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wednesday, april 7, 2010
KIDSPOST
10 years old!
Our news page for kids looks back at its first decade, covering everything from big national stories to our readers’ birthdays. And don’t forget the summer book club. C10
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THE RELIABLE SOURCE
Newseum getting Simpson’s suit
Rejected by the Smithsonian? Simpson’s clothes are coming to D.C. anyway. C2
APPLE
A warning to Newsweek?
Did the computer maker threaten to withhold cooperation? C9
BACKSTAGE
Saddling up again
“Old stage horse” Elizabeth Ashley is signed for “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” this summer. C2
3LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/style The Reliable Source’s Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts Noon • The Web Hostess with Monica Hesse 1 p.m. • The “Lost” hour 2 p.m.
‘David After Dentist’ goes Goliath online
From a YouTube video viewed millions of times, a father builds a business
by Monica Hesse
Last year, four athletes set out for a day of fishing off the Florida coast. One came back. This is his story.
A guy selling a product needs to dress the part, which is why David De- Vore’s uniform is a black collared shirt emblazoned with a zippy patch of his son’s face and the phrase that made the younger David famous: “Is this real life?” The question is followed by a trademark symbol. “I’m the dad who posted ‘David After Dentist,’ ” DeVore says to an amiable trio of 20-somethings at a book party in McLean. “You know, the little loopy kid in the back seat of the car?” Fifteen months ago, before the suc- cess of “David After Dentist,” DeVore’s business was Orlando real estate. Now his business is his son, David.
His six-figure business. You know the kid. By now you’ve seen the 2009 video 10 or 12 times. By now you’ve memorized the dialogue of David, then 7 and fresh from a tooth re-
YOUTUBE.COM
SURPRISE HIT: At age 7, David DeVore became a YouTube sensation in “David After Dentist.”
moval, displaying the woozy effects of really good painkillers. “I have two fin- gers,” he tells his father. “You have four eyes.” Then, displaying wisdom repur- posed by stoners everywhere, David goes deep. “Is this real life?” he asks. “Why is this happening to me?” The video has been viewed 56 million times on YouTube with 100,000 new views every day.
david continued on C9
MICHAEL TEMCHINE
Death and disbelief
U.S. COAST GUARD VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
RESCUED:In a photo released by the Coast Guard, former football player Nick Schuyler clings to the overturned boat.
by Paul Farhi
co, 75 miles off the coast of Clearwater, Fla. Coo- per thought he could muscle it free by opening up the throttle.
N
Schuyler felt the boat surge and strain against the anchor line. And then all was chaos: The line yanked hard against the stern, dragging it under the water. As the bow rose high in reaction, the boat began to twist and flop on its side, cata- pulting Schuyler, Cooper and two other pas- sengers into the churning water. Four young men now found themselves cling- ing to a capsized boat, as night and a storm began to gather. There hadn’t been time to send a dis- tress signal.
So begins the life-and-death struggle recounted
in “Not Without Hope,” Nick Schuyler’s harrow- ing account of his grim ordeal at sea. Schuyler survived the accident on Feb. 28 of last year, but only barely. After 43 hours in the roiling water, numb from the cold, he was rescued by a Coast Guard search boat. He was nearly dead from ex- posure; at the time of his rescue, his body tem- perature had plunged to 88.8 degrees. He was the only one who returned.
schuyler continued on C3
HBO SPORTS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘I WAS
JUST LUCKY, I GUESS’:
Schuyler says he can’t explain why only he survived. Now he is stung by guilt and criticism.
vived.
ick Schuyler stood on the rear deck of the fishing boat as his friend Marquis Cooper gunned the engine. The boat was stuck, its anchor snagged on some- thing at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexi-
THOSE WHO PERISHED
BOOK WORLD
Trauma in the nest: A good child gone wild
by Ron Charles
W
IN THEIR PRIME:All who died were supremely athletic. Two were professional football players and one had played at the University of South Florida. From left are Corey Smith, Marquis Cooper and Will Bleakley.
hy must one feel so defensive about lik- ing Anne Lamott?
Detractors complain about her twee self-deprecation and New Age filigree, but I suspect there’s something offensive about her success, her perfectly calibrated NPR appeal. After all, she’s writ- ten three essential books, ti- tles that seem assured of gift-giving immortality at yuppie weddings and baby showers: “Operating In- structions” (1993), her mov- ing advice for beginning mothers; “Bird by Bird” (1994), her practical advice for beginning writers; and “Traveling Mer- cies” (1999), her soulful advice for be- ginning churchgoers. But her fiction has always seemed
IMPERFECT BIRDS
By Anne Lamott Riverhead 278 pp. $25.95
somewhat ephemeral next to these nonfiction classics. (“Blue Shoe,” anyone? Any- one?) That could change with her new novel, “Imper- fect Birds.” Not only is it a moving and perceptive por- trayal of raising a substance- abusing teenager, but it im- plicitly offers the kind of ad- vice that many parents need to hear. One hopes that con- cerned friends and school counselors will begin pass- ing “Imperfect Birds” to be- leaguered moms and dads just as they’ve long given copies of “Operating In- structions” to expectant par-
ents. (Roxanna Robinson’s “Cost,” about a mother dealing with her hero- in-addict son, is a better novel — one of the best I’ve read in years — but it’s so
book world continued on C4
A new Scrabble rule? Aghast fans cry H
4
by David Montgomery
Tuesday dawned with sputtering
Scrabble fans dashing for their diction- aries: Appall! (10 points). Pox! (12 points). Crazy! (19 points). Zounds! (16 points). By day’s end, they felt better: Phew. (12 points). Sheesh. (12 points). They wished they had enough tiles in their racks to spell “apocrypha” or “exagger- ate.”
Stefan Fatsis, a Washington-based
Scrabble coach and devoted chronicler of the Scrabble world, summed up the snafu (8 points) this way: “It’s a case of corporate flackery and media incompe-
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tence completely misleading the pub- lic.”
What caused about 10,000 near-
heart attacks from London to El Segun- do, Calif., began a few days ago with a tiny item in a British trade paper. It re- ferred to Mattel’s plans to introduce a new kind of Scrabble that would per-
mit the use of proper nouns.
The horror. To Scrabble purists, this would be like lowering the height of the baskets in the NBA, or doing away with the net in tennis. Suddenly, any idiot could spell, say, “Bjork,” and score a quick 18 points. The British press grabbed this seed
game continued on C5
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