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Music geeks like myself will likely enjoy Sound Opinions, a weekly Chicago radio talk show hosted by Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, rock critics of that city’s Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively. It’s meant to be the rock equivalent of what Siskel & Ebert used to be. Good stuff. Streaming audio’s at the web site.

Growing up in south Louisiana, I always had an inkling the local newspaper in Lafayette, The Daily Advertiser, was a little bit corrupt.
Maybe it was the fact that, through decades of publishing, it had never once exposed a single iota of government malfeasance. (“Government corruption? In Louisiana? Never!”) But, then again, that could just be a sign that it’s an awful newspaper, not necessarily one on the take.
Maybe it was the 1980s case of Gilbert Gauthe, the first nationally prominent child-molesting priest, who did his dirty work about eight miles from my house. The Advertiser, enthralled to the powerful local Catholic Church, buried the story on inside pages, even when it was making the national evening news shows. It was left to the area alt-weekly to do all the good journalism on Gauthe. (Sadly, The Advertiser has since bought out and neutered the alt-weekly.)
But the final confirmation of my anti-Advertiser feelings came last week, when I read about a lawsuit, D’Aquin v. Wright. Richard D’Aquin was the publisher of The Advertiser; Bob Wright is a lawyer in town who, in the mid-1990s, wanted to attract a minor-league hockey team to Lafayette.
According to the suit, Wright came to D’Aquin with a deal:
Skew the newspaper’s coverage of Wright and the hockey team in a positive direction. Write lots of articles saying how great having the team’s going to be. Use your sports reporters as cheerleaders. Ignore the negatives of the city shelling out tax money to attract the team.
In exchange, Wright promised D’Aquin an ownership share of the team, worth about $400,000.
To recap, the publisher accepted a secret bribe to alter his newspaper’s coverage.
Wright never gave D’Aquin the money or the ownership. So now, D’Aquin is suing Wright to be reimbursed.
To recap, the publisher accepted a secret bribe to alter his newspaper’s coverage — and is now suing the briber for breach of contract!
It’s a wonderful world we live in. (By the way, this D’Aquin fool also doubles as vice chairman of the Louisiana Board of Regents, the agency that runs the state’s universities. It’s a plum gig. He was appointed by Gov. Edwin Edwards, last seen in Fort Worth, reporting for his 10-year federal prison term. Wonder how D’Aquin got that job.)

Anyone looking for good Internet radio grooves will be happy to learn that, as of Monday, Soma FM is back on the virtual air.

I just got interviewed by The New York Times.
Not for a job. For a story on the CD Mix of the Month Club. Things are getting a little out of hand.
In other news, if you’re like me — a young Texas male with decent credit and a clean driving record — hunting for cheap car insurance, call Allstate. I had been paying $800 per six months with Progressive. I called Geico, and they wanted $1180! Allstate came through with a much more reasonable $450.
Interesting idea: Cityblogs.

Here’s my story from today’s front page. It’s the latest in the Schools That Work series, a great high school in El Paso, a mile from the Mexican border. (This is why I was in El Paso a couple weeks ago.)
Expect posting to return to a more user-friendly level shortly.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer. And not just because he’s followed my hoped-for career path (Washington Post to The New Yorker, with a little Canadian flava along the way) — he’s an intellectually interesting writer who does great profiles.
He touched up a bit of a fuss earlier this month, when he gave a speech at Harvard saying most profiles are shallow and awful. Gladwell said journalists fool themselves into thinking they know more about their subjects’ inner lives than they really do, and that their tendency to play “mini-shrink” makes him doubt the very legitimacy of writing standard profiles.
All interesting stuff to someone in my line of work, but here’s the key: look at the guy’s hair! That’s the best journalist hair I’ve ever seen! (For context, this is what he looked like on his recent book jacket.) I aspire to that sort of journofro.

I need some tech advice. I’m trying to copy a bunch of files from my old high school/college computer, which has spent the last six years in the smoke-filled home of my uncle. We can’t let cultural gems like COLLAPPS.DOC and RESUME.DOC disappear, can we?
Here’s the deal. It’s an ancient Compaq ProLinea 4/66. Its problems:
– Its monitor’s on/off switch doesn’t work. (I’ve solved this with the careful wedging of a toothpick.)
– The keyboard doesn’t work. I can’t do anything from the DOS prompt; all I can do is within the GUI installed on the poor thing, GeoWorks. (The mouse works fine.)
– The 3.5″ floppy doesn’t work. At first, I thought it was just the quarter-inch layer of accumulated junk. But after I cleared that away, I saw the metal guides inside the drive were warped into inappropriate shapes. I can jam a floppy in, but it doesn’t read.
So…anyone got any suggestions on how to get files from this aging PC? I’d love to hear either great ideas on alternate means of file transport (ideas involving the parallel port will get special credit) or from local Dallasites who have a replacement keyboard (PS/2) I could borrow for a few hours. Do they make floppy drives you can use via a parallel port with DOS?
All those with ideas that end up producing success will get the beverage of their choice, not to mention free copies of any of my Western Civ II high school essays.
One aside: I stopped by the neighborhood Radio Shack this afternoon to buy some floppies (back when I thought the 3.5″ drive worked). I asked where the floppies were, and the old man behind the counter pointed me to the corner — to a part of the store where it appeared no one had set foot since 1986.
First off, when I said “floppies,” he sent me to the boxes of 5.25″ floppies — yep, the old black ones. They had more 5.25″ disks than 3.5″ ones. Other sightings in the corner:
– A single box of (yes!) 8-inch floppy disks, coated in a decade-thick layer of dust.
– A graphics card for the Tandy Color Computer.
– A 128K memory card (yep, 128K, not 128MB) on sale for $39.99. (For those not up on memory price trends — yeah, both of you — you can now buy 512MB of memory for about $28. That would be 4,096 times as much memory.)

My quest for Total Canadian Media Domination is one step closer to completion. See this piece on yours truly in Monday’s National Post. Apologies to Fiona, the college girlfriend I exposed unintentionally as “fairly tone deaf.” Apologies also to anyone who had an image of me that did not involve me saying “like” too much. (Come on, Ms. Grice — clean up those quotes of mine!)

In case I’m ever feeling too good about myself, just remind me that one of my college classmates is now general manager of the Boston Red Sox.

Mickey Kaus reports back from his cross-country road trip. First off, good on him for picking the southern I-10 route — clearly the finest of them all, and not only because it threads its way through Rayne, my residence for the week.
His two most important observations:
– “Best radio station: KBON 101.1, Eunice, Louisiana.” Well, I could have told him that.
– “Friendliest people: New Haven, Connecticut.” Well, I could have told him that. The homeless people there are extremely nice when they ask for your money.
Vacation is wonderful.