Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Graph of the Day

Say It Ain't So - Billy Mays

Legendary pitch man, Billy Mays, died of what is believed to be a heart attack. He was the man. Nobody could sling products like him. Obviously there's no God, cause if there was, he would've been selling shit into his 80's.

Instead of a clip of him selling stuff, how about one of him ordering from a drive-through (in his Bentley, life was good).

Friday, June 26, 2009

A Witness Story

Some people have seen some terrible things. Very interesting story.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Michael Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)

Michael Jackson died today of heart failure. He was the man. I hope he gets a good send off party. I'll just dedicate my favorite jam of his.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Summer Movie Jams

The summer movie season is in full swing I got to see a few of the hits.

Star Trek

The Onion said it best with the headline Trekkies bash new Star Trek film as "Fun, Watchable." This movie was good and I hope the nerds weren't mad because it wasn't technical enough about the Star Trek universe. J.J. Abrams created his own version of the show and characters, and got the screenwriters to pen a classic boy-in-footsteps-of-father theme. That's pretty much all it took to get a blockbuster hit.

On the social side, I wonder how the father-son theme plays with young males. I know a guy who I thought was a prime candidate for that movie when I saw the previews. He's searching for his father in everything he does. He's lost and I feel bad for him sometimes. I knew he'd be drawn to this movie. Just as I suspected, he thinks it's the best movie of the year. I don't think it was the special effects or the great scenery that got him.

I think he was thrilled to sit for an hour and a half and see a character conquer every young man's biggest fear; will he be able to stand in his Dad's shoes and succeed. Many young men are afraid that they won't be fully actualized into the great men that they think they can be, or that their fathers were.

We need stories like Star Trek to remind us to keep fighting and believe that we can be just as good as our Dads, or better. That theme will be used over and over. Hopefully, moviemakers will put it in their movies to help guys figure out their way. But I'm afraid that most movies will use it as a gimmick to lure unhealthy men into the theater. They know how broken guys out there are, and they can capitalize on it. That's the only thing I didn't like about Star Trek. It felt fake. The father-son theme was thrown in there because it hits so deep with young, scared men. They will flock to this movie and not know why they like it so much. It's not the effects, it's not the acting, it's the temporary freedom from fear.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

T-Swizzle

Taylor Swift and T-Pain are great in a spoof they did for the CMT Awards.



"Wait... I didn't even say anything."

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Sorry, yall. My internet's been down for a week now. I'm trying to get it back up by this weekend. How's the world been treating everyone? I'm good. I'll update you as soon as I can. Gotta run back to class now.

Monday, June 01, 2009

The Race War Will Not Be Televised

This country will never get over the race thing. White people have messed themselves up forever with that slavery thing. The new police shooting story is case in point. story

A white New York cop is under investigation after he shot and killed an off-duty black cop.
This is only a big story because a black officer was shot. I don't get what the big deal is. Everyone agrees that shooting mistakes happen. And since there are now almost as many black cops as white ones, it's a mathematical certainty that a white cop is eventually going to shoot a black one.

Of course we don't hear the stories of black cops accidentally shooting white ones (as if the racism could never be reversed). And we don't hear about the black cops shooting other black cops, as if there's no way people of the same race could not be racist towards each other.

We are living out a corny movie plot. There's still this romantic notion of the black man rising against the injustice of the white man that is poisoning the way the country works together. It's probably because the romance sounds much better than the simple fact that most cops are stupid and unqualified and make stupid mistakes sometimes.

What's so crazy about the idea of mistaken homicide, anyway? How come black people can't recognize that mistakes can happen towards them? It's insanity to think that black-on-black mistakes and white-on-white mistakes are normal, but as soon as a black guy gets shot by a white cop, it's automatically considered to be purposeful and racially motivated?

There's got to be something else going on that's making us so short-sighted. Black people are still mad as hell about the past. We can't get over it. We never will. White people are unforgivable. They can vote for a thousand black presidents, we will NEVER get over it. We will hate white people for EVER.

Its funny because I could imagine every statistics professor pulling his hair out with stories like this one. It is guaranteed that a black person will eventually be accidentally shot by a white cop. Guaranteed. No emotions, just simple math at work. If a blind robot was given a gun and started shooting down a crowded street with 500 white and 500 black people, it would only take about eight shootings to guarantee that a black person was shot. Is the robot racist? Would anyone posit something so stupid? Maybe they would if the robot was replaced with a middle-aged white guy with a buzzcut.

Even knowing the odds we still can't stand the fact that a black person was killed by a white man. It hits us deep down. We will never get over that no matter how many math lessons we get.