Category: Uncategorized

a bunch of stuff

I owe you guys some good posts. Much exciting stuff going on in my life, workwise and otherwise, but I shan’t go into too much detail. Random thoughts:
– Am I the only person who, when seeing Paul Giamatti in a movie, thinks of Wallace Shawn? And vice versa? Not because of physical resemblance, although there’s some there. Primarily because they’re both sons of men who you might imagine expected non-Hollywood careers for their offspring. (A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale, and William Shawn, legendary New Yorker editor and man quoted on this site’s About page.)
– I know I’m more likely than most to get excited about the release of 544-page, lengthily-subtitled history books about obscure moments in Atlantic Canadian history. But I’m really excited about next month’s release of A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland, by Yale history prof John Mack Faragher. I’ve been interested in the 1755 expulsion for years (for obvious personal reasons, since it was my ancestors who were expelled), but I really look forward to a historian of Faragher’s rank cutting through some of the self-serving mysteries that cling to the events of 250 years ago.
– Mac geeks like myself are always trying to figure out what’s coming up from our favorite company. That’s mostly done through rumor sites — a dozen or more sites that chronicle leaks from Cupertino on what new products are coming down the pike. The best of these has long been Think Secret, which seems to clearly have the best sources and generally nails its predictions — so much so that it’s currently the target of a trade-secrets lawsuit by Apple.
Anyway, I mention all this because it turns out the guy who runs Think Secret is a 19-year-old kid. Who has been running Think Secret since he was 13. Sign this manchild up, news organizations of the future! (By the way, Apple’s lawsuit is bullshit and will go nowhere. Journalists can’t go to jail in this country for asking questions, thank heavens.)
– Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers, in Wired. Exhibits A through L of why I don’t blog about what I write about (other than to link to my stories).
– MP3s of live Neutral Milk Hotel from 1998. Sound quality’s okay, but it’s hard to remember sometimes how amazing NMH was there for a while.
– Vaguely ludicrous covers of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat by someone named Ergo Phizmiz.
– Random MP3s: Keleya, a kick-ass ’70s funk number from a West African James Brown disciple named Moussa Doumbia; The Muppet Show theme music sung in Hebrew; Bill Hicks railing on (the first) George Bush in 1992.

to mexico

I guess I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but crabwalk.com will be going global in 18 short days.
Well, hemispherical. Or at least continental.
From January 22 to February 19, I will be in Morelia, Mexico. I’ll be trying my durnedest to learn Spanish at the Baden-Powell Institute, which to my knowledge was not founded by the man who started the Boy Scouts and often did spywork among the Zulu while disguised as a butterfly collector. (Of course, he was also a pedophile who dug Hitler and tried affiliating with Hitler Youth groups. But never mind that.)
No plans to shutter crabwalk while I’m gone or anything, don’t worry. But I may throw in a little espanol for fun now and then.
And for anyone who’s been to Mexico (or, more doubtful, Morelia): Any advice? The sum of my Mexico experience consists of a couple hours in Juarez one night in 2002.

wesley cheating story

Here’s my story from today’s front page, and I happen to think it’s a pretty good one:
Houston’s Wesley Elementary may be the most celebrated school in Texas.
When George W. Bush, running for governor in 1994, wanted to declare education his No. 1 priority, he went to Wesley, where desperately poor students outscored children in the wealthiest suburbs.
When Oprah Winfrey wanted to promote a school that “defied the odds,” she took her cameras to Wesley, which has been the subject of dozens of flattering profiles.
But a Dallas Morning News investigation has found strong evidence that at least some of the success at Wesley and two affiliated schools come from cheating.
“You’re expected to cheat there,” said Donna Garner, a former teacher at Wesley who said her fellow teachers instructed her on how to give students answers while administering tests. “There’s no way those scores are real.”
The News’ analysis found troubling gaps in test scores at Wesley, Highland Heights, and Osborne elementaries, which are all in the Acres Homes neighborhood in Houston. Scores swung wildly from year to year. Schools made jarring test-score leaps from mediocre to stellar in a year’s time.
After The News shared its findings with Houston officials Thursday, Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra issued a written statement. “We have reviewed the anomalies in the test scores of the Acres Home schools as pointed out by The Dallas Morning News, and we agree that these anomalies identify performance that is highly questionable.”
If the test scores are to be believed, students at those schools lose much of their academic abilities as soon as they leave elementary school.
There’s also a sidebar:
The fact there might be cheating at Wesley Elementary is not news to Houston officials.
In June 2003, former Wesley teacher Donna Garner stood before a meeting of the Houston school board and directly accused officials of cheating at Wesley. “I was instructed on how to cheat and that the expectation was that I would cheat,” she said, according to a copy of her speech.
District officials pledged an investigation. But it has taken the district a year and a half just to hire an outside law firm to do the investigating. The lengthy delays could make it harder to catch cheaters.
“When a great deal of time has passed between the incident and the investigation, people forget things,” said Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. “And what happened on test day is not as clear as it was eight months ago or a year ago.”
Central Texans, I’ll be talking about the story on KTSA 550 AM at 1:05 this afternoon, should you want to hear how my radio voice differs from my in-person voice.
Update: Here’s the Houston paper, following my story. I have to admire the paper’s guts for including this quote from the Houston school board member who represents Acres Homes: “It is an embarrassment to hear from the Dallas Morning News what’s going on in Houston.”