Crabwalk

I liked ¡Ask a Mexican!, Gustavo Arellano’s column in SoCal’s OC Weekly, the moment I started reading it a few months ago. It’s funny, and I think it’s actually pretty valuable. There are a whole lot of white folks who, despite living in places like California or Texas, never really interact with Hispanics. When I read that our local weekly, the Observer, was going to be running the column, I was glad to hear it.
(The Observer, OC Weekly, and a host of other alt-weeklies are all owned by the same chain, Village Voice Media.)
But then I read this week’s column. (It’s not online that I can find.) It has a riff on the terms “illegal immigrants” and “undocumented workers”:

The Dallas Morning News stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”

That’s curious, for a number of reasons. First, “reportedly” is a weasel word — does the DMN stylebook say that or not? It’s an easily checkable fact. Second, why in the world does a columnist in Orange County know or care about the stylebook of a Dallas newspaper?
And third, it’s just wrong. Since I write for the DMN, I happen to know what our stylebook says. The entry for “illegal immigrant” says: “Use this term to describe someone who is in the United States or another country illegally, either by entering without legal authorization or overstaying an entry visa…Avoid the euphemistic undocumented immigrant.”
In other words, the precise opposite of what the column claims.
It wouldn’t have been hard to check, either. Google News finds 186 stories in the DMN that use “illegal immigrants,” versus 17 that use “undocumented workers.”
Like I said, curious. But then I saw that lots of Village Voice Media alt-weeklies were making the same baseless claim via Gustavo’s column. Here’s the Nashville Scene’s version of Gustavo’s column:

The Tennessean stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”

Here’s Kansas City’s alt-weekly, The Pitch:

The Kansas City Star stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call illegal.

And the original version from the OC Weekly:

The Orange County Register stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”

(I’m sure there are more, but most VVM web sites, like the Observer’s, just link to the OC Weekly’s version of the column instead of reproducing what ran locally.)
Needless to say, the idea that “illegal immigrant” is somehow banned from each of these newspapers is wrong. (OC Register: 53 stories with “illegal immigrants” according to Google News vs. 4 with “undocumented workers”; The Tennessean: 25 vs. 8; Kansas City Star: 221 vs. 49.)
What I’m assuming happened is that Gustavo wrote the column with the OC Register line, which was then sent out to sister papers. Recognizing that readers in Dallas/Nashville/wherever couldn’t care less about the OC Register’s stylebook, local editors changed the name of the newspaper to their city’s daily.
(Kudos to Phoenix New Times. According to Nexis, it’s the only VVM weekly to have run Gustavo’s column but edited out the false newspaper claim.)
At no point in this process did facts interfere. Alt weeklies have long been known for criticism of the local daily — sometimes legit, sometimes knee-jerk. I just hope they don’t start exporting the knee-jerk stuff to each other.

Mission of Burma is streaming songs from its new album online. They are all very good. I want to grow up to be Clint Conley — in his late 40s, a happy suburban dad (and journalist!), and still bringing the punk rock.

The reason for my lateness in publishing MP3 Monday? I was stuck in Houston after a flight cancellation, my second weather-related flight bumping in a week. I only straggled home to Dallas Monday afternoon.
I was in south Louisiana helping out the Jefferson Fellowships, the fellowship program that took me to Hawaii, China, and Japan last fall. (It’s a journalist exchange program between Asia and the U.S.)
The current crop of Jeffs was touring the U.S. to learn about energy policy, and I’d suggested to their chaperone Abby that they stop off in south Louisiana. So I ended up showing 12 reporters (from China, Burma, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh, India, Fiji, and the U.S.) around my homeland — taking them zydeco dancing, checking out Hurricane Rita damage, touring offshore drilling rigs, and feeding them all the local delicacies. Boiled crawfish, boudin, gumbo, raw oysters, shrimp, andouille, poboys, beignets — all the good stuff. It was great seeing all the new faces (and the one old one).
Also, because I’m sometimes told by masochistic readers that I should post photos once in a while, here’s a group photo taken Saturday in front of the glorious Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge. (I would be the green-shirted and alarmingly-haired gentleman in the back. The fellow sitting down in the center is Dickie Breaux, the owner.)

The Express-News got a nice scoop on Texas considering raising the speed limit on some West Texas interstates to 80 miles per hour. But the story has a classic news-stats error. It quotes a state official saying, in effect, that people are driving that fast anyway and that the change is just reflecting reality:

[Carlos Lopez, director of traffic operations for TxDOT] said the department surveyed how fast cars were traveling on both interstates and found 85 percent of them were driving up to 79 mph.

But that means the opposite of what Lopez is trying to say. “Up to 79 mph” means only that people were driving at that speed or below. It tells you nothing about whether they’re going 78 mph or 2 mph. It’s just as factual as writing:

[Joshua Benton, proprietor of crabwalk.com] said that his blog surveyed how fast infants were crawling across the day-care center’s carpet and found 100 percent of them were crawling up to 79 mph.

What I presume Lopez meant is something like 85 percent of drivers are driving above 79 mph. Or maybe that 85 percent are driving between 75 and 79. Who knows?

As you may have heard, Apple recently won a lawsuit that had been filed against it by The Beatles’ management firm over the right to the Apple name. Once the decision came down, the BBC wanted to interview an expert on the subject, tech journalist Guy Kewney.
Unfortunately for them, when it came time to pull Mr. Kewney on stage for a live shot, they mistakenly pulled up a man named Guy Goma — who was the cabbie set to drive Mr. Kewney back to his office.
Here are the details. The video is here and so worth the download — if not for Mr. Goma’s tech wisdom, for the look of abject horror and then impish glee that comes when he realizes the mixup.

Like picnic ants to a spilled glass of lemonade: How the tower routes FedEx planes around Memphis in a thunderstorm.

For those of you who prefer your newspaper reporters unconscious, I recommend this video of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter up in the sky.

Wow: My old college roommate’s dad is apparently going to be the new CIA director.