Category: Uncategorized

Wilmer-Hutchins custodian indicted on theft charge. Blah, blah, blah.
Author Richard Blow changes name to “Richard Bradley.” Wuss.

Carl Hiassen on journalism: “All of my best work comes from some kind of anger. If you go up to Jimmy Breslin, he’s as pissed off today as he was 30 years ago. That’s the fire you want to have in your writing.”
I’d say “that’s the fire you want to have in a certain kind of writing,” but otherwise true.

I have been duly shamed for writing about the death of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and not linking to the one story on the topic co-bylined by a crabwalk.com reader. So I am doing my penance.
In addition, the story was linkworthy if only because of its use of the term “mad paranoid.” “Mad” being, in this case, a glorious adverbial substitute for “very.” Which reminds me of the great ol’ Calvin Trillin bit about the distinctions between being “crazy stupid” and being “stupid crazy.” I always thought “crazy stupid” was a preferable state of being.
By the way, that great story for tomorrow will only be a so-so story. I have to stop preselling these things.

Today’s Wilmer-Hutchins story: “After being introduced to the Wilmer-Hutchins school board they will govern, one of the district’s new state-appointed managers had something to tell trustees. ‘God help us,’ businessman Albert Black said. His statement

At the risk of pissing off a few crabwalk.com readers: Man, that second Ol’ Dirty Bastard album is awesome. Shame it took Big Baby Jesus’ final return to the 36 chambers to make me dig it out of the CD stacks. O.D.B., R.I.P.

Okrent’s new column argues for a journalistic trend I absolutely believe in: That journalists should be more free to include their own conclusions, based on their reporting, in stories.
“But haven’t we reached the point where denying the reader what a writer knows to be true is far more unfair than including it? I was delighted when, in ‘After 6 Months, Tyco Prosecutors Close Case Against Ex-Officials‘ (March 18), Alex Berenson described the prosecutor’s case as ‘bewildering,’ ‘tedious’ and having ‘rarely been presented in a straightforward way’ – a vision of the trial that would have been utterly unavailable had Berenson not dared to offer conclusive characterizations based on his own observations. On a much larger scale, I was dismayed when a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in a letter to friends (later passed around the Internet) described the horrors of life in Baghdad, and was criticized in some quarters for thereby jeopardizing her impartiality. But what she described was based on indisputable first-hand experience. If there was a journalistic offense here, it was that readers of The Journal had been denied knowledge of what this reporter knew to be true. Whom did that serve?”
Imposing false balance where there is none helps no one.
Also of note from the Sunday Times: Sitting in for Old Man Safire is none other than crabwalk.com-reader Erin McKean.

Here’s that story I hyped a few days ago: “James Wright was having some trouble with the science TAKS test last year at Wilmer-Hutchins’ Alta Mesa Elementary. He says his teacher was willing to help. ‘The teacher would walk around the class during the test and be like, “Hey, that’s wrong,” ‘ said James, now a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Kennedy-Curry Middle School. ‘You’d go through the answers and you’d say, “Is this the right one?” They’d say “nope.” And you’d say, “Is this the right one?” And they’d say “nope” until you got the right one. Then they’d say “Yeah” and nod their head.’ He’s one of several students and teachers in Wilmer-Hutchins schools who have come forward to support suspicions first raised by a Dallas Morning News data analysis that cheating took place on the TAKS tests.”
Yesterday’s story: “A prominent business leader and a former interim Dallas superintendent will be the state overseers in Wilmer-Hutchins.”

Today’s W-H story: “The Wilmer-Hutchins school board is no longer grounded. State District Judge Merrill Hartman agreed Thursday to let the board hold a meeting next week. He had issued an unusual temporary restraining order last week banning the trustees from meeting or acting on any subject.”

What the Chipmunks really sounded like. I love this more than I can say.

“He was paralyzed on the ventilator, his family was devastated, and the ICU staff was stunned at how quickly he was worsening.”