Dammit, we all make mistakes, and the Worldwide Leader is no exception. Some of its employees can barely carouse the English language, but they tend to be future Hall-of-Famers in sports that can reduce a 40-year-old man's brain to cheese curds.

Then there's this frame, screen-grabbed during motion video in a promo that must run on ESPN.com several thousand times a day. That rogue apostrophe makes me wonder whether Bristol really is staffed by guys with 12th-grade educations.

G11: Gadget envy worth 32 days' rent
I can't remember the last time I spent $500 on something other than auto repair. I've never spent that much (non-company money) on a plane ticket; even going to Haiti was only $375 round-trip. (Though, to be accurate, Spirit did see fit to charge an extra 25 bones each way for the right to molest my luggage.) Hell, my rent is only $475 a month.

But today, with the body of my trusty 30D still in the shop ($301, incidentally) I plonked down half a G on a camera that came highly recommended by a friend who described its predecessor, the G10, as the smallish companion to a full-sized SLR, the photojournalist's equivalent of a dagger secreted away in a boot sheath. The G11 has a swiveling LCD and drinks in light up to 3200 ISO. It shoots video, of the non-HD (just D?) variety. It'll fit in a pocket, which'll be a nice change of pace from the 30D, which for its formidable display of sheer bulk, is rarely stealthy. Lugging a huge camera into a situation is like wearing a giant sign that says "get some attention here." Girls talk to you. Drunks talk to you. Babies realize it's their time to shine. But sometimes it's nice to sneak around, so hurry your ass, UPS Ground.

Mostly my hope is that will take pictures that match the images I see in my head when I survey amazing things. As this one did:
Bumper cars: Why Coney Island rules.

Fun glitch-filled few minutes on motherjones.com this afternoon. Here's a screen grab of part of the homepage:

Occasionally I contribute movie reviews, among other articles, to the Arkansas Times, the AAN weekly here in Little Rock. Because the generally haphazard nature of the venture and the inconsequential size of this media market, I'm often a week behind, forking out a high-single-digit ransom to see the likes of "Slumdog Millionaire" or "Religulous" or "Vicky Christina Barcelona" or “The Informant!” and then pounding out 400 to 500 words on whether the movie is worth your money and time. Often as not, it is: Met on their own terms, most major releases tend to hit the same comfortable middle ground that most consumer goods do - similar, say, to a restaurant meal.

This week I reviewed “Zombieland,” which was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, I was able to see it Monday night at a promotional screening here in Little Rock, something apparently arranged by a radio station. Knowing that the theater would be lousy with people who’d gotten free tickets, I tried arriving almost 20 minutes early. But when my friend Kyle and I pulled into the cinema parking lot, we saw no more than a dozen cars. “This doesn’t look like free anything,” I told him. Sheepishly I phoned my editor, who informed me that I had the wrong theater. We jumped back in the car and drove at the sort of clip that inspired Kyle to reminisce about curb-hopping, parking lot-cutting races across his college town when he was a student. We arrived at the movie after the title credits, to a packed house. Funny thing: For a fat, shiny gumball like “Zombieland,” you wouldn’t want it any other way. Woody Harrelson’s character, Tallahassee, has an ongoing jones for Twinkies (ironic, maybe, given Harrelson’s own raw food diet; explaining this to "Esquire" he said, “To eat only raw food, you've got to love a salad. You've got to just love a salad."). A little girl (6 or 7 years old) sitting next to me kept asking her mom, “What’s a Twinkie?” Sitting a couple of seats away, the girl’s dad, I presume, threw in a couple of wisecracks, calling the protagonist (whom I described as a “a germaphobic ‘World of Warcraft’-addicted wiener") a “sissy” when he snuggled with a girl on a couch, and remarked, when a Humvee makes a timely appearance, that “every man needs a Hummer,” perhaps lowercased. A friend told us afterwards that the father next to her spent time scrounging the theater floor for an errant Adderall while his child bounced and chirped for all to behold.

But “Zombieland” wasn’t exactly “The Pianist,” and a little rowdiness doesn’t hurt. Yelling at the screen during a horror/action/comedy is no more disruptive than dancing at a concert. Which goes to the other unusual aspect of the “Zombieland” review: I didn’t say it explicitly, but that movie is pretty damn funny. Harrelson is the sort of knowing stupid-funny that makes me want to invite him over for a salad. On the way home I realized my abs felt like I'd been doing crunches; that's laughter, kids, and it's as healthy as fresh air. I stand by the closing of the piece: “You'll maximize your entertainment buck by seeing it with the largest, loudest, drunkest, dumbest audience you can find.” Sooner, then, is better.

When I told my friend Robert last night that Haiti has about 9 million people, and the Dominican Republic about 10 million, he asked in astonishment, “How big is that island? Like, as big as what state? South Carolina?”

Uh, actually, yeah, almost exactly as big as South Carolina – only 10 percent smaller, in fact. (Helluva guess, man.) But South Carolina contains just 4.4 million people. If you want to get a sense of the population density of Hispaniola, it turns out you have to put the population of Texas into a space as big as Indiana, or cram every Californian into something Iowa-sized, or just take South Carolina’s current populace and add everyone who lives in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Colorado. Then throw up a big ol' fence, ratchet the unemployment up to 83 percent, steal all the trees and let the good times roll.

A view into Port-au-Prince: photo credit Jonathan Katz

I wonder whether it’s a factor of the late-night audience for prime-time football games – a pliable, slightly boozy demographic, given to rushed judgments and home-team jingoism – but I’ve noticed two borderline insulting TV spots in the past week after the pigskin is put to bed.

The first, in which a soccer mom with two strapping children unloads groceries and gives “Washington” what-for about a proposed tax on soft drinks. She looks like a mother lion about to claw the eyes out of an approaching hyena. “Families around here are counting pennies to get through this economy,” she says. “So when we hear about another tax it gets our attention. They say it’s only pennies. Well, those pennies add up when you’re trying to feed a family. Washington, if you’re listening, what doesn’t seem like much to you can be a lot to us.”

Here’s the video. Note that its comments and ratings have been disabled:

Hookworm: Worthy of scornIf you’re looking for villains – and in these times of Congressional peanut galleries, Café Press shirts and bloviating mountebanks, we all are – may I suggest you adopt a nemesis in the style of one Aaron Jackson: worms.

There’s little to like about common intestinal worms. They’re pernicious, they drink blood from your digestive system and they literally reproduce in shit. Maybe you have a soul, maybe your dog has a soul. I'm no theologian, but I am willing to entertain those possibilities. Worms, however, are soulless sucking machines that benefit humans only insofar as they remind us what a cruel bitch Nature really is, when she gets her way.

Thomas C. Cheng’s 1973 textbook “General Parasitology” enumerates the harm in the dry, disinterested prose that so often makes academic writing unexpectedly resonant:

Until recently, the human hookworm disease was numbered among the most prevalent and important of the parasitic diseases of man. Unlike malaria, amoebiasis, or schistosomiasis, hookworm disease is not spectacular. Hookworm affects populations by gradually sapping its victims of their strength, vitality and health. As exemplified in certain parts of the Middle East and the Far East, and not too many years ago in most of the southern states in the United States, the victims become lazy, shiftless and nonproductive. The resultant economic loss is beyond computation.

For obvious reasons, people in the developing world – and, speaking of the American South, you could make the case that pre-Depression Mississippi belonged in that heap – can’t abide a scourge that saps “strength, vitality and health.” Nutrition in food, already scarce, turns to supporting a worm farm in a person’s guts rather than building muscle, bone, tissue. The World Health Organization estimates that worms may pirate 20 percent of a person’s nutritional intake. For children, especially, the results can be the difference between health and malnutrition, and between malnutrition and starvation.

I’m working on a story that will try to gauge just how effective a national program would be in Haiti, where Aaron runs a handful of orphanages and coordinates distribution of a deworming agent called Albendazole to anyone who might suffer from worms. I was with Aaron and his friends Brayan Jackson (no relation) and Johnny Dieubon the day the St. Pete Times’ Latin America correspondent, the fairly gallant David Adams, and a Times photog, the intrepid John Pendygraft, also crashed at one of the orphanages Aaron and Johnny run in Port-au-Prince. It was warm and humid in the little block building, and when the sun went down, dark. We sipped Haitian beers that David managed to buy from atop a ladder behind the house, through a gap in a wall of cinder blocks. As we sat at the kitchen table and talked by candlelight (night falls early in Haiti right now; the country is on the equivalent of Central Time right now, despite having the same longitude as the Hamptons) some of the children sang in the living room. Here’s the audio:

The orphans' song

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(Download)

It’s hard to explain how flattering and enchanting it is when young children, some of them painfully undersized for their age, introduce themselves with hands extended to shake, asking, in quiet but confident Creole-accented English, “Hi, what is your name?” Before they retired for the night, Aaron opened and distributed two bags of Skittles I bought from the airport in Santo Domingo a few hours earlier.

That night we Americans slept on five foam mats: four aligned shoulder-to-shoulder, with one across the feet of the others left for the last man to bed, which happened to be me. In a pile of dead mosquitoes (thanks, DEET!) I awoke at some bleary hour (dawn, as you’d guess, comes early, as well) to the some clanging din that I later ascribed to a man across the stony road who I later observed sawing through rebar amid a collection of stray metal objects. We piled into an old donated ambulance and drove to the rural outskirts of Port-au-Prince to pass out pills to people living in homes made, in some cases, of mud and sticks. Here’s David Adams’ account (follow the link for John Pendygraft's photos):

Jackson and Dieubon walked up a stony, rubbish-strewn track going from one rickety adobe-built shack to another, looking for malnourished kids.

"See how orange the hair is?" Jackson said, pointing to a barefoot child covered in dirt, the ends of her hair tinged a rusty color, a sign of vitamin deficiency. Jackson bent over and squeezed the child's swollen belly. "See how hard it is? The worms are eating it up, man."

The symptoms are so obvious, and the cure so simple, that you don't have to be a doctor to make a diagnosis. Side effects are considered minimal. It can be given as a preventative to any child who might have worms but not yet show symptoms.

Swollen bellies are so common, many poor Haitians have no idea their children are sick. With no electricity or treated water services, they also have little means to prevent infection.

"Here it's seen as normal," said Jackson. "It's hard to prevent when it's from bad water. It's all they've got."

One thing I’ll say for Aaron: He has no compunction about lifting up a kid’s shirt – any kid anywhere, it seemed – and thumping on the kid’s swollen belly as though he were evaluating a melon. The dude hasn’t met a stranger in his life. Here’s some video from our subsequent stop at a village set back from the main road, a place he and Johnny call “Little Africa.” There, in a scratched-out patch of clay and rows of skeletal homes, we found children outside a church sitting around a water pump, playing a game with homemade playing cards. Once the Planting Peace guys arrived and started handing out pills – well, it was an event. Five white guys, a couple of them toting camera equipment, distributing mystery pills as Johnny tried to explain to kids and parents alike what they were for, why they were important, why infants couldn’t take them. One woman approached us as we were leaving and explained that while she had a baby with her (too young) she also had an older child back home who needed a dose. Brayan worried that the kids who kept holding their hands out for more pills didn't understand that it was medicine, not a tiny snack.

I’m going to ballpark it and say the Planting Peace guys handed out a hundred pills to kids that day. That’s a hundred kids who were great candidates to have parasites, and several of whom were displaying the outward signs of malnutrition: distended bellies, hair tinged the color of rust. Total cost of the pills: less than $2. One of the great things about hating worms is they’re cheap to kill. If you’re the sort who gets off on exterminating your enemies, it’s a real bargain. Aaron tells me that he’s about to be interviewed (again) by Anderson Cooper, who Aaron tells me once remarked to him, off-camera, that for the cost of a pack of cigs, you could deworm a whole school. Aaron has more information at his site, plantingpeace.org.

I think Jimmy Fallon's about as innately funny as the nutrition label on a bag of flour, but as long as he can stick guys like Hannibal Buress in front of a camera, he's welcome to keep making television.

The amusing part about this arrangement, aside from Burress, is that he's the anti-Fallon. Whereas Fallon can't walk past his own reflection without biting his teeth, smirking, tearing up and abandoning a little-known comic technique called "staying in character," Buress can get through an entire set with a casual demeanor that smacks of natural ability. I caught his act last night at Comix in Manhattan; it didn't surprise me to hear afterward Saturday Night Live has hired him as a writer. If Tina Fey ever decides to abdicate as Weekend Update anchor, Buress' borderline-deadpan ass would fit that chair nicely.

Spike Lee threw a helluva little birthday party for the recently deceased frontman of the Jackson 5 on Saturday.

If you'd suspected, as perhaps nearly everyone in the country had, that the appetite for Michael Jackson news was at least in part manufactured by the sloven newsgathering sensibilities of news networks, well, that may be true. But let me vouch: People love them some MJ.

A Michael Jackson tribute: on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Originally Lee's tribute to Jackson was slated for somewhere in Fort Greene, but somebody did the math and realized tens of thousands of people would be better accommodated on a large lawn in Prospect Park. As my friend Jena and I approached from the rather stunning north end of the park we joined a trickle of pedestrians that grew as we neared a thudding bass rolling through the damp woods. "I'm going there now," a man behind us said into his cell phone. "I'm just following the peoples. The little white peoples." But it wasn't just little white peoples: It was hipsters and black mothers with children and dudes on bikes and elegant girls in tight dresses and just about anyone you'd expect to see rocking out to Michael Jackson. And when we arrived on the green, there was a full-blown party breaking out.

Remixes of old-school MJ were blaring from speakers at the front of the green while people dance-swayed. The good Rev. Al Sharpton appeared on stage and reminded us that Jackson rose from a lower-class family in world-class shithole Gary, Ind. to become one of the great entertainment forces of the 20th century -- a tale that resonated with the overwhelmingly black crowd. As the DJ spun the likes of "Rock With You" and "Thriller" while kids in dinosaur-emblazoned raincoats bounced, and grandmothers popped-and-locked, and some dude tried to sell me burned copies of all eight of Jackson's albums for $25 (I came thisclose), the best moments were a spontaneous group dance among a maaaaaassive swath of the crowd during "Billie Jean" and a Tracy Morgan-led karaoke rendition of "The Way You Make Me Feel". Check out the audio below. (And click that Tracy Morgan link, if you know what's hilarious for you.)

The Way You Make Me Feel

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Park Slope sings "The Way You Make Me Feel" (Download)

Yesterday ESPN.com ran an excerpt of an interview with one Plaxico Burress, the NFL wide receiver who's now about to do time for accidentally shooting himself in the leg, in a Manhattan nightclub, with an unregistered firearm. It's approximately the stupidest thing you can imagine, and plenty of ESPN employees have taken the chance to say so over the past few months.

But the beauty of ESPN is that it can chastise jocks and leagues while it nuzzles every closer to them. Which is how we wind up with the nauseatingly cozy teaser on this story. Are you tired of listening to critics/reporters who described Burress' monumental idiocy for accidentally blowing a hole in his thigh with a handgun? Get the real scoop here! If this is the tone of the web site, imagine the Valentine that the producers sent to Burress' camp in order to land the interview.