Category: Uncategorized

Screw-loose Screw founder says he got screwed.
A large silver cross around his neck gleamed against his chest hair. He has been wearing it for a few months. “I feel doomed as a Jew,” he said. “I’ll try anything else.”

Great piece in WaPo about the perils of mixing race baiting, stand-up comics, and t-shirt manufacturing. (Well, it’s a great story — the writing’s a little awkward in a few places.)

ChandaWatch: Our Hero’s chances at a medal just improved greatly. It seems that Serena Williams, hours before she was to board a flight to Athens, backed out, claiming “lingering knee pain.”
That means Serena’s singles spot will be wasted — the deadline for replacing members of your Olympic team has passed, so Aussie Samantha Stosur will get the spot. But Serena had planned to pair with sister Venus as the top American doubles team. (They won the gold in Sydney.) So now Venus’ new doubles partner will be…Chanda Rubin!
This is excellent news on a few fronts. One, obviously Venus is a hell of a doubles partner. Two, when you’ve got an achy knee (as Chanda has had since January), doubles play is a much better fit than singles — much less lateral movement, much heavier reliance on upper-body reflexes. And Chanda’s a heck of a doubles player herself — her only Grand Slam title to date remains winning the Australian Open in doubles a few years back. So while her singles campaign probably doesn’t have much of a chance, we may see Chanda on the medals stand yet.

It’s time for a special summer edition of ChandaWatch, that hoary crabwalk.com tradition in which we track the tournament progress of Chanda Rubin — the only person in the world to be both (a) a highly-ranked women’s tennis player and (b) my high school classmate.
Normally, ChandaWatch is reserved for the Australian, French, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. But this is a Very Special ChandaWatch — our hero is headed to Athens.
She’ll be one of four American women competing in singles, along with the Williams sisters and one TBA. (It was Jennifer Capriati, but she dropped out today, as had Lindsay Davenport before her.)
Chanda’s been nursing a knee injury all year, which doesn’t bode well for her prospects. But when the blood of patriotism starts coursing through her veins, who knows what is possible? Play starts Sunday.
I wish I could be there to root her on; there was a slight chance earlier this year I was going to be able to cover the Olympics again, just as I did the Salt Lake City games in 2002. But alas, ’twas not meant to be.

How does one end up with a painful cut on the back of one’s left earlobe? One has no idea what one could have done to create said cut. Said cut hurts like hell, one could tell you.
If you are the person who created said cut — perhaps as part of some jujitsu-by-night campaign to cripple crabwalk.com — one would appreciate hearing an apology. One would.

Dan Gillmor — Silicon Valley blogger, blog evangelist, and my copanelist at SXSW last year — has posted the entirety of his new book We the Media online, free for anyone to take. (Or you can pay $24.95 to buy a dead-tree version.)

I’d like to thank The New York Times for writing a story on Anastasia Myskina suing GQ over two topless photos it allegedly allowed a shooter to resell to a Russian magazine.
I’d like to thank the Times primarily because the article has apparently sent tens of thousands of tennis pornhounds running to Mother Google and searching lasciviously. This site has gotten more than 4,000 “myskina topless” hits in the last 36 hours — and my site is only No. 13 in Google’s rankings for the phrase.

Who knew Norman Mailer’s son was executive editor of High Times, America’s premier pothead periodical?
Here, father and son converse.

I’ve written before about the strange joy/frustration that comes with being a Dallas music fan the week before SXSW each March. Dozens of bands, aiming to make a Texas jaunt worth their financial while, schedule shows in Dallas on their way to Austin. It’s a concentrated burst of musical talent, the sort we don’t get too often from the tour bookers of indie rock.
The unfortunate thing is that these bands all play in a few days, leaving the music lover with a host of unpleasant choices to make. (This year, you had the Decemberists, Modest Mouse, the Unicorns, and Crystal Method playing on the same night. Then Broken Social Scene, Calexico, Polyphonic Spree, the Unicorns, and Pedro the Lion the next night. Then Sonic Youth, Trans Am, and International Noise Conspiracy the next night. A man shouldn’t have to choose between all those!)
Anyway, it looks like we North Texans will now face the joys and pains of a similar bandclog each fall, now that the Austin City Limits Festival is revealing its glories to the world. On September 17, Dallas gets My Morning Jacket and Wilco/Calexico on the same night, and I’m sure a couple other bands will get booked over the next month.
(While the Wilco shine has tarnished in my eyes over the years, there’s no doubting that will be the best “bands-ending-in-the-letter-O” double bill in years. Now if only they can get Chromeo, Cee-Lo, TV on the Radio, Bebel Gilberto, Brian Eno, Disco Inferno, Caetano Veloso, and Grant Lee Buffalo signed on.)

Weezer lead singer Rivers Cuomo — perhaps the most famous Harvard dropout not named Bill Gates — decided he wanted to go back and finish his degree. This is the self-effacing, confessional essay he had to write for readmission. It gets at why Weezer’s brilliant second album was followed by the crap pablum of the green album and Maladroit. Turns out it’s all Nietzsche