Category: Uncategorized

Fametracker on teen cable starlets getting their own movies:
When we were kids, no one paid attention to cable shows because there was no cable. When we were kids, there were only three TV channels that mattered — ABC, NBC, and CBS — and only about eight TV stars in total. And TV only came on for two hours a day, from 10 AM to noon, and then it went off again and we all went back to tilling the fields.
And in our day, all the children on TV shows were played by adults, and the only “child”-star was Plug Whompers, the rascally urchin from the hit show The Ruinous Plow. And he was played by a forty-three-year-old actor named Scollard “Five Fingers” McCaffrey, who caused a national scandal when he married a horse, and who later drank himself to death.

Worst band name ever: Benton Falls. I don’t know what they’re trying to imply.

Careful readers of the Wall Street Journal — a demographic that almost completely overlaps with crabwalk.com readership, I might add — saw this story about linguistic shifts in the meaning of “Shut up!”
Particularly careful readers may have noticed the second person quoted is one Erin McKean.
But only I would be in position to know Ms. McKean is, in fact, the same Erin McKean who was until its demise an active trader in the CD Mix of the Month Club. You never know what celebrity CD you’re going to get in the mail!
As the kids might say, mad props to her. Next thing you know, she’ll have morphed into the next Robert Thompson.

Should-be rock star Joe Pernice (of the Pernice Brothers) on being offered a book deal:
Well, I was certainly intrigued. Even a little flattered. But to be honest, I had suffered through my share of paper writing in graduate school and had spent my last drop of critical juice back in 1997. By the time I finished my graduate degree, I was so burned-out on paper writing that I actually convinced an unsuspecting professor who was a distant fan of my first two records to let me write a ten page paper (my last) on postmodernism IN MY OWN MUSIC! Give me a break. I don’t know who deserves the bigger throttling for that one. Probably me.
By the way, you should buy Joe’s new album, due out on May 20. The two previous albums are also gems.

Fellow Mac geeks: Thinking of ways to get around the digital rights management encryption of songs bought via the iTunes Music Store? (Just for jollys, not for any evil intentions.) Just channel the sound through Audio Hijack or its pro version. (With the regular version you have to record into AIFF and then convert to MP3 in iTunes; with the Pro version, you skip the conversion step and go straight into MP3.) Works fine for me, and it strips out all encryption and usage limits.

Currently accepting applications for people to go to the Stephen Malkmus show Friday night at Trees with me.

If you’re going to dress up as an Iraqi official, you should at least have a better fake name than Niknak-Padiwak Givudogabon.

The best thing about Apple’s new iTunes Music Store: It hasn’t been around long enough for the recommendations system to make sense. (You know, the “If you like this CD, you’ll also like” thing that Amazon and others get from analyzing customer data.)
If you try to buy a track off 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the current number one recommendation is Paco de Lucia & Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. I had no idea 50 Cent’s bangers were all secret flamenco guitar aficionados.

Oh, and congrats to Molly, who somehow won $800 in a public speaking contest for memorizing her story about my burrito habits.

Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger. Crabwalk, although inclined by life experience among the Weisbergeresque to agree, takes no formal stance.
Got back from Chicago last night (mad shout-out to my education writer homeez!). Drank a lot of beer. Bought a sportscoat. Drank some more beer. Heard about a newspaper shutting down a reporter’s blog. Silently praised my employers for being more logical. Pledged more regular blog postings to satisfy the five readers left after the CDMOM shutdown. Drank beer.
Oh yeah, here’s my story from today’s front page, article no. 3,573,738 in my endless standardized testing death march.