Category: Uncategorized

While I’m thinking of Cajun food: a little recipe for after your next Thanksgiving. Starring one cup bacon fat!
And while I’m thinking of Cajun things: I’ve always loved this description of the Savoy Saturday morning jam session outside Eunice. “All are invited to join in, no permission or approval is needed, but we ask only one thing: Please, no more than ONE triangle player at a time. If you’re wondering how to find the music center, just look for thirty cars lined up Hwy. 190 between Eunice and Lawtell. We are open for business, and admission is free, but a small box of boudin or cracklins would make you the most popular guy in there for about 2-3 minutes.”

Happy holidays!
By which I mean, happy Acadian National Day, the national holiday of my people. (The Acadians, careful readers of crabwalk know, were the French Canadians who evolved into the Cajuns of south Louisiana.) August 15 was chosen in 1881 at the first National Acadian Convention in Memramcook, New Brunswick; the day was the Catholic feast day for Our Lady of Assumption. It was chosen in part to separate the Acadians from the Quebecois and other French Canadians, who celebrated their day on June 24.
I don’t know what’s going on in Canada today, but this is a big year in Acadian history. It’s the 250th anniversary of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by the treacherous and villainous Charles Lawrence, which was happening right around this time of year in 1755. (Lawrence’s order came on July 28; the first wave of expulsions lasted through to September. Which reminds me: I need to finish A Great and Noble Scheme soon.)
So, celebrate by having some crawfish today. Actually, crawfish are out of season at the moment, and the only ones you can get are frozen tails imported from China. So…have an andouille sausage poboy instead. Maybe some catfish courtbouillon. Or some corn and crab bisque. Or some tasso jambalaya. Mmmmmmm.

The prez and his iPod. “He likes to bike with an iPod Shuffle and let the beat of country music pace him. He jokes that he can be alone even when he rides with someone: ‘I just crank up the Shuffle.'”
Seriously, though, that story is a P.R. man’s dream. Whoever arranged that outing for the White House got exactly what they wanted from the reporter.

Good description of the overhyped Jack radio format: “You can expect anything, so long as you only expect stuff that’s been played at proms and wedding receptions within the last 30 years.” I love their billboards around Dallas, which are supposed to show the enormous range of music they play — everything from the Cars to the Fixx! Wow, what range!
Here’s my story from Friday’s front page. I would have linked to it Friday, if my web host hadn’t gone through ANOTHER server crash and erased all of crabwalk.com AGAIN. Luckily, I had a backup and lost nothing. Now, just to find the time to transfer to my other host…
Friend Of Crabwalk Molly is blogging from Ghana, where she’s on a three-week reporting trip, the lucky ducky.
The Failed States Index. Unsurprisingly, Africa’s a big mess by this measure, but I felt a sort of pride when I saw Zambia is apparently at no risk for governmental collapse. (On the map, it’s the butterfly-shaped black smudge in south-central Africa, surrounded by a sea of reds, oranges, and yellows.

Music roundup:
Sufjan Stevens covers R.E.M. (To so-so effect.)
Sufjan Stevens covers the Beatles. (And kinda kicks ass.)
Sufjan Stevens plays a full concert, now illicitly available for convenient download. (And covers Francis Scott Key again.) Better sound quality at this show.
16, Maybe Less, the first track to leak from the inconceivably anticipated (by me, at least) Calexico/Iron & Wine collaboration. I think Sam Beam’s voice and John Convertino’s drums were meant for each other.
Jeff Mangum lives! This can only be good news, since it brings us ever-so-incrementally closer to the day that a followup to “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” hits stores. Krappy video here.
Newish Decemberists song, “Kingdom of Spain.” And, for the hell of it, “The Bandit Queen,” originally planned for the last album but declared too silly. (This version, from a live performance on Austin’s KUT, is the only I know to exist.)
Dallasites, prepare for the arrival of the Wrens on August 27. Decemberists and Built to Spill in September, and Calexico & Iron & Wine in October.
Finally, it’s about time someone created a Katrina Kerns Appreciation Society, in honor of the finest fashion model/Sufjan backup singer of All Time.

Unusual: Visitors to the No Child Left Behind page on the Texas Education Agency’s web site are greeted with a quote from Emma Goldman. It’s a fuzzy little quote about kids, but Emma Goldman? The “anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches”? On a Texas state government web page? Unusual.

What business can learn from open source. “I suspect professionalism was always overrated– not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.”

We Stand on Guard for Thee: Canada’s Comic-book Heroes. Including Canada Jack: “This acrobatic adventurer first appeared in the March 1943 issue of Canadian Heroes, a comic published by Montreal’s Educational Projects. Jack was athletic, but wasn’t endowed with superhero-level powers; he fought evil as an accomplished gymnast, horseback rider and jiu-jitsu expert. Unlike Johnny Canuck, most of Jack’s adventures kept him on the homefront fighting saboteurs, kidnappers, firebugs, and POW escapees. He was helped by members of the Canada Jack Club, a children’s group organized to support the war effort.”

I’m back!
For those who didn’t figure it out, the web hosting company that is home to crabwalk.com was befallen by a very unfortunate circumstance about two weeks ago. That unfortunate circumstance was letting its servers go too long without preventative maintenance and watching the whole shebang crash — without there being any backups of user data.
In other words, crabwalk.com was gone.
The hosting company told us customers a data-recovery process would bring back “95 to 100 percent” of the files our web sites are built on. After two weeks of delays, it turned out that, in my case at least, the more precise number proved to be zero percent. The big goose-egg. That includes crabwalk and five other sites I run, all toast.
The only saving grace was that the underlying database that runs crabwalk was untouched, so I could rebuild a big chunk of the site with some techsweat. And judicious use of search functions, the Wayback Machine, and every last corner of my hard drive has brought back nearly every last byte of crabwalk. (As far as I can tell, the only thing irredeemably missing is a scary old photo of Suze Orman. Sadly, it appears lost to the ages.)
Anyway, poke around and let me know if there’s anything that seems off. Over the next few days, I hope to get my other sites back online.
And, oh yeah, I just got back a few hours ago from vacation in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It rocked. Perhaps more about that later, including my secret plan to become Uruguay’s benevolent philosopher-king.

Big moment in Belo journalism history today: On the front page of today’s Al Dia (our Spanish-language daily), the words “fuck you” appear in a photo caption, uncensored and unashamed.
Of course, the words are in English. I wonder if the DMN can publish swear words, but only in Spanish.