January 15, 2007

MLK Day

Business…with thanks to Kevin Clark, who spawned this idea, I give you a look at Jason Taylor’s care package to Shawne Merriman.

Today would have been Martin Luther King’s 78th birthday.  One interesting thing about King’s birthday, as the years stack up, is that we’re no longer at a point where there’s anything to be gained from considering how things would have been like if King were still alive.  It’s less and less likely every year that he would have been with us now.  Seems a better question is what are we doing now that he would have been too old to lean on, anyway.

The answer?  I’m honestly not sure.

Anyway, the vaunted Cobb tagged me with the following blog question–what’s the most racist thing to ever happen to you?

Talk about a question that’s hard to answer.  I guess that’s mostly because I stopped keeping count of those things a long, long time ago.  Ran out of room to remember the stuff, and it just stopped being particularly noteworthy to me.  Hassled in hotels, press rooms, neighborhoods, driving, learning, teaching…pretty much anything else I can think of, I’ve encountered racism doing.  And I swear, I’ve heard a lot of things.

But picking out which was the most racist is like picking out the stinkiest turd.  After a while, they all just start to smell the same.

But I’ll hit you with a great story from when I was 14.  I went to high school in a small town, one of those towns surrounded by a bunch of other small towns.  Well, all those small towns got together every summer to have a SAT camp.  The ten sophomores at each school that scored the highest on the PSAT would get together and learn strategies for the test the next year.  Get some of them National Merit Scholars, yanno?

Well, I was invited.  My brother–all 6′3 1/2″, 225 of him–drove me up there, and we waited in line to get checked into the dorm and all of that.  Now, what we didn’t know at the time was there was also a basketball camp meeting at the same place during the same week.  But no big thing, yanno?

(Note–I’m 6′4″ now, but I was a late bloomer.  I think I was 5′7″ around that time, when I was heading to 11th grade.)

So me and the big brother were in the line behind a few cute lil’ white girls and some goofy looking white dudes who were there for the same reason I was.  The line proceeded forward, where a gentleman would direct people to the table that applied to them–scholars or basketball.

It went like this until I got to the front of the line.  You’ll be able to tell when it was me.

“Scholars?”

“yes.”

“Scholars?”

“Yes.”

“Scholars?”

“Yes.”

“Basketball?”

“No, scholars.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Sure he was sorry.  He knew why he assumed I was there for the basketball camp.  But no big thing.  I’d heard far worse.

So we’re in the scholars line for a while when some well-meaning parent came over and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Ummm, the basketball camp line is over there.”

It was then that my brother dropped the classic.

“Well, the next one’s gonna win the contest.”

I asked him what contest that was.

“Next person to come up to us with that bullshit is gonna win the honor of being the next person to get cussed out in front of all these people.”

No one else signed up, luckily.

But that’s just a story.  There are far worse, but I ain’t got the time to index ‘em.  That would be a Top 25 list of its own.

January 12, 2007

A Day with Dolby 5.1

Business…here’s a real simple way to tell who’s gonna win the Super Bowl. And they say prognostication is hard…

Love to stay, but I just got an Airport Express. It’s a classy lil device that lets me wirelessly run songs from iTunes through my home system (which I have modestly named The Thunderdome II). So what I’m doing now is listening to a bunch of stuff I’ve never gotten to jam on a full-on system. For music nerds like me, that can take up a lot of attention.
One recommendation–check out the new Beatles compilation Love. That’s the remix/mashup record George and Giles Martin did for Cirque de Soleil. The arrangements aren’t drastically different from the originals, but the songs are all remastered, making them perfect for Dolby 5.1. It’s worth peeping for all the Beatlephiles out there, and it doesn’t serve as a bad introduction for the uninitiated. The originals aren’t like these tracks, but they’re not foreign.

(Thanks again, boss.)

And just in case you’re out there–Prince, it’s time for you to have some of your old stuff remastered. Maybe you have already, but I’d really like to hear what Dirty Mind would have sounded like with full production. And can you imagine Sign O The Times with digital sound?

January 10, 2007

Oh buddy…

The older I get, the less stock I put in being right.  If all they say about you at the end of the day is that you’re right, then you ain’t got much of nothin’ to hold on to.  Or so I believe.

With that in mind, here’s this interesting nugget from ETS.

But really, does anyone know the answer to the question at hand?

January 9, 2007

Radio Tonight

Just wanted to let you know I’ll be doing my weekly spot on Tuesday Night Jams with Eric Eggers on 100.7 FM in Tallahassee.

I’ll be around.

January 6, 2007

A Moment of Profound Disappointment

So I’m watching Season One of The Wire.  There’s a scene where McNulty trails Stringer Bell to his Intro To Macroeconomics class.  In the class, the lecture is on elasticity.

I can’t tell you how disappointmented I was by this.  Everyone knows that elasticity is a micro concept!  Am I right?  Huh?(*)

My goodness, if they’re messing that up, my belief in the realism of the show is totally shaken!  If they’re slippin on stuff like that, who knows what they’re getting wrong with the smack trade.

This must be how Diana Ross when she finds out the Wiz is actually Richard Pryor.

*-I’m fully aware that no one gives a damn about this but me and a handful of other socially maladjusted beings.  We’re called economists.

January 4, 2007

Before I go to sleep…

…I feel the need to share two things.

1.  I went ahead and got a Mac.  Those that knock these things are might just haters.  I’m quite happy with it.  And the iSight thingy is really cool.

2.  My girlfriend and brother collaborated to get me the first three seasons of The Wire.  The lady and I watched five episode in six and a half hours after getting the plastic off.  And it’s taking everything in me to go to bed rather than turn on episode 6.

January 4, 2007

Today’s Pressing Question

Are we really gonna watch this?  I think I’ve overdosed on all of this, but have I?

Well, have you?

January 1, 2007

New Year’s in the A

Yanno, New Year’s Day is a much better day since I stopped drinking.  Before, it was a day of detox.  Now, I can actually wake up at a decent hour without cursing the world.  Hooray sobriety!

Anyway, went to see Maze and Kem at the Atlanta Civic Center last night (yes, I’m in Atlanta and no, I haven’t called you yet, whoever you are).  ‘Twas what Gipp would call that fie fie delish.  It was the second time I’d seen Kem in the last four months, so it didn’t really light me up.  That’s not to say his show wasn’t good.  Just was a bit of a rerun.  The thing I always give him credit for, though, is his ability to put on a great show without really trying.  Sure, he puts effort into what he does, but he’s such an effortless performer.  It works for the dude.  And it surely works for a few of them ladies, particularly the one sitting directly in front of us that was shakin and gyratin from the second the lil fella hit the stage.

But sorry, Kem.  By the end of the night, I’d forgotten that he was even on the damn stage.

Maze was that good.  I mean incredible.   Don’t matter that Frankie came out there with that same white shirt and white pants and white hat on, the same thing I believe he wore to some talent contest in Philly in ‘72.  Don’t matter that Frankie ain’t quite as smooth as he used to be.  Not a lick of that matters.  First, the band still goes hard.  High energy at every turn, tight grooves, incredible guitars, all that fun stuff.  I mean, they ripped EVERY SONG, including a great version of “Auld Lang Syne.”  Incredible.

Now, this is how you close a show.  Play “Auld Lang Syne,” do all the Happy New Year stuff, then come with…..

Golden Time of Day

The Morning After

Back in Stride Again

Happy Feelin’

Joy and Pain

Before I Let Go

You can’t beat that with a bat, pimpin’.  The wild part was that after midnight, we were sitting there trying to do the math to figure out what was left for the band to play.  I’d narrowed it down to four songs, the last of which was “Joy and Pain.”  So we start walking out when we heard the first two notes of “Before I Let Go,” which prompted me to run up the steps and almost knock my poor girlfriend to the ground.  But she kept up.  Good woman she is.

Now, don’t ask me how I forgot about “Before I Let Go,” which is so crunk that they played it at almost every party I went to in college.  I was a freshman in 1997.

Anyway, none of this really explains the best part of the show–drunk grown folks!

I mean, just because I ain’t drinkin’ don’t mean the rest of these jokers ain’t.  By the time the balloons were fallin from the ceiling, the whole room was on Cootie Brown.  I mean COOTIE.  Lady to the right of us was drinkin that bubbly straight from the bottle.  She came in chill as all get out and was droppin it like it was on fire halfway through Frankie’s set.  That lady in front of me clearly loved Kem, but not as much as she loved that fire water, which had her droppin it all the way to the floor and doin the slow circles with her hips and the whole nine.  It’s worth nothing that woman came by herself.

Then there was this couple that must have come drunk and then kept drinking.  When I say they dance all the way through Frankie’s set, I mean all the way.  First song to the last.  And they wasn’t just two-steppin, neither.  Them niggaz was cuttin’ the rug, baby.  Spinnin, dippin, woppin…everything.  The wild part, though, was that they were in perfect rhythm the whole time.  For them to be as drunk as they clearly were, that was an amazing feat.

But this was the most fun I’ve ever had at a concert.  ‘Twas New Year’s, when everyone’s just happy.  ‘Twas Frankie, who brings the house down.  And since it was New Year’s, there was enough drank to start a car.  Not just a little one, neither.  H2.  Shit like that.

Couldn’t lose.