Category: Uncategorized

Since I mentioned it once before, I feel it is my responsibility to keep you up to date on the Peter Buck trial. It seems that, along with damaging British Airways crockery, the R.E.M. guitarist also stands accused of other offenses, including “cover[ing] himself with yogurt” and “mist[aking] a hostess trolley for a CD player,” all while drunkenly crossing the Atlantic. I bet Osama’s linked up in this somehow.

I’d like to apologize for the entry below. I’m almost certain that my Secret Santa gifts in the 1980s did not include a Victor Borge biography. My mention of Mr. Borge, perhaps the greatest of the great Danes, was simply an attempt to get Google to send me some of the thousands of Victor Borge hits it no doubt generates. My apologies, and govern yourself accordingly.

Remember the Htoo brothers, Luther and Johnny? The Burmese preteens who, unlike most of their peers, channelled their feelings of aggression into forming an “Army of God,” not video games? Who toted assault rifles around the jungle, willing followers in their wake, but still found time for naps? Well, they could be coming to a junior high near you. The U.S. is close to giving the Htoos green cards. Now, it’s bad enough when the guy sitting next to you in your MBA class might well be responsible for the genocide of 800,000 people. But can you imagine going to eighth grade with these guys?

The tentative Crabby(TM) for Best Christmas-Related Web Idea goes to Secret Santa. Yep, it’s just like you remember it from grade school, except your gift gets chosen from your Amazon wish list instead of the fevered imagination of a 12-year-old.
I remember my first and only Secret Santa experience, sometime around eighth grade. We had a $10 spending limit, but were supposed to buy three things to give over three days. The guy I had picked was into music, so I hatched a brilliant scheme: buy two really crappy gifts for the first two days, to fool him into thinking he was getting screwed over, then spring a shiny new tape from one of his favorite bands on Day 3. (I remember the tape well: Pink Floyd’s Animals.) So on Days 1 and 2, he got books straight from the 50-cent shelf at a Lafayette, La. bookstore — I think one was on raising goats, maybe the other one was a Victor Borge bio, I don’t remember.
Anyway, so this guy spends two straight days complaining about how crappy his gifts are to everyone within earshot. I felt like explaining: Don’t you get irony? The humor inherent in intentionally bad gifts, soon to be redeemed by a slice of Floyd? By the time Day 3 arrived, I was completely disspirited, and the guy wasn’t all that impressed — he already had a copy of Animals.
So everybody sign up for Secret Santa, on the off chance we might pick each other and I might have a healing experience.

Attention Harry Potter fans: you may not know what evil you have unwittingly been exposed to! The always (unintentionally) amusing fundamentalists at ChildCare Action Project has come out with a scathing report on the new movie. Some of its startling findings (all italics mine):
– Harry Potter is “a colorful display of goth art.”
– “Harry Potter present[s] evil as something to admire and emulate.”
– “[W]hat better time to embrace evil in entertainment than now when we have kicked God out of schools, government and many, many homes and what used to be the family. I guess Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a logical extension of I Dream of Genie, Bewitched and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, all benevolent on the surface and all since we kicked God out of our schools.”
– “Part of the rivalry is expressed in broom-riding sports much like roller ball with as little concern for the safety of fellow players.”
– “By the way, Harry converses with a snake in this movie. Not a cow, not a dog, not a cat, but a snake. And one of the characters is 665.5 years old.”
The CAP scoring system dings movies for crimes against Christianity; in Harry’s case, these include:
– in the “Wanton Violence” category: “floating evil being drinking blood from an animal’s neck,” “ghost removing his head,” “great falls, repeatedly,” “beating of a child with a club by a giant troll, seeing the club hit the child, repeatedly,” and “crumbling flesh.”
– under “Impudence/Hate”: “brutal sports tactics with audience of children cheering it on,” “encouragement by an adult to a child to break the rules to get even,” “parents submitting to child’s creaming.” (I assume they meant screaming; if there was creaming in the movie, maybe it really should be banned.)
– under “Offense to God”: “magic to grow tail on a boy,” “magic to change flag colors,” “paintings with moving subjects, repeatedly,” “broom riding,” “cat with red eyes,” “Christmas without Jesus.”

I know times are tough for everybody, and that Oval Office gig he’d been betting on fell through unexpectedly, but it sure is odd to think of Al Gore taking a job with a diversified financial services firm. He’ll be vice chairman of Metropolitan West Financial in L.A. (Since he did invent the Internet and all, I hope he can improve their sorry web site.)
This makes me think Gore won’t run again in 2004. It really wouldn’t make sense politically for the guy who ran on a “I’m for the people, not for the powerful” platform to run after three years of working for The Man.
My favorite quote from the article: “Gore, who has been teaching college courses since he narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election, will focus on developing private equity strategies in the biotechnology and information technology fields as well as explore international markets for MetWest.” Oh, please! Gore’s a smart guy, but he knows roughly as much about developing private equity strategies in biotech as I do. Nice gig, if you can get it.

A lot of what we reporters do is awfully easy. What guys like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh do is awfully hard — digging out facts, linking them together, exposing things powerful people don’t want exposed. Felicity Barringer has a great piece in today’s NYT on what Bob and Sy, two old rivals from the ’70s and two of the greatest journalists of the last century, are doing in the wake of 9/11.
(Woodward, of course, is most famous for breaking Watergate. Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre, among other things. I’ll always root for Hersh over Woodward, if only because of what you can tell about them from this one great Barringer paragraph: “Those describing the 64-year-old Mr. Hersh dip into the basket of adjectives usually applied to small dogs

The latest issue of Editor & Publisher magazine features a (lengthy) profile of the Block family, who own my old employer, the Toledo Blade. I don’t get mentioned directly, but my 1999 trip on the company’s dime to Pitcairn Island in the south Pacific does, and I was involved, to varying degrees, in several of the stories mentioned.

Hello, Toledo! (Saying that’s just one small step below my ultimate fantasy, yelling “Hello Detroit! Are you ready to rock?” to a crowd of millions.) To the Toledoans who are reading this page for the first time — and I’m betting there are a few of you — welcome to my humble abode. Just so you know, you should feel free to leave comments on my stupidity by clicking on the link at the bottom of each entry. Suggested topics of discussion: that llama incident in 1998; my tendency to shake uncontrollably at the mention of Kid Rock; the Toledo five-day forecast. (Actually, everyone should feel free to leave comments: they’re the gasohol on which this fuel-injected blog runs.)

A new photo above means I’m on the move again. I unexpectedly have to work tomorrow, alas, but as soon as I’m done with a Japan story and fill out some Olympics-related forms, I’m off to my home town, Rayne, Louisiana, to be among my fellow Cajuns for a week of vacation. Among my projects for the week: a freelance Q&A with Michael Beschloss for the DMN, a bunch of freelance marketing copy for a Toledo company, sleep, a couple of new web projects, lots of Louisiana historical research, too many po-boys, too much crawfish etouffee and rice dressing (which uninformed New Orleanians and Popeye’s franchisees call dirty rice). It all sounds wonderful.