain on earth. United States soldiers fire with superior marksmanship and are armed with superior weapons.
“You have only one choice … Surrender now and we will give you a second chance. We will let you live. If you surrender no harm will come to you. When you decide to surrender, approach United States forces with your hands in the air. Sling your weapon across your back muzzle towards the ground. Remove your magazine and expel any rounds. Doing this is your only chance of survival.”
Is this refreshingly blunt, or does it sound like outtakes from some bad John Carpenter movie? Gotta love the mocking tone: “What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry?” My car’s so much nicer than your car. My daddy’s so much richer than your daddy. My jeans are so much cooler than yours.

I’ve just been handed two tickets to an advance screening of K-Pax, the new Kevin Spacey movie. It’s at 7:30 tonight at Loews Cityplace (Haskell and Central). Anybody interested in going? Email me if you wanna go.

Just picked up the new album by The Strokes, who, like the White Stripes, are currently being deified by the British music press as saviors of rock and roll.
Honestly, do British music mags ever think a band’s just, you know, okay? It’s always “there is no excuse to not be listening to this CD at all hours, even while asleep,” or “let’s start a religion with this band at the center.” It’s like it’s a nation of 13-year-olds suddenly realizing that, you know, “Stairway to Heaven” is, like, really deep and stuff. Nothing wrong with that, of course — when you’re 13. (Actually, I’m as guilty of that as anyone. In my previous life as a Professional Rock Critic, I slobbered way too much over CDs that ended up being just, you know, okay. My apologies to any bands that became too drunk on their own power after reading one of my reviews.)
Anyway, surprise! The hype (some measure of it, at least) appears to be deserved. Sure, the vocalist is a Velvet Underground-era Lou Reed ripoff — hell, the whole band is a Velvet Underground ripoff, with little smidges of Television, Iggy Pop, and Blondie. But since when is that a bad thing? They’re coming to Dallas next Monday; anybody want to come with?
(I’m also rooting for a long and productive career for these guys, because that increases the likelihood there’ll someday be a cover band called the Diff’rent Strokes.)

Two links to close the day: first, the Berkeley city council has officially called for an end to the bombing of Afghanistan. No matter what happens to this country, it’s nice to know some things will never change: leftist enclaves will continue to make haughty, self-important declarations of Truth to the rest of the (less civilized) world. As council member Ying Lee Kelley put it, the body will “continue to honor Berkeley’s tradition of opposition to brute force to solve profoundly difficult social problems.” I was unaware Berkeley City Council had an official constitutional role in determining our foreign policy.
Highlight of the council meeting: only six of the nine council members were willing to support a resolution to “condemn the mass murder of thousands of people on September 11, 2001, and express our profound grief at the atrocities last month that killed thousands of innocent people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, and acknowledge, honor, and support the heroic rescue efforts on the part of dedicated police and fire departments, and the city, state, and federal governments.” And actually, that language was a compromise; the original resolution expressed deepest sympathies for Afghan civilians, but not for those in the WTC.
It reminds me of what has always been the most absurd public body in America, the Cambridge Commission on Nuclear Disarmament and Peace Education, an official department of city government in Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley’s East Coast equivalent. I was visiting a friend at Harvard last year and saw a public notice of a special election they’d called — at significant public expense — to get Cambridge officially on the record against nuclear war. That’s what I look for in my local government: trash collection, pothole repair, and plans for ballistic missile reduction.
Oh, and the second link (a much happier one): pretty birds.