After my post yesterday about the Harvard student who got 2 years for stabbing a young man of color to death, Stephen Bor passed on information about the resolution of a court case on the other side of the country on the same day.

Two men shot semiautomatic weapons into a car of unarmed Cambodian men; two of the men in the car - Sovintha Nhem and Sophea Sun - were killed. One of the gunmen also died. The other gunman - after two hung juries - copped a plea and walked free yesterday.

The shooting stemmed from a confrontation that began when Nhem, who had been asked to leave a Skyway bowling alley and casino with his friends, wandered into the yard of Sidorchuk’s nearby rental home. The two exchanged increasingly heated words — with Sidorchuk and Belk hurling racial slurs and Nhem’s group shouting threats in return — until Nhem and his four friends backed a car into Sidorchuk’s driveway.

At that, Sidorchuk and Belk opened fire with semiautomatic weapons, shooting more than 20 rounds into the car. None of the young men inside were armed.

Deputies who later rushed to the scene discovered a marijuana-growing operation inside Sidorchuk’s home, but no testimony about that was allowed at trial.

From Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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In 2003, a Harvard student stabbed 18 year-old Michael Colono to death in Cambridge. The press went crazy about it because it was like good Harvard boy gone bad, I can remember so many details about this guy. His parents were divorced. His mother was an attorney in Colorado. He lived in Somerville, and that night had decided to walk home from a bar in Cambridge. He drank Jim Beam. He had been hanging out with 2 women earlier in the evening, and done the gentlemanly thing by seeing them off in a cab. I remember his name, although I won’t use it here, because as far as I’m concerned this person is not human and doesn’t deserve the courtesy of being thought of like a human.

But the information about Michael Colono was slow to come. So slow. I remember just wanting to know anything about him. I can remember picking up pieces here and there, that he had a young daughter and I think he worked as a cook. But the press told us other stuff about him, I think he had been picked up by police once or twice for fighting or something relatively minor.

But why did we need to know the victim had past experiences with police? How did that matter when he - unarmed, sitting in a car, with his friends - was the one who was killed? And why did we need to know the family story of the assailant? The killer was older, taller, heavier, and carrying a concealed lethal weapon - not just a small switch-blade, but a large knife. All the victim did was laugh at how drunk this random pedestrian was, and I guess the killer felt like a big man and was so offended by being the butt of an inoffensive joke that he killed an 18 year-old.

I hate to take away the focus from human life, but just imagine if the killer had been the young Latino father, and the murdered was the one who was the white Harvard student. Whose backstory would we have heard about in the news? Honestly. (more…)

Yeah. So. I’m just gonna say it.

I don’t like Harvard.

Growing up in this area, I had no special feeling either way for Harvard. As far as I was concerned it only existed on TV, or as a school that my parents hoped I would attend and would never in a million years have accepted me. I didn’t know anybody who went to Harvard, so I had no interactions with anybody from that school. As far as I was concerned, Harvard Square might as well have been the Kremlin. I knew it existed, but I had no reason or desire to go there. In fact, my college hatred was reserved for BC and BU students, who would crowd onto the green line drunk every Friday night and sing “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” or some other such nonsense like the climactic scene in a really boring movie.

In my adult life, I have met many people who went to school there, and you know, there’s definitely a lot of good folks. The good folks far outnumber the bad folks, so you know, don’t take this the wrong way. The bad catches are few and far between, but those bad folks are the worst folks I’ve ever met. They’re snobby and self-centered; they think their choice college education gives them the authority to pass judgment on others; they feel entitled to be a part of any and all conversations; they believe that what they learned in classes is more valuable than what anyone could have learned in life (or classes elsewhere); they see the world as having two possible views in everything: their point of view and the wrong point of view. In fact, you remember that ponytail in Good Will Hunting? Pretty much exactly like that dude, but in real life so way more worse.

Again. Not all. Just a few, but those few are so aggravating that they feel like a lot more than a few. (more…)

So I realized this week just how many blogs I read every day, which is to say a lot. I have over 60 RSS Feeds up in my Firefox. Some of them I read for straight up information, some for computer tips because I am a technopeasant, some are about radical politics, some music, some sports, blah blah blah. But I figured since I’m kind of lazy, I would waste this blog entry simply telling you about other blogs I read on the Internets.

BPRLive is a streaming Internet radio station playing only independent API artists, both obscure and…relatively less obscure. Just kidding. Aside from the names you’ve been knowing like Blue Scholars, VuDoo Soul, Visionaries, Kevin So, etc, there are jams from plenty of folks you cannot hear anywhere else except their myspace pages. (Watch for a live version of some dude named Giles covering “Part Time Lover.” For real it’s coming.) But aside from all that, it is a blog that I contribute to on the regular, along with other homies around these parts, and we write about API music, but also about other issues affecting our communities. But most recently, we’ve developed a feature called Shuffled!, in which API artists put their iPod on shuffle and write about whatever comes up. It happens every Thursday, so definitely keep checking for it.

Status Ain’t Hood is Tom Breihan’s blog for the Village Voice. I basically disagree with every single point Breihan makes. He seems to hate good hip hop and love corny hip hop. It’s rare that I get through one of his entires without coming across some point that in my mind completely invalidates his entire article. OK, considering all that, the tone of his writing is, dare I say, perfectly suited for a blog. Even when he writes about shit I’m not interested in - like country music or the Country Music Awards - I still read the whole thing because his writing is just that enjoyable to read. Regardless of the topic and his opinions, his writing is exactly the kind of writing I want to read off a computer screen 15 minutes at a time. That sounds oddly like a dis, but is a compliment.

I am bad at everything I do, but in particular, I’m bad at designing shit, like my own fliers and you know, this website. So I consider reading I Love Typography a bit of a voyeuristic treat. It’s all about fonts. I know I have no real understanding of why some fonts work better than others, and reading this thing doesn’t make my eye any sharper. But I do know when I like a font and when I don’t, and for some reason when I like a font, I REALLY like it. (I rented the documentary Helvetica though, and it wasn’t as exciting as I hoped it would be. I rented it when my wife was away so she wouldn’t make fun of my taste in film, which she already knew was pretty suspect.) But I appreciate the insight I’m privy to when reading the entries and comments, and it helps me pretend that maybe one day I’ll be more than the Denny Blaze of font appreciation.

My So-Called Career is Paul Shirley’s blog about what it’s like to be a true journeyman basketball player. He was a college star,went on to play a few minutes in the NBA, and currently plays in Spain. Somewhere along the way he picked up the skills to become a really talented writer. Who knew? I became a fan of his writing when I read this article comparing Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett on Slate earlier this year. Another aspiring NBA baller who has an awesome blog is Rod Benson, and he can be found at Too Much Rod Benson.

The D-Nice Journal. Why would I need to convince you? It’s D-fucking-Nice!

Bon bon kids. Welcome to another Appreciation post, it’s been a minute since I’ve done one. To catch past entries in this vein, click here.

Now that we got that out the way, let me bring you to Summer of 2000. I was less than two months removed from college graduation and working my very first real world job, which was pretty much nothing like the real world. I was a staffmember at the Organization of Chinese Americans, and was spending two weeks in Atlanta for the annual National Convention. It’s crazy that I was 21 and in charge of mad shit for real. But I can look back and appreciate that my experiences at my first job out of college - stressful though it was - really instilled me with a lot of confidence in my abilities to get stuff done. And that time in Atlanta was also interesting because 4 separate dudes I met there offered to set me up with women they knew. No wonder they call it HOTlanta.

Irregardless, that summer was also the first time I met the R&B group Kai. The name was short for kaibigan, the Tagalog word for “friendship,” and as you probably expect, they were 4 Filipino cats from the Bay plus - as you may not have expected - one Chinese dude who sang bass. They were signed to a major label, I think it was Geffen.

Although I had been taking performance poetry kinda serious for like a year or two by then, they were kinda next level for me because I had actually bought their CD single when I was in college. Maybe that seems like small-time nowadays because of the way that buying music has changed, but at the time, it was pretty big news that I could walk into Media Play in rural farmland Hadley, Massachusetts and buy a Kai CD. You young’ens might not get it, but Kai was as big API celebrities as we could imagine at that time, aside from maybe Margaret Cho. But she sucked anyway.

Read the rest of this entry at BPRLive.org

Is Ghostface the Greatest Of All Time because of this kind of shit? Or in spite of it?

Either way this shit had me cracking up.

“Call some-f*ckin-body and get the f*ckin doll aite?”

So long 07!