Pandas: they may be cute, but they’ll strip you naked.
If this was a video game, we could just turn off the console and start the day over and Yao would never have this injury. Unfortunately, this is real life, and my favorite NBA player is out the rest of the year with a fracture in his foot. Below, please find a photo of him making a face that illustrates how every Rockets fan feels right now:
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.
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!
Did anyone know there was a player named Jyles Tucker playing for the San Diego Chargers?
The rookie recovered a fumble for a touchdown yesterday in a win over the Raiders. I’ve heard of people with Giles as a last name, but this is new.
His name is Jyles, pronounced like Giles.
Or is my name Giles, pronounced like Jyles?
Oh the movie never ends it goes on and on and on and on…
Nostalgic today because of yesterday’s news about the Juice Crew. Awesome. Peep the ill trio of Masta Ace videos below.
Kool G is actually my favorite member, but something about Masta Ace is mad timeless.
According to blackfilm.com, there is a movie in the works about the Juice Crew. Holy shit!
So apparently the actress who played Akeelah is gonna be Roxanne Shante, which got me saying like…word? I thought she was like 11, but after reading up on her, she seems like a good choice. A+ for you guys.
Surprised about Cuba Gooding Jr as Marley Marl, and looking forward to David Banner as Biz. But I’m casting the movie in my head. Please play along:
I got a lot of positive response to this entry I did for BPRLive.org three days ago, so in the spirit of laziness, I’m crossposting here.
Please read on.
Hands down, the greatest song of the melodramatic arena rock era that took place in the late 70s/early 80s was “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. I have a hard time believing anybody could disagree with this sentiment. There’s something for everyone: the boy meets girl under less-than-ideal circumstances story, the insightful observations about human nature, the repetition of the word “on.” I think people usually assume its some overly cheesy pop song with no meaning, but there’s poetry in them thar lyrics. Please check the following trio of haikus, taken directly from the song, and devoid of their original context and punctuation:
People living. Just
to find emotion hiding
somewhere in the night.
Just a city boy.
Born and raised in south Detroit.
He took the midnight.
For a smile, they can
share the night. It goes on and
on and on and on.
So perhaps Journey’s connection to Asian artistic forms led them to their most recent band-related decision, which was to bring on an actual Asian to front the band. Arnel Pineda - the lead vocalist for a bar band who covers Journey tunes in the Philippines - is their new lead singer. Holy shit!
Click here to read the rest of this post at BPRLive.org
I was tagged by eliaday for this blog meme recently, and so I guess that means I write 8 random things about me here. I call this an ingenious way to come up with blog material; you call it lazy. Let’s just agree to disagree.
I’m calling this blog meme “8 Diagrams” in honor of Wu-Tang month. There are actually no diagrams, but there are 8 bullet points. So take from that whatever you want.
1. My favorite slept-on rap verse off any mainstream song is Babs Bunny’s verse from Bad Boy This, Bad Boy That My favorite couplet in the song is: “you a thug, why you keep on talking? Let’s get it crackin/Get a b** stomped out in the club, I make it happen.” It’s just so unapologetically gangsta; it’s like that moment in A Bronx Tale when the motorcycle gang gets locked into the mafia don’s bar. Thrilling.
2. I hate wearing t-shirts with sleeves, but I hate dudes who always wear sleeveless t-shirts more. If I started wearing sleeveless t-shirts around town, I might as well grow a ponytail and ride a Segway to make the transformation from person into “Mad TV” sketch character complete.
3. When I was a kid, whenever someone anywhere in the building flushed a toilet, the water from all faucets would flow weaker. If this happened while I was in the shower, then I’d step away from the water because I’d be thinking, “ew, toilet water,” and then once the stream got strong again, I’d step back in.