Author: jbenton

gatlinburg

It’s amazing how a web site can bring back childhood memories long thought buried. (Or long hoped buried.) When I was growing up, we took a grand total of four vacations. We went to the Alabama coast once. We went to Washington, D.C., once. And twice we went to see the many splendors of the tourist traps of Tennessee.
Said tourist traps are mainly clustered in two places: Gatlinburg/Pigeon Falls, in the Smoky Mountains, and greater Chattanooga. In Pigeon Falls, they had, among other things:
– the Dolly Parton statue (not far from Dollywood, which we never could afford)
– the Elvis Presley Museum, featuring the King’s nasal spray applicator (and don’t forget Lou Vuto’s famed Elvis impersonation at the Memories Theatre)
– the Police Museum, featuring the life story of McNairy County Sheriff Buford Pusser, who was shot eight times and knifed seven more (I have a very strong childhood memory of the sign at the entrance: “We Have Buford Pusser’s Death Car”)
– a Ripley’s museum (which had a very freaky photo of the guy with the two irises in each eye — come on, you know the guy I’m talking about)
The Chattanooga metroplex offers less kitschy variety, perhaps, but plenty of weirdness. There’s Lookout Mountain (“See Seven States!” I’ve always dreamed of seeing Alabama and Mississippi at the same time), Ruby Falls, and the super-bizarre Rock City, which had enough freaky LSD-influenced gnome-like figurines to haunt a kid’s dreams for a year.
Actually, I think I’ll go rebury those childhood memories right now.

sports ratings and cipro

If you’ve ever wondered what America’s real national pastime is, consider this: the meaningless, awful Monday night football game between the Cowboys and Redskins — who were 0-8 going into the game — got higher ratings than the fifth and decisive game of the Yankees-A’s playoff series, featuring two of the best pitchers in the game. Clearly — and a bit sadly — football is king.
In unrelated news, I’m probably less worries about anthrax than your average American. (This despite the fact that I work in a newsroom. A newsroom that, for several months earlier this year, was the subject of weekly protests by local Muslim groups because of our reporting on their alleged links to terrorist activity. In the medical business, I believe those things would be known as “risk factors.”) When I went to China this summer, my doc prescribed me Cipro, and I took a few over there. Little did I know there’d be a shortage of the drug a few months later, since it’s the only drug approved for anthrax treatment. So I’ve got to have some resistance built up, right? And I’ve still got a few pills left, so if any of you end up handling suspicious white powders (and you’re not just a cokehead), I can hook you up.

osama’s phone number etc.

Want to give Osama a piece of your mind? According to this article, his satellite phone number is 00873 682505331. (In the U.S., you’d preface that with an 011. The number was revealed during the New York trial of the previous WTC bombers.) Calling it currently gets you a message that Osama “is not logged on.” (That’s one way of putting it.)
That’s one of the many ironies of all this mess: this guy wants us all to devolve to the Middle Ages, right? In his speeches, he obsesses about historical wrongs done to Islam centuries ago, like the conquest of Andalusia in the 1490s. But he’s a techie gadget hound who has an Inmarsat sat-phone. As Maureen Dowd put it after Osama broadcast his appeal last week, “It’s utterly ridiculous, like being at war with the Flintstones.”
This Seymour Hersh piece in next week’s New Yorker has been getting a lot of advance buzz for a couple of weeks. It’s all about the connections between the Saudi royal family and Osama. Haven’t read it yet, but will soon.
The reason I haven’t read it yet is that I’m too busy reading up on the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, which injured more than 5,000 people. It’s one of the closest precursors to the WTC attacks I can think of — I’m hoping to write about it when I’m in Japan in a couple of weeks. But at the moment, I’m hiding this fact from my dear grandmother, who just about has a heart attack everytime I go overseas, even when it’s not on the heels of a major terrorist attack. I’ve made it clear that not many Islamic fundamentalists live in Japan, and I think she’s generally okay with my going. But she really doesn’t need to know about nerve gas attacks injuring thousands in the subways I’ll soon be riding on.

driver’s license

Got my Texas driver’s license this morning — 13 months after I moved to Dallas and mere days before my Ohio license expires. (That license would be the one that had my eye color listed as “unknown,” like I’m some sort of shapeshifter or something.)
Anyway, I went through what’s become a regular ritual: fudging on the vision test. I have great, borderline supernatural vision when both my eyes are open. But my left eye on its own is farsighted. Luckily, driving with both eyes open is legal in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and as long as I’m not suddenly blinded in my right eye by a passing motorist, I’m fine. So everytime I get a vision test, there’s this moment of tension when I wait to see if the DMV employee is willing to give me, say, 30 attempts to read Line 5. “Let’s see…it says 534271. No, 846202. Actually, it must be 832027. Maybe 934605?”
Thankfully, my DMV patron was very cool. When I started Attempt #7 with an 8, she quickly said, “Yes! 8 is the first number!” And the best news of all: my new Texas license is good until 2007, by which point I’ll probably just break down and get glasses, anyway. Unfortunately, that also means I’ll have this shaggy half-ass hairdo and pathetic facial hair on my official record for six years.

injured wrist

Making up stories is fun! I’m walking around the office with an Ace bandage on my damaged left wrist, and admitting I wiped out in my parking lot on my bike is no fun at all. You tell me which storyline I should use:
1. “I broke it during a ritual gang initiation Saturday night. I’d advise you no longer wear the color red in my presence.”
2. “It’s the ancient Chinese tradition of hand binding. It’s a lot like foot binding, except, um, with your hand.”
3. “I heard Cate Blanchett digs guys with Ace bandages.”
4. “I heard Ashley Judd digs guys with Ace bandages.”
5. “I heard Natalie Portman digs guys with Ace bandages.”
6. “Oh, that? Just an old Yahtzee injury.”

biking

When there’s actual dust collecting on your bike, you know it’s been a while since it’s seen any use. So today I decided to head to the Katy Trail and bike 10 or 15 miles. I hopped on, headed out the door, and proceeded to wipe out in my parking lot within 15 seconds of leaving.
I must have been distracted by something, because when I looked up there was a parked car right in front of me — right in a parking spot, where parked cars are supposed to be, that sneaky devil — and my efforts to dodge it ended with much flesh-cement contact.
Usually, I have only my memories to remind me that I’m less than perfectly graceful; it’s nice to have the road burns and partially-functional left wrist to keep that thought front and center.

football recap

Rock climbing followed by football means soreness upon soreness. Maybe I should go running and complete a wussy personal triathalon. But at least I had a good game: four (!) touchdowns, two interceptions, several nice defensive plays. I think I’ll be able to try out for the Cowboys soon.
When we were done playing after about three hours, a group of us were sitting on the sideline, drinking water, enjoying the pain (and in the case of two players, smoking). Then this group of guys came over and asked us if we’d be willing to play against them for a while. It seems they’re practicing for this big touch football championship coming up in November, and they needed people to defend them for a while. Dog-tired but never ones to reject a challenge, we played. These guys clearly took thing much more seriously than we do — they had a playbook! With more than a dozen plays! They had a coach! When a route wasn’t run crisply enough, they’d talk about being two feet farther left or right, a degree of precision we don’t even have when we’re parking our cars, much less running pass patterns. Anyway, they smoked us good. But I did get a few nice views of the backs of their shirts as they ran past, at least.

rock climbing

Just got back from rock climbing in Carrollton. For those who haven’t been there, they’ve converted a bunch of old grain silos into climbing walls. (You can climb up the inside or the outside; as it was raining, we stayed inside.) They claim it’s the tallest indoor climbing gym in the world.
I fared okay, considering the last climbing I did was in college, and that was of buildings, not rocks. A great guy named Lukas lived across the hall from me freshman year — probably the most brilliant guy I’ve ever met. (He took fourth-year graduate-level theoretical physics as a freshman.) Among his (non-marijuana) interests was rock climbing; on a whim he entered a contest and won the Connecticut state rock climbing championship. But he did most of his climbing on the Gothic spires of our campus: they were convenient and fun to conquer. During spring semester, he lost his dorm room keys; instead of getting new ones, he just left a window open on the third floor and climbed in every day. I’ll never forget the look of horror on this one poor freshwoman’s face when Lukas appeared outside her fourth-floor window one night…