Author: jbenton

Yet another Wilmer-Hutchins story: “Classes at Wilmer-Hutchins High School nearly came to a sudden halt Tuesday — only a few hours after they began. District officials failed to repair the school’s faulty fire alarm system or seek a fire inspection before opening the school to students. Dallas fire officials threatened to shut the school down unless the district fixed the problem immediately or paid $50 an hour for a fire inspector to be stationed on campus. ‘It’s truly a recipe for tragedy,’ said Capt. Jesse Garcia, a Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman.'”

My daughters, when they arrive some years hence, are definitely going to rock camp.

Want your old iPod’s battery life to zoom up to 21 hours? Apparently, this $39 battery and five minutes with a nylon screwdriver can do the trick.
(Actually, five minutes with a nylon screwdriver can do a lot of tricks. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Thoughts from an ACL weekend:
– Best band: My Morning Jacket. As you might expect from a band that relies on reverb for so much of its sound, the slower, more mournful songs didn’t translate as well to the stage. But heavens to Betsy, they can bring the rock! Felt like I was at a Led Zeppelin show in 1971 on a few numbers. Jim James has one of the more lovely voices in the modern Southern rock canon, and his hair — a thick Allman Brothers swirl that at times rendered his face invisible — is clearly Olympic-class. And the best part is that the sonic assault made you forget how ludicrously bad all their lyrics are. (“Run Thru” was absolutely transcendent as long as you didn’t understand what James was saying.)
– Also excellent: Calexico. (They’re so consistently great. My mancrush on lead singer Joey Burns remains strong. And each time I see them, I realize even more what a great drummer John Convertino is.) The Pixies. (The band was solid and efficient, but the truly amazing thing was being packed sardine-style in a 50,000-person crowd, knowing that every last person there was about to pee his/her pants with excitement.) The Old 97s. (How these guys have not blown up is beyond me. They’ve got a very accessible sound, and they also kick ass.)
– Disappointing: Franz Ferdinand. (Not for anything they did — they were fine. But they were stuck on a small stage with a huge crowd, and the amps didn’t have nearly enough power to deliver the frenetic pace to the boonies. So for much of the crowd it ended up feeling like a fun show was going on in the next area code over.) Broken Social Scene. (Not awful, again. But inconsistent. Dragged in places.) Spoon. (Ended well, but the band started off slowly and the keyboards were miked all wrong.) Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. (Just like their records — interesting at first, quickly boring.)
– The bands were almost uniformly anti-Bush. Almost annoyingly so at times, no matter your political opinion. And not just the bands you’d expect, either — Flatlander Butch Hancock couldn’t go more than three minutes without a Bushwhack.
– Bruce Robison (whose name I will someday start pronouncing the proper “RAHB-i-son” instead of “ROHB-i-son”) did end up playing “Rayne, Louisiana,” the greatest song ever written about my hometown.
– Sarah, who was kind enough to host me for the weekend, has a cat named Lionel. Lionel may be the most dog-like cat I’ve met. (I last saw Lionel about a year ago, and I don’t remember him being so dog-like. I mostly remember him as being crazy.)
Lionel is graspy, needy, and overly affectionate — all in classic dog-style. When Sarah gets ready for work in the morning, Lionel’s been known to sprawl out in front of the door to prevent her from leaving. Sometimes he tries to hold the door shut with his paws.
At about 4 a.m. Friday night, as I slept on the futon in the living room, Lionel walked on my face. He was dragging a plastic stick with a feather on the end — one of those toys you use to torment cats. He wanted to play. It being 4 a.m., I didn’t. So I took the featherstick from him and flung it across the living room.
Mistake. I have now triggered the fetch reflex, deep in his cat-dog brain.
He scampered over, grabbed the featherstick and brought it back to me, dropping it on my face. We repeated the process three or four times before my sleep-deprived brain registered what was going on. I ended up sleeping the rest of the night on top of the featherstick — the only place I could think of to keep it out of Lionel’s view.
– If Austin hasn’t yet named “What Would Willie Do” its official theme song, it should get moving.

I’m heading down to the Austin City Limits Festival tomorrow. Are you going? If you are and want to hang out, call or text-message me on my cell.
By the way, I’ll be on TXCN again tonight.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Maud Newton is one of the world’s great humans. (Maud, I’m available for blurb duty on your next book jacket.)
The latest evidence is this article she wrote for Maisonneuve about blogging. Particularly paragraphs five and six of page two, in which my “mild exhibitionism” is outed for the literary world to see.
The fact Maisonneuve is Montreal-based continues this site’s habit of being hopelessly overexposed in the Canadian media (National Post, Toronto Star, Shift, the CBC). Uncle Sam’s scribblers have been less receptive.

Russia doesn’t get much attention in the American press any more, unless a couple hundred kids get murdered in a school. But if you worry about global stability, this TNR piece is worth your time. I honestly had no idea how screwy Putin was getting.

There is much to love about The New York Times, but I am constantly surprised by its journalists’ capacity to be elitist, self-important assholes. This brief interview with America’s new poet laureate — who has apparently committed the capital offense of living in Nebraska — drips with snobbery and condescension. “But you must know of Czeslaw Milosz, the much-beloved Polish poet who recently died.” (“And surely I must find a way to work his name into the Times, so I can show all my fellow Cornell grads that I still read The Paris Review.”) So much posing for peers, so little humanity.

Today marks crabwalk.com’s third birthday.
(At least in its current form. It had a few abortive previous lives before the ol’ orange-and-yellow look arrived on Sept. 15, 2001.)
For the stat hounds in the house, I’ve posted 1,595 entries in the last three years. You (and your kind) have posted 2,597 comments. (Minus the hundreds of spam comments I’ve deleted.) That works out to 1.45 posts and 2.37 comments per day.
The top 20 search terms people have used most often to find this site: myskina, polier, nude, alexandra, anastasia, naked, topless, the, photos, sharapova, and, elisabeth, mix, kieselstein-cord, photo, alex, ohno, maria, pictures, lyrics.
You’ll notice a lot of hot naked women’s tennis players, mix CDs, Apolo Anton Ohno (the short-track speedskater), Elisabeth Kieselstein-Cord (the lovely young Manhattan heiress), and Alex Polier (the young woman who allegedly had a fling with John Kerry).
Other common search terms over the years: A.J. Hammer, Michael Pitts, Jamie Sale, fainting goats, Suzy Kolber, Tupac’s autopsy photos, Freelance Hellraiser, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, Eran Karmon, Sofia Lidskog, and turducken.
In all, someone’s followed a link here or typed crabwalk.com into a browser more than 300,000 times. Thanks for reading.

Another Dallascentric link: Jim Schutze has a very good column in the current Observer. The “Laff in the Dark” stuff is fascinating.