Category: Uncategorized

I am pleased to announce the return of Stupid McNupid, my pal Kelly’s blog, now safely hosted on my server, far away from the Blogger ills du jour.
Also, Texans can see me on rotation on TXCN for the next few hours, talking about federal education policy.

I volunteer at Sunset High School here in Dallas. Every week, I have to walk right past the home-ec room (or whatever it is they call home-ec rooms nowadays). They have the best-smelling cookies for sale, every morning. You can smell them three hallways away. I don’t see how anyone gets any work done.
On an unrelated note, everyone reading this should go to SXSW Interactive in Austin this March. Yours truly will be opining on a panel (alongside Matt Haughey and J.D. Lasica) about…um…something or another.

Mr. Blackwell’s annual list of worst-dressed celebs is out again. Anyone else wonder what Herr Blackwell does for the other 364 days out of the year, when he’s not thinking up bon mots about the ill-attired? (“Anna [Nicole Smith]’s fashion follies are the worst of the year…don’t bother with a new designer, Anna, just hire a structural engineer!”) Seems like a somewhat sad existence.
One thing we know he’s not busy doing: fixing his web site, last updated in 1997. And seriously, this man is a self-appointed arbiter of style? The man looks like the announcer on a Game Show Network rerun.

Is it just me, or is David Samuels the worst rock critic writing today? (One of life’s mysteries: how Slate can be so smart on political and business analysis and so bad on cultural coverage. I mean, abysmal.) He’s just so consistently disappointing — you can almost see the boys in Redmond thinking, “That David, he must be plugged in to what the kids like these days.”
This “indie-rock year in review” was an embarassment. (“The most important story of the year in indie rock is that Elliott Smith didn’t release a record…Only the redoubtable Cat Power (whose new record will be coming out in February on Matador), the queen of sadcore, continues to make the case for indie rock as a world apart.” Puh-leeze. Elliott Smith spending the year with a heroin needle in his arm instead of recording is the biggest story of the year? Only Cat Power is “keeping it real” [chest thump] by staying on an indie? The Guided By Voices record was the “best rock record of the year”? Somebody, pull this man out of 1996!)
And let’s not even discuss his claim that the Vines are better than the Strokes, the White Stripes, and the Hives. (“As a result, Highly Evolved now stands a mere 12,000 units away from the magic 500,000 threshold required for earning a gold record. So go buy it. That’s my advice. The Vines deserve a gold record as much as any band in the business

Good for Toledo — not every city could handle having a gay Hispanic ex-priest as the president of city council. I used to cover Louis Escobar, and he’s a good man.

Good profile in Sunday’s paper of Evan Smith, the New York-bred editor of Texas Monthly. Scary anecdote:
In 1994, when he briefly thought he would like to return to the East to work for another magazine, Mr. Smith and his future wife packed up to leave Austin. But first there were the magazines in the closet.
Over the years they had piled up