Author: jbenton

Good description of the overhyped Jack radio format: “You can expect anything, so long as you only expect stuff that’s been played at proms and wedding receptions within the last 30 years.” I love their billboards around Dallas, which are supposed to show the enormous range of music they play — everything from the Cars to the Fixx! Wow, what range!
Here’s my story from Friday’s front page. I would have linked to it Friday, if my web host hadn’t gone through ANOTHER server crash and erased all of crabwalk.com AGAIN. Luckily, I had a backup and lost nothing. Now, just to find the time to transfer to my other host…
Friend Of Crabwalk Molly is blogging from Ghana, where she’s on a three-week reporting trip, the lucky ducky.
The Failed States Index. Unsurprisingly, Africa’s a big mess by this measure, but I felt a sort of pride when I saw Zambia is apparently at no risk for governmental collapse. (On the map, it’s the butterfly-shaped black smudge in south-central Africa, surrounded by a sea of reds, oranges, and yellows.

Music roundup:
Sufjan Stevens covers R.E.M. (To so-so effect.)
Sufjan Stevens covers the Beatles. (And kinda kicks ass.)
Sufjan Stevens plays a full concert, now illicitly available for convenient download. (And covers Francis Scott Key again.) Better sound quality at this show.
16, Maybe Less, the first track to leak from the inconceivably anticipated (by me, at least) Calexico/Iron & Wine collaboration. I think Sam Beam’s voice and John Convertino’s drums were meant for each other.
Jeff Mangum lives! This can only be good news, since it brings us ever-so-incrementally closer to the day that a followup to “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” hits stores. Krappy video here.
Newish Decemberists song, “Kingdom of Spain.” And, for the hell of it, “The Bandit Queen,” originally planned for the last album but declared too silly. (This version, from a live performance on Austin’s KUT, is the only I know to exist.)
Dallasites, prepare for the arrival of the Wrens on August 27. Decemberists and Built to Spill in September, and Calexico & Iron & Wine in October.
Finally, it’s about time someone created a Katrina Kerns Appreciation Society, in honor of the finest fashion model/Sufjan backup singer of All Time.

Unusual: Visitors to the No Child Left Behind page on the Texas Education Agency’s web site are greeted with a quote from Emma Goldman. It’s a fuzzy little quote about kids, but Emma Goldman? The “anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches”? On a Texas state government web page? Unusual.

What business can learn from open source. “I suspect professionalism was always overrated– not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.”

We Stand on Guard for Thee: Canada’s Comic-book Heroes. Including Canada Jack: “This acrobatic adventurer first appeared in the March 1943 issue of Canadian Heroes, a comic published by Montreal’s Educational Projects. Jack was athletic, but wasn’t endowed with superhero-level powers; he fought evil as an accomplished gymnast, horseback rider and jiu-jitsu expert. Unlike Johnny Canuck, most of Jack’s adventures kept him on the homefront fighting saboteurs, kidnappers, firebugs, and POW escapees. He was helped by members of the Canada Jack Club, a children’s group organized to support the war effort.”

I’m back!
For those who didn’t figure it out, the web hosting company that is home to crabwalk.com was befallen by a very unfortunate circumstance about two weeks ago. That unfortunate circumstance was letting its servers go too long without preventative maintenance and watching the whole shebang crash — without there being any backups of user data.
In other words, crabwalk.com was gone.
The hosting company told us customers a data-recovery process would bring back “95 to 100 percent” of the files our web sites are built on. After two weeks of delays, it turned out that, in my case at least, the more precise number proved to be zero percent. The big goose-egg. That includes crabwalk and five other sites I run, all toast.
The only saving grace was that the underlying database that runs crabwalk was untouched, so I could rebuild a big chunk of the site with some techsweat. And judicious use of search functions, the Wayback Machine, and every last corner of my hard drive has brought back nearly every last byte of crabwalk. (As far as I can tell, the only thing irredeemably missing is a scary old photo of Suze Orman. Sadly, it appears lost to the ages.)
Anyway, poke around and let me know if there’s anything that seems off. Over the next few days, I hope to get my other sites back online.
And, oh yeah, I just got back a few hours ago from vacation in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It rocked. Perhaps more about that later, including my secret plan to become Uruguay’s benevolent philosopher-king.

Big moment in Belo journalism history today: On the front page of today’s Al Dia (our Spanish-language daily), the words “fuck you” appear in a photo caption, uncensored and unashamed.
Of course, the words are in English. I wonder if the DMN can publish swear words, but only in Spanish.

“An hour later, it was a nobody’s market.”

Search terms used in the last 24 hours to find crabwalk.com: “drum bass mc fries burger let me repeat your order”; “Anastasia Myskina naked”; “jamie sale naked”; “venus williams naked”; “kim clijsters nude”; “fantasy football draft topless”; “can you find me any mp3 downloads of alien ant farm for free”; “underage girl pics (16 years old).jpg”; “who is paying money for tupacs autopsy photos”; “lyrics love is like the border between greece and albania”; “hooters toledo ohio 2001.”

Best-selling music artists of all time. The list starts out normally enough (The Beatles, Elvis, Abba, Led Zeppelin). But at No. 5 comes…Alla Pugacheva?
Alla was/is apparently the biggest pop star in Russian history. Although it’s rarely a good thing to have this in your bio: “Although hugely popular in Russia and other former Soviet republics among older generations, she is also widely disliked by many, not least for the amount of airtime given to her by the Federal channels and the continual gossip about her life in popular tabloids. For many she epitomizes the stale, repetitive, state-endorsed pop-culture fed to the population through the media.”
Or: “Pugacheva is also credited (and blamed too) for helping many young and unknown artists to rise to fame. Although most of them have become pop stars of often dubious talents, some of them later became such rock legends as Slava Butusov of Nautilus Pompilius.”
Of note is the fact she was named the “National Artist of the Soviet Union” in 1991, which of course led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union later that year.
And this priceless line, which actually makes me applaud her cheekiness: “While never directly opposing the Soviet regime, her outspoken and unrestrained manner of behaviour, such as saying ‘Cheer up! Ho Chi Minh may be dead, but I’m still alive!’ at a concert held on the day of Ho Chi Minh’s death, would have constituted grounds for regulatory action or even arrest.”