Author: jbenton

This is the first image I’ve seen online of the damage to the Superdome roof.

Well, it’s amazing to think that the level of destruction New Orleans is experiencing could be good news — but compared to the extinction-level event that could have been, it feels like good news.
Apologies to the folks on the Mississippi coastline who took the brunt of Katrina after the storm took an ever-so-slight turn to the east. Good news for New Orleans, bad news for you.
The Times-Picayune web site is not being updated logically (like all Advance newspaper sites, it looks like ass), but here and here are the two weblogs they’re keeping on the storm.
Not to talk sports at a time like this, but I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the Saints’ future in New Orleans. A move to Los Angeles has been the buzz for some time now — in part because team owner Tom Benson claims the Superdome is a piece of crap and in part because he could sell the team to L.A. investors for, oh, a billion dollars or so.
The state has been unwilling to renovate or replace the Superdome, mostly because it’s not the piece of crap Benson says it is. Well, after today, it will be that piece of crap — chunks of the roof are already being ripped off. On the other hand, Benson will soar to All-Time Asshole status if he (a) tries to milk big payments out of the state after a natural disaster or (b) tries to skip town with the city’s beloved franchise at New Orleans’ lowest point. National and local stories about a Saints move to L.A. would have been negative before; now they’ll be downright vitriolic. We’re talking people showing up at his door with pitchforks and torches.

Jesus — I hope New Orleans survives this. That’s battlefront-level destruction they’re forecasting. I can only hope they’re wrong.
(For those who have wondered about my family, they’re farther to the west and almost certainly out of harm’s way. But losing New Orleans — and that’s the sort of phrasing people are using, “losing” New Orleans — would be an almost unmatched disaster. Been watching the Weather Channel, and even their guys are so freaked out they’re already 40 miles inland.)

“Men felt that intercourse was debilitating and male sexual strivings were thought to be a result of eating massive amounts of potatoes.”

Interesting summary of the legal back-and-forth that led to the firing of Bob Huggins, coach of the University of Cincinnati’s men’s basketball team.
I have hated Huggins for a long time. He specializes is recruiting talented thugs with daunting criminal records, telling them they don’t have to attend class, and using them until they were either thrown in prison or drop out.
(From one Internet post about the firing: “My favorite memory is when the player punched the police horse. No, it was when the one player used drugs and never got booted off the team. No, it was when the one player duct taped his roommate to the chair and beat him up. No, it was when the one player beat up his pregnant girlfriend and didn’t get booted off the team. No, it was when the one player stole the University phone charge number and ran up a big bill and never got booted.” Which doesn’t even mention Huggins’ own recent DUI conviction. Nor does it mention his graduation rate, annually one of the worst in Division I basketball. Which is like saying he’s a particularly short midget. Cincinnati went a multi-year span in the 1990s with a zero percent graduation rate.)
John Cheney, the coach of Temple, also recruits a lot of borderline case kids. But he does it with a real eye toward rehabilitation and pushing the kids toward graduation. As a result, he’s beloved by many. (Although he’s getting a little crazy in his old age.) Huggins is the mirror image: a user, a thug who spins through felons to get wins. I’m glad he’s gone.
Oh, wait — Nick Lachey likes Huggins. Didn’t realize that. Never mind, then.

Problem No. 1 with newspaper ombudsmen (this particular one being at The News & Observer, a fine newspaper in North Carolina): They write stupid columns selling out their own staffers for doing nothing wrong.
When are newspapers going to realize that bending over backwards to be avoid being offensive to every last busybody subscriber is the best way to become the most boring publication possible? That the reason newspapers read like thin cream of wheat is that we pay too much attention to hypersensitive readers who complain about anything we do?
And nothing — I mean nothing — makes me madder as a journalist than the ombudsman’s last couple of paragraphs, which essentially argue that the reporter in question is rendered incompetent when writing about children because she herself has no kids.
What complete and total bullshit. What a cowardly way to undercut a reporter. I suppose this means I’m not capable of writing about: black people, Hispanic people, Asian people; women; children; graduates of state universities; the left-handed; people who watch poker on television; vegetarians; and non-Cajuns, non-bloggers, and people over 30 or under 28.
Newspapers will keep circling the drain as long as we keep thinking offending one reader is a sign that a story shouldn’t have been written. More often than not, it’s a sign that it should have been written.
One other thing: The ombudsman endorses this statement from the newspaper’s high school sports editor:
“We go out of our way to accentuate the positive. We would identify the person who recovered the fumble rather than the person who fumbled, the player that intercepted a pass rather than the player who threw the pass, and the guy who scored the touchdown, instead of the guy who missed the tackle.”
If that’s a rule at the N&O, I’ve just lost a measure of respect for their very fine sports section. News is news, people, and keeping the name of the fumbler out of the paper is idiotic.

I’m pretty sure the assassination-is-okay-for-socialists doctrine is somewhere in Leviticus.

Here’s my column from today’s paper.
Number of minutes after I woke up this morning that I got my first angry phone call from a senior citizen: 6.

Sufjan Stevens live on KCRW. I link to it only because he reveals which states he’s considering for his next geography-driven album — Oregon, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. (At 22:00 in the video.) And, more importantly to me, he reveals that the New Jersey album will be a musical about the exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.
That is awesome primarily because, when that comes out, I will seem retroactively extremely cool. Because for several years in the mid-1990s my email signature was:
“Thomas Edison! Grover Cleveland! John Fenwick! Joyce Kilmer! Clara Barton! Vince Lombardi! Walt Whitman.”
I knew those names as the ones Jon Spencer yells out at the end of “Big Road,” on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width. (Which, by the way, was probably the first “indie” record I ever bought, back in 1993.) At the time, I didn’t know those names, aside from being fine citizens of New Jersey, were also all service areas on the Turnpike, along with Woodrow Wilson, Molly Pitcher, and James Fenimore Cooper.
(It may be a sign of my impending blog bankruptcy that I’ve been reduced to recycling posts from 2001. Not sure. Also, I’m using more italics these days, it seems.)

Hell yeah! My wee Cajun colleagues from Lafayette, Louisiana are kicking ass in the Little League World Series.
They played their first game Saturday and fell behind to the New England champs from Maine. They were down 2-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning. (Little League games only go six innings instead of the traditional nine.) So, what happens? Three runs! In the bottom of the sixth! Cajuns win!
(Coach: “This little team is a very confident club. They never lost their composure.”)
Today was game 2. Things weren’t looking good — the boys from Owensboro, Kentucky, took a commanding 8-1 lead in the third. Did Our Heroes wilt in the face of pressure? They most certainly did not! They began to chip away at the deficit — one run in the third, two in the fourth, then four more in the fifth.
In the bottom of the sixth, Owensboro retired the first two batters. Down to their final out, Our Heroes…bunt! And reach base! And advance to third on a timely single! And…throwing error! That’s a run! Cajuns win, Cajuns win!
These guys rock. They’ve got good Cajun names like Duplantis and Toups and Romero and Bergeron. As if that weren’t enough regional cred, they’ve got a sweet old grandma they call Nama who blesses them with a quick sign of the cross on their foreheads before each victory. (It doesn’t get much more Cajun than that, friends.)
Up next for Our Heroes is the villainous Rancho Buena Vista. Their star pitcher, Kalen Pimentel, just tied a Little League World Series record by striking out 18 batters. (For those good with math, 6 innings x 3 outs per inning = the dude struck out everybody.) And that’s just his pitching arm: he’s the “Barry Bonds of Little League,” who was recently batting .756.
I know nothing of this Kalen Pimentel boy. But I assure you that on Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time, on ESPN2, he will feel the mighty pincers of our crawfish-fueled Cajun heroes.
If not, I say check his pee for steroids.
(By the way, best part of any of these stories:
One thing the team and coaches have had to adjust to is the local cuisine. The first night the team sat down to supper, it was served what [head coach Mike] Conrad described as mashed potatoes on what looked like a waffle, all covered with a light tan gravy.
“They were all just staring at it, not one of them had a fork in his hand,” Conrad said.
Conrad said he’s been told help is on the way today, when families and other supporters travel north with boudin and cracklins. The coaches are hoping to see some Community and Mello Joy coffee coming up as well because the local java just isn’t measuring up. “Whatever this stuff is, we still haven’t figured out what it is yet,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t even wake you up.”
Trust me: a team high on boudin cannot be stopped.)
Finally, a shout-out to Buddy Guirovich, the “godfather of Lafayette Little League” and my middle-school gym teacher.