Category: Uncategorized

Number of emails in my work inbox when I left last night at 7 p.m.: 30.
Number when I arrived this morning, thanks to SoBig.F: 1,218.
Time to log in: 39 minutes.
Number of hours remaining in my current stint at the DMN: 9 (roughly).

This one’s for the Harvard alums in the house.
In other news: one more day of work for me! Which, at the current rate, should mean only 2,596 more Sobig.F emails in my inbox. It’s slowed down our servers so much that it took me 40 minutes to log on to our network this morning — a process that normally takes three or four minutes.

Gallagher, watermelon smasher, runs for governor. Yeah, I know that D-list-celeb-runs-for-California-governor is already a worn meme, but this piece has that delicious WaPo Style section snark I so love.
The real reason I’m posting is this line:
He has a wad of 100 $20 bills in his pocket and later will get a room at the aptly named Governor’s House Hotel on Rhode Island Avenue NW.
When I move to D.C. on Labor Day, I’ll be living at the Governor’s House Hotel for nine weeks! There’s a chance, however slight, that I may get the Gallagher room! There may be melon bits in the curtains! Oh, joy!

How to Get Josh Unreasonably Mad, Part XXVIII: Talk to me about an educational topic. Disagree with something I’ve written. Then, instead of offering a reasoned, thoughtful basis for said disagreement, ask:
“Do you have any kids? How old are you, anyway?”
I’ll tell you the answers (no and 27, respectively), so come back with:
“Well, when you have kids, you’ll realize I’m right.”
How impossibly condescending. I always feel like saying, “Let’s see, is it your full-time job to write about education issues?” Or, “Have you always been the sort of blubbering cretin who can’t back up his arguments with anything other than calls to blind authority?” I was unaware that Scott Peterson, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein — parents all — had more automatic credence on education issues than I do.
It’s always best to do this at the end of a lengthy, rambling email with at least 18 factual errors, 11 illogical arguments, and five sentences that could only have been written by chimps.

One downside of my upcoming move to D.C.: I’ll have to live on my (slow) iBook for four months. No desktop tower power for me.
To help remedy that, I just bought the cutest little 60GB Firewire hard drive. And, as longtime readers know, that means I get to play my geek game of choice: the What-Character-In-A-Confederacy-Of-Dunces-Will-I-Name-This-Drive-After? game.
To recap: my main 80-gig boot drive is named Jones in honor of the janitor at the Night of Joy; my old 30-gig drive’s two partitions are named Ignatius (the protagonist, naturally) and Gonzalez (Ignatius’ boss at Levy Pants). My external 40-gig clunker is Mancuso after the Quarter-wandering patrolman; my iPod is Myrna after Ignatius’ love interest, and the iBook’s HD is named Miss Trixie after Levy Pants’ senile secretary. (Yes, I am a geek.)
I considered a few other character names for my new drive (Gus Levy, Lana, Dorian, Santa Battaglia, Darlene). I even considered a few terms that, while not character names, will forever be associated with the novel in my eyes (Boethius, Big Chief, Communiss, Dr. Nut). In the end, though, I decided to keep it real and pick the name of the novel’s one Cajun character: the suave (though a bit clueless) elderly gentleman caller, Claude Robichaux.
So while I’m wandering the village squares of Zambia in a few weeks, I’ll have a 60-gig Cajun by my side. Comforting.

I’ve talked up eMusic before — it’s the flat-fee, download-all-you-want digital music platform of choice in the crabwalk.com household.
But there evidently is one caveat. “Download all you want” is evidently only true to a point. Crabwalk reader (and ex-CDMOM trader) Scott emails:
Wow, thanks for introducing me to emusic! Of course, I started downloading the albums you suggested and ones from the cdmom’s, and now I have about 2,000 songs. I guess that is where the problem lies. I got an extremely vague email from emusic stating how I have downloaded too many songs. The main issue is that I have downloaded over 2,000 songs in a 30-day period, something that less than 1% of their customers have done or do. My problem is that they didn’t tell me what to do or what is going to happen. I want to download more, but I don’t want to get kicked off.
A couple days later, Scott got another email, booting him from the service.
A little Googling found this page, which indicates Scott isn’t alone. I can understand if eMusic wants to put some sort of cap on downloading, but I think being upfront about what that limit is is a prerequisite for kicking someone off, no?
Really, it’s hard to argue Scott’s been screwed, since 2,000 songs for the roughly $45 he probably paid (for a three month membership) isn’t a bad deal. (I’ve probably downloaded somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 songs, but over about six months.) But, still, it seems like a dose of bad faith from a company I didn’t have any reason to question before.

You know, I was really looking forward to today. Today was going to be the first day in almost two weeks I came to work at my normal hour and departed at my normal hour.
Well, the first half came true. But I’m also here at 11 p.m., writing about power outages 12 states away.

Summer 2001: Hoodlum breaks into my car, tries to steal CD player. Luckily, hoodlum is stoopid and can’t figure out how to get it out. Steals a cell phone.
September 2002: Hoodlum smashes left rear window, breaks into my car, successfully steals CD player. Also randomly pours a bottle of Coke on my backseat.
Last night: Hoodlum smashes right rear window (thank heavens for variety!), breaks into my car, successfully steals my CD player. Also takes about $40 (estim.) in change. Leaves my TollTag and my Texas state map.
All of these occur in a locked (or at least “locked”) garage. Just talked to the goonlets who run my apartment building — not even a “we’re sorry” or a “we’ll work on improving safety.” Just “There’s really nothing we can do” (!) and an explanation that, while they have security guards roaming the complex, they only work during the daytime. (Exact quote, I kid you not: “They have to sleep sometime.”)
So to Hoodlums No. 1 through 3 and the mind-blowing cretins at Post Properties, I give a rousing:
Thanks, assholes!

Not too long ago, I read something on The Toledo Blade’s web site about Pastor Michael Pitts of Cornerstone Church. (It’s in Maumee, a Toledo suburb.) It made me think back to when I was working for The Blade a few years ago and Pastor Pitts was in the news quite a bit.
You see, Pastor Michael Pitts was charged with several counts of exposing himself to strangers. I should make it clear that he was never convicted of any of these charges. (I want to make sure that his lawyers, wherever they may be, see I am making this clear.) But there was a significant amount of evidence that many people found quite convincing.
In 1995, he was stopped by police after allegedly being spotted masturbating in front of two young boys hitting golf balls at a local baseball diamond. Officials did not press charges after Pastor Pitts agreed to seek counseling with a psychologist who sees sex offenders, they said. (The Pitts camp claims the officials are lying.)
In 1997, he faced eight counts of public indecency and seven counts of criminal trespass, linked to a series of incidents in which a man matching Pastor Pitts’ description was reported exposing himself to people in places like a local park and a Wal-Mart parking lot. His car was spotted near where several of the incidents occurred.
Pastor Pitts hired some very fine attorneys and, in the end, all charges except for two criminal trespass misdemeanors were suddenly dropped. His final punishment: 14 days of house arrest with an ankle bracelet and a $500 fine. As part of the unusual plea agreement, both prosecution and defense agreed that neither side would be allowed to discuss the reasons for the sudden deal.
Pastor Pitts claimed complete vindication. Others were less sure.
Why am I bringing this up after the fact? Well, I Googled Pastor Pitts, and I was surprised to find that there was no mention anywhere on the Internet of his alleged indiscretions. None. There was also no mention of the fact that, in 2000, he was convicted of driving while intoxicated
That didn’t seem right.
Pastor Pitts is from that particular branch of Christianity that believes that being a holy man and making enormous profits from one’s church are not mutually contradictory. At least as of a few years ago, he was living in a half-million-dollar home on 30 acres, wearing designer duds, and driving a Cadillac. He blamed his problems on “media monsters.”
So that’s why, on this page, I’ve posted a few old articles from my old newspaper. I think anyone looking up the good pastor should have access to some information about his past, shall we say, issues.