Sadness

Got some bad news this morning.

First, the back story. This year is City Paper's 25th anniversary and to commemorate this, Patrick and I are, in the 25 weeks leading up to our anniversary issue, going through the archives year-by-year and telling the paper's story through bylines, headlines, etc. in a regular feature called Paper Trail.

Each week, we spend a few hours with a year's worth of bound volumes and note the big stories, important staffers who debuted, and choose one cover from that issue to print in the paper.

A couple of weeks ago in the 1991 installment we proudly noted that a young photographer named Mpozi (Mshale) Tolbert (that's him, above, in a photo we ran in 1997 in an ancillary publication called Earshot), a teenager at the time, had made his debut in the paper. Mpozi was already an established figure in the offices by the time I showed up in 1995. As an intern, I remember seeing this hulking, 6-foot 6-inch dreadlocked man pop into the office now and again to chat with Margit Detweiler and Neil Gladstone. He was a giant man, but always incredibly kind. He was the kind of guy you couldn't help but like, be drawn to. As a freelance photographer, he wasn't in the office all the time, or regularly. But whenever he did, it was like an event. "Mpozi's here," the vibe in the officed seemed to suggest. If Mpozi was here, it meant there was something going on that we should take notice of. He was plugged in, and his vision as a photographer was such that if he'd shot something, or wanted to shoot something, you'd better damn well pay attention. His photography was such that he really got into the lives of his subjects. There was an empathy in the celluloid. He was magic.

So last week we received a letter to the editor from Mpozi thanking us for being mentioned in Paper Trail. We'd received a letter a couple of weeks prior from Miguel Gonzalez thanking us for his mention as well. As we found out, there's something of an e-mail list of former CP staffers out there chattering about who gets nods in the column and who does not. Well, any and all feedback is smiled upon, but it was especially nice to get a nod from Mpozi (his message is replicated in the first link of this post).

So it was a horrible shock to learn that this wonderful man -- strong, peaceful, brilliant, artist -- had fallen, let alone that it had happened so young. He'd been working at his desk at the Indianapolis Star when he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. A cause of death has not been determined yet, but when someone young like this passes suddenly, your first inclination is to think something was wrong with his heart. Which is just not something you could ever say about Mpozi.

I didn't know the man well, but I knew him well enough to say that his loss is huge. My condolences go out to his family, and anyone whose life he touched with his work or his generosity.

Requiem for a Nice Guy

Was kinda shocked to read the news that Chris Penn was found dead in his Santa Monica home yesterday at the tender age of 40 or 43. Until, that is, I saw the most recent picture of Penn wherein he's looking, well, let's call it "not quite the picture of health." His latest jawn, the now sort of eerily monickered The Darwin Awards, is set to be screened at Sundance. I've got an e-mail out to my Sundance correspondent, Andy Williams, to check on the mood.

Go gently into the night, Nice Guy Eddie.

Thanks for your years of service; please file this form to claim your gold watch. Also, the door swings shut quickly.

There will probably be lots of hand-wringing on both sides of this story wherein the Astros are attempting to avoid paying the bulk of the final year ($17 million) of Jeff Bagwell's contract because he's been hobbled and in decline for the last few years thanks in no small part to a shoulder condition for which he had capsular release surgery (right) performed. The ’Stros want Bagwell declared unable to perform or something like that so they can file an insurance claim that'll net them $15.6 million. Bagwell would need to retire for this to happen, something the Hall of Fame-bound slugger ain't having. Of course, this would be a pretty crummy way for the organization to part ways with a guy who's spent his entire major league career with it, but then again, $17 million is a high price to pay for sentiment, and since it's not a matter of screwing Bagwell out of his money, but a pre-agreed term of the contract, I say bravo to the Astros for making a prudent if unpopular business decision. That said, it seems unlikely that it'll work out well for anyone involved. Bagwell's no longer a $17 million a year player (and it's unlikely he ever will be again), but pride -- ooh, that pride, it gets you -- is driving him to prove he's fully recovered from last year's surgery. Conversely, the Astros $15.6 million would be better spent trying to convince another relic -- this one with a recent history of stellar performance -- to rejoin the squad. Stay tuned for ongoing coverage of this public relations debacle.

Man vs. beast

I'm at a loss here.

No they di'n't!

Yes, they did. The IBAF, the organizing body for international baseball, tells the World Baseball Classic it will not sanction the tournament unless Cuba is allowed to participate. Not sure whether the WBC really cares, but hey, IBAF, get down with your bad self.

Last Night a DJ saved my life... almost

This story is both awesome and sad. DJ Pete Price (at right) of Liverpool's Magic Radio 1548 abandoned his call-in show to rush to the aid of a caller who had mysteriously stopped talking during a debate. While the results were less uplifting than you'd hope, it's not the first time Petey's played the role of hero.

Et tu, Google?

I've been engaged in a love affair with Google for several years now. It all started when my friend, the famous Brett Burton, hipped me to the no-frills, results-centric engine some 7 or 8 years ago. I fell for the image search, swooned over Google News and waited anxiously for an invite to gmail (even though I consider my address to be something of a vanity thing — like the good towels — to be used for special occasions). I got a little suspicious when they started doing that personalize-your-home-page thing. I mean, displaying ads based on the text of the e-mails I was reading was, y'know, fun, but the thought that the big G! might be collecting information about me was a little disturbing... like discovering that your friend with the really good taste in music has a soft spot for Dave Matthews. And now this: rumors of Google Cube. If the G-peeps go into making machines (and yes, it's all rumor and conjecture at this point), will they become just another monolith?

Now batting for New Orleans: Cuba

First there was the Bill Delahunt/Hugo Chavez Massachusetts heating oil orgy. Now the Fidel Castro "Let's play nine for N'awlins" campaign. We got socialists keeping our poor from turning into icicles, and commies throwing sliders to raise money for Katrina relief, and even if it is just a very clever ploy to get past the U.S. embargo and play in the World Baseball Classic, you gotta wonder how many more clever ways the Bush administration's foes are gonna find to embarrass them. What's next: Chinese citizenship for Valerie Plame?

But There's Portable Nut ...

Seeing this ad ("It's like a nut you can play outside") for Sony's PSP filled me with the kind of awe I've only experienced once or twice over a televised signal — the last time being some 5 or 6 years ago when I first saw MTV's too-good-for-its-own-good Sifl & Olly. It's a sort of "This is so screwed up, and I love it, and I can't believe there's someone who finds this as funny as I do" kind of feeling. Saw it for the first time with my friend Pat — we were just hanging out on the couch half-watching TV — and we were both stopped cold when it aired. (We were also hanging when I first saw S&O.) Found it online and sent it to my favorite squirrel fanatic McKenna who had it up on his blog in a matter of seconds. Reaction in the gaming world to the spot was typically mixed. The accompanying "Carpet you can watch outside" ad done by the same folks was amusing, but slightly less so.

Totally my favorite thing this year

Not even sure if I disovered this this year. I actually saw it in the November 2004 issue of Arthur Magazine, which I'm fairly positive I didn't come into possession of until sometime in the oh five. It's by a guy named Tom Gauld, and you can find it in his new book, Robots, Monsters, Etc. Of all the goofy nods and winks in this, I love "The Floating Skull" most of all.

I Didn't Do It For You

It's not so odd that I picked up Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. What's odd is that I finished it. I'm all about starting books. Not so big on finishing them. But when I picked up Ms. Wrong's (gotta love the name) journalistic account of Eritrea's struggle from independence from Ethiopia, I honestly couldn't stop coming back to it. First off, Eritrea's a country that as of a few years ago, I (a map and geography junkie as a kid) didn't even know existed. Second, Wrong's just a flat-out amazing writer. Her opening descriptions of Eritrea's blast-furnace climate, craggy topography and time-warp Italian architecture hooked me (made me want to visit, truth be told); her accounting of the country's heroic, ascetic, supported-by-nobody secession movement was romantic; and her dissection of the newly independent country's fall into despotic bickering tragic. When I discovered that The Economist named it one of the year's best books, I felt kind of validated. I can't recommend it enough.

the digital music wars will be ugly. literally ugly.

Can't but read this story about how Bill Gates and MTV are teaming up to take on iTunes and cringe a little bit. Sure, apple and its proprietary m4u technology is irksome, and yeah, yeah, yeah, competition is "good" or whatever. i instinctively fear (because it is in my nature to root for li'l underdogs that are preordained to be bloodied by roaring mechanisms) that iTunes will go the way of Netscape, bludgeoned out of extistence by the sheer we're-already-on-your-system ubiquity of Microsoft products. In fact, as Top Tech News' Elizabeth Millard cheerily, unflinchingly and unironically reports of the looming "next iteration" of the only slightly-less-clumsy-than-it-used-to-be Windows Media Player:

Mainly, its technology already is on the majority of home and business computers, and when the Windows Media Player arrives in its next iteration, the inclusion of Urge means users will not have to download additional software.

Urge, natch, is what the unholy Gates/MTV tag-team will call their new service. And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft get into a little hot water with the whole bundling thing back with the whole IEv.5 v. Netscape jawn?

Whatever.

The thing that sets me atrembling most is that however Urge ends up functionality-wise, you just know it's gonna be butt fugg. I mean, look at what's come before. This has never been an attractive program, and even the doofuses who design "skins" (ew) for it are aesthetic imbeciles. this is why we can't have nice things. cuz nice things get muscled out of the market.