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I’ll be in Austin again Monday, so a quick post to tide you regular readers over. (Wouldn’t want you to think I was dead or something after a four-day no-posting streak.)
Went to see Best of AV Geeks 3 at the MAC Friday night. It’s a highly amusing traveling roadshow of six “mental hygiene” films, of the sort shown to bored schoolkids in the ’50s and ’60s. The films all had important messages to communicate, but sadly, the roadshow may not be coming your way anytime soon. So, as a service to my readers, I summarize the important moral lessons I learned from each film:
More Dates for Kay (1952): Girls, if you want to get dates, make sandwiches for boys. You can choose the boys and the type of sandwich at random. Have as many dates as possible so you won’t be tempted to see the same boy too many times and have sexual intercourse with him.
Teeth (1970): Dental care can be hip! Kids, if you’re in one of these new rock and roll bands, your future will be determined by the brushing patterns you make on your incisors each morning — after breakfast, not before. Girls who take care of their teeth are hot. (There was also something here about former Pres. William McKinley, but I couldn’t quite make it out.)
The Lunatic (1972): Try not to get V.D. Guys with beards and slightly shaggy hair have V.D., so you should avoid having sex with them. (Hey, wait a minute.) Men in turtlenecks are to be avoided. If you get V.D. and are ever on camera, look terribly depressed. All the people who work at the local clinic are either sweaty bald men with freakishly large love handles or nice black men with glorious Ben Wallace-style afros.
Purely Coincidental (an ’80s industrial-safety film): If there are metal shards mixed in with your dog’s food, he could die. Don’t drop spark plugs into barrels of ground meat. If you urinate on your hands, you should wash them, not run them through a vat of baby food. If your dog has died, the only appropriate thing to do is drink heavily, then shoot guns at smaller animals.
Parent To Child About Sex (1967): Masturbation is a perfectly natural thing. If a four-year-old asks how babies come out of their mommies, make the having-sex gesture with your hands and use the word “vagina” a lot. If the child doesn’t understand, she’ll probably just lose interest and move on to some other, more enjoyable topic. Sex education comes best from curt 60-year-old men who look like extras from Oliver Stone’s JFK.
The Huntsman (1972): If a bunch of Canadian hippies get your cowboy boots wet after stealing two golf balls from you, you have license to push their car into a river. But you’ll probably feel guilty afterward.
Not that you needed to be told that.

Ohio’s dirtiest politician finally gets nailed, and it’s about damn time. (Plus, if you look at the story now, you can catch an error common for quickly-filed stories that are written beforehand: “Throughout the xx-week trial (began Feb. 5)…”)

Truly amazing video for a great song. (If my band was still together, this is roughly what we’d sound like — loud and raw, with croaky vocals. I love songs whose guitar parts even I can play.)
On Monday, I have to have lunch with this handsome devil.

In Canadian media news (there’s a phrase that’ll drive the readers wild!): Saturday Night, Canada’s oldest magazine, relaunches Saturday after a several-month hiatus. A few years back, I’d heard great things about the magazine and the writers and editors it had produced (most notably for me Paul Tough, late of Open Letters and still of This (North?) American Life and the New York Times Magazine, which is the closest American analog to Saturday Night at its best).
I enjoyed reading it online, and when I spent some time in Nova Scotia in 2000, I loved it in print. Great, crisp writing, but the editing was just astounding, from story selection to the front matter to layout. Its owner, CanWest, shamefully shuttered it last year to cut costs.
I must say I greet the relaunch with some trepidation, since it’s been sold off to a company I know nothing about, Multi-Vision Publishing. Multi-Vision recently bought up Shift, another former favorite that seems to have lost a step. (Although the economy’s probably more to blame for that than anything Multi-Vision’s done.)
And most sadly, Saturday Night’s going from being a weekly included in the National Post to coming out only six times a year. And it looks like it won’t be available online — they’ve cut staff from 40 to eight, and I doubt any of those eight is web-dedicated. Plus, it’s evidently still going to be distributed solely in the Post, which means I probably won’t even be able to subscribe.
(I’d check the web site to see if subscriptions are available, but the old domain name just returns the cryptic tautology: “The domain saturdaynight.ca does not currently have a web site. As a result there is nothing to see at www.saturdaynight.ca.” Same for Multi-Vision’s site.)
But despite the dark signals on the horizon, here’s to a grand old magazine struggling yet again for breath. May it be as great in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.

You know what I hate? I hate it when, as a reporter, you know there’s a 95 percent chance someone is lying to you and cheating the public — but you know you’ll never be able to prove it. It just gets you into a funk. I got into this business to tell the truth, not to be a conduit for frauds.

Just got back from a local high school. In two places, the smell of pot was overpowering. It was like the dorm room across from mine freshman year. Not exactly conducive to education, I imagine.
I was there to meet with my Little Brother, who continues to not do so well. A suspension, referrals to the principal’s office, falling in sleep in class, not doing his work — I don’t have the highest of hopes that he’ll be a sophomore at this time next year.
In less depressing news, I figured my prize money for the Headliners should be spent on something less than critical, so as soon as UPS works its magic, I should be the proud owner of a Canon PowerShot A40. Who knows, this may be just what I need to expand my interest in angry weasel photos.

Hey Toledoans, it’s opening day at the brand new Mud Hens stadium. Watch it on MudHensCam!

I had a middling story in today’s paper, on the University of Texas’ efforts to attract minority students.
My boss is off this week, and we’ll see whether that will translate into my usual slackerly behavior. I hope not; I’ve got way too much work to do for that to happen. So, since I’ll be busy, a few stories far more interesting than mine to keep you entertained:
An interesting (okay, to me) repudiation of the broken-windows school of policing theory.
A slam on alternative medicine.
Lefties aren’t nearly as cool as they think they are.
Taki on what if the Germans won WWI.
An Australian on the lessons of American history.

Why it’s never a good idea to register domain names while drunk: About a year ago, my coworker Colleen dragged me kicking and screaming into the world of Survivor 2. At first, I was strong and resisted. But Colleen sat next to me, and her constant discussion of Outback goings-on was eventually too much to take. I had to watch. (To my credit, she was never able to drag me into Temptation Island, The Mole, or the myriad other “reality” shows she was and is addicted to. Also, Elisabeth was really all the motivation I needed to keep tuning in every week.)
Anyway, when the final episode came around, our local Dallasite Colby lost to an undeserving Tina. At a party a few days after the final episode, Colleen’s husband Eric and I were discussing the injustice of it all, when Eric had a brilliant idea for taking advantage of the media hype surrounding Survivor.
We should start a web site, he said. A site that claims that Colby deserved the million-dollar-prize he was unjustly denied — that indeed, Colby had already won in the eyes of Texas and the eyes of the world. The site would accept donations from like-minded folks who believed that Colby had made the show the success it was, not mousy Tina. The money would be donated to Colby (with, perhaps, a cut for us) to make up for his loss. We figured it’d be easy enough to get the Survivor-mad media to write about our little site. It was a sure-fire path to Internet stardom.
Colleen immediately pointed out a problem with our plan — if Eric and I were the front men for this little endeavor, we’d clearly appear to be obsessed with Colby in more than a television-fandom sort of way, if you get my drift. So she volunteered to be our female spokeswoman for media calls. So about four beers into the evening, I found myself giving my credit card information online and registering a domain.
Needless to say, this went nowhere. The shell of a dummy page was put up, but the idea was quickly forgotten. The media lust for all things Survivor faded.
And now, all that’s left is an email in my inbox telling me that colbywon.com will expire in another month. If you want to snag it after May 20, feel free.
Why it’s probably a good thing I cancelled my cable on Friday: See above.

Today should be another excellent day — opening day at The Ballpark, then an evening with the ponies and Willie Nelson at Lone Star Park.
In case anyone’s wondering why I was so happy yesterday, I found out I won a 2002 Headliners Award, which is the biggest honor in Texas journalism every year. (No link to a list of winners yet, so you’ll just have to trust me.) My coauthor Roy Appleton and I won in the Best Explanatory Journalism category, for the five-day dropout series we wrote last May.