Author: jbenton

I’m moving to a new apartment next weekend (boring story, don’t ask), so I’m in the midst of a pre-move life cleansing. Selling old books to Half Price Books. Throwing out ancient clothes. Just generally trying to trim my personal bundle of belongings.
The true beneficiary of all this may be you, The Reader, since I have tentative plans to post photos of, among other things, my past fashion mistakes. (For example, there was a period when I wore green pants almost every day. With sweater vests. Yes.)
As a taste: I was cleaning out my bathroom cabinet and throwing out things that have expired. The best of the bunch was a Visine bottle that had expired in December 1994. More than a decade ago. I (or, more likely, my grandmother) must have bought it after high school graduation, apparently working from the belief that no man should go off to college without eye drops.
Thankfully, I don’t think I’ve needed eye drops once during that time. Truth be told, eye drops kinda freak me out.

Would you like to be one of the so-called “literary journalists”? The sort of scribe whose byline evokes a sort of intellectual respect, the kind of scribbler who gets months or years to craft a magazine piece of sterling clarity? Would you someday like to call John McPhee your spiritual godfather?
May I suggest a three-step process?
1. Buy The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton. It’s a series of interviews with lit-j superstars on their jobs: how they find stories, how they interview, how they organize, how they write. It’s refreshingly craft-oriented and practical. Writing is a solitary profession, and it’s great to see the quirky systems writers assemble for themselves to be productive. (Gay Talese’s involves a pair of binoculars, corkboard, and a photocopier set at 67% zoom.)
The list of interviewees is impressive: Talese, Susan Orlean, Ron Rosenbaum, William Langewiesche, Michael Lewis, and my personal idol Calvin Trillin.
2. Buy The Complete New Yorker Book and DVD. Yes, it’s $100. (Actually, just $63 at Amazon.) But come on! It’s eight DVDs with the complete text of every issue of The New Yorker, 1925 to the present.
Seriously, the complete text. Which means you get a healthy subset of everything ever written by all those folks listed above. The complete A.J. Leibling! All the Malcolm Gladwell you can handle! Calvin Trillin’s brilliant U.S. Journal stories from the ’70s! McPhee McPhee McPhee! Sy Hersh after Sy Hersh! White and Lardner and Angell, oh my! “In Cold Blood,” “Hiroshima,” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in the orignal forms!
This may expose me as a geek, but I’m about to wet my pants with excitement.
3. Work really hard.

My knowledge of women’s clothing is limited to the chiffon sundresses I wear on hot summer days. That and the thongs I wear to eliminate awkward panty lines. And those cute midriff-exposing cut-off t-shirts!
But enough about my fictional crossdressing. Erin McKean, Friend of Crabwalk and occasional commenter ’round these parts, has launched A Dress A Day. You’ll never guess what it is: a web site featuring a dress each day! Strangely enthralling.
Erin’s day job is chief wordslinger for Oxford’s American dictionaries. And sorry guys: she’s taken.

Here’s today’s Wilmer-Hutchins story. “Dallas schools officials seem ready to take on the students of Wilmer-Hutchins

Great moments in public relations: “In a famous 1971 interview on ‘Face the Nation,’ the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, ‘Some women would prefer having smaller babies.'”

Good American Music Club live performance from Irish TV. (Although Vudi, the lead guitarist, is missing for some reason — leaves the sound a little hollow. Still, Mark Eitzel seems to be in particularly good voice.)

Apparently my employer has purchased Google AdWords for my name. In other words, search for me in Google and this ad pops up on the results page: “Read your favorite columnists in the Dallas Morning News. It’s Free!” (It only shows up about half the time, so reload if you don’t see it.) Coolio.

Street Fight, a documentary on the bruising 2002 Newark mayoral race. That’s the race that was lost by Obama-before-there-was-an-Obama Cory Booker, who used to be my polisci T.A. in college. Watch the trailer to see a political machine in action.

Congrats to my cubicle neighbor Kent Fischer — both for his impending fatherhood and for getting said fatherhood written up in the sports section of The Boston Globe. I must say, I was not expecting to see his child’s conception detailed in a major metro daily.

This post is for two groups of crabwalk.com readers: Canadians and Louisianans, particularly geeky types ages 20 to 35.
Does this sound familiar?
It may be just 10 seconds of weird synth burbling, but oh! the memories it brings back! That’s the theme song for Parlez-Moi, one of the most bizarre and memorable programs of my youth.
In it, great Canadian clown (there’s a phrase you weren’t expecting to read today) Marc Favreau portrays the sad clown Sol, who gets into a series of wacky adventures — most of them involving him goodnaturedly screwing something up. Episodes included “Sol Minds the Fruit Store,” “Sol at the Hairdresser’s,” and the thriller “Sol and the Tomatoes.”
The key thing was that Sol would have his misadventures in French — then Marc Favreau would come out and tell the audience what all the words meant in English. Real learning! It was originally produced by TVOntario to heal the linguistic divisions of our great northern neighbor, but in the 1980s, Louisiana Public Broadcasting licensed the rights and showed it to impressionable youth like me. (A variety of political forces were advocating for building a new generation of francophones back then.) Anybody else remember this?
Not that I knew it at the time, but apparently Sol was originally a political clown.
While I’m rummaging through childhood memories, here’s the theme to Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. (More.)