Jumping the Shark

I was telling a friend a few weeks ago that Crunk has jumped the shark. The day before I had seen the preview for the Olsen Twins' movie "New York Minute" and the background song was "Shake it Like a Saltshaker" by the Yin Yang Twins. Let me tell you that I was thoroughly disturbed watching the Olsen twins (and Eugene Levy) running around while the baseline of "Saltshaker" was playing. Certainly not a sight I had imagined while bumpin that track on my stereo.

But let's chalk that one up to wierd and unecessary combinations where marketing people try to bring in a wider audience. Another example of that is the use of 50 Cent's "In the Club" as the background music for the preview of Harrison Ford's Hollywood Homicide. Needless to say, Harrison is the last person I'd expect at a club bobbing his head to 50. But I digress...

The next and perhaps more convincing argument that Crunk has jumped the shark? MSNBC writing a story on how Cunk is like Punk Rock. It's always fun reading something that's trying to explain and define a cultural/street phenomenom in terms that the average white joe blow can understand. Here's to journalistic integrity!

Personally Crunk's jumping the shark makes no difference in my life. Lil Jon is always a fun guy to listen to hollering on a track ("WHHHHHHHHHAT?!?!") and basslines can always make some bones shiver. Jumping the Shark in this case just means there's some odd juxtapositions going on with the growing popularity. I don't think it means the quality of the music is going down-hill. As long as those qualities are around it's "OOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKKKKKAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!"

Church!

Ok, so my plan to post comments about more serious topics ain't really happening. That's not to say I've stopped thinking about the current situation in Iraq or the electoral frenzy in India. For the time being, can I just sit back relax in the glow? The glow of recent Staples Center sideline sightings? Can I just say how pleased I was during the recent Lakers-Spurs playoff game? Of course, the Lakers came storming back to win the series, but the cherry on top? Not one, but two, count 'em two P-I-M-Pees: Snoop Dogg and Bishop Magic Don Juan. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Being away from LA breaks my heart sometimes, but catching that sight on TV definitely brought me back to an LA state of mind.

Unfortunately, I can't find a pic of Bishop Magic Don Juan from the game, but hopefully this will be enough to give you a grasp of the stunning nature of seeing this guy on the sidelines. How can you not sit up and smile at him?

Smile for the Camera

So how you like me now? The folks at Google have certainly done a nice job with the new templates. I can't seem to get the in-house commenting system to work though, so until then, HaloScan still prevails.

UPDATE: Ok, so the in-house commenting thing works only for new posts. No problem with that so bu-bye haloscan.

More about the new templates: The way in which Blogger is now organizing posting should actually help get more (and better) search results on the various search engines. Each posting now has its own HTML page rather than a single HTML page per month, etc. Hopefully this means that the search engines find more pages to index and that the results lead to the specific posting with the keywords. Anyways, hope you're done blinking you eyes and the shiny new exterior of this blog.

On the Pedestal

In my last post I mentioned America standing on a pedestal. I should say that I'm all for standing proud on a pedestal and bragging about one's greatness. When one has a great accomplishment, a true champion will brag all he can about it (some more loudly than others). But when it's a false accomplishment, the person trying to stand on the pedestal should expect to be spit upon and moreover, should not ignore the spitters. To put an analogy to this, I'll use the NBA playoffs, since they're consuming my evenings right now.

A false accomplishment is hitting a game tying shot in the 2nd quarter of a first playoff game. Trying to stand on a pedestal after that is screaming and hollering to the crowd to show how much heart you have. This is something a true champion would never do, it's something a kid would do. It's something that Steve Francis did against the Lakers in a game that his team ended up losing. Steve, sit your ass down. Oops, you're already doing that since your team got knocked out of the playoffs last week. Now, a true champion is someone gets up on the pedestal once something great has been done. Michael Jordan did this as he pushed Bryon Russell aside for a game-winning (and 6th championship-winning) shot against the Jazz.

Now, I'm not saying that basketball shots are mark of a champion in the world at large, but the attitude is something to note. Right now, I believe that the Bush admin is prematurely getting up on the pedestal without much to show for. A "mission accomplished" speech? That's like a 1st quarter layup. Sit down son. Capturing Saddam? That's like a hard dunk near the end of the 2nd quarter. Nice make kid, but get back on D. Finding your own soldiers abusing prisoners in the same way that Saddam's regime did. That's like Hakeem Olajuwan constantly blocking a young Shaq in the 95 NBA Finals. Humiliating. Sit the fuck down and come back when you've won something.

At this point, we should all be showing the same humility when it comes to Iraq. Until we can go back and learn a few lessons, we have anything to stand up for. No matter how you want to relate other good events in the world (eg, Libya's turn-around) to our actions in Iraq, we have nothing to smile about when we can't even entrust our soldiers to respect the people they are supposedly liberating. Yes, a few bad apples have stained thousands of good people struggling to secure Iraq, but what's done is done. Morever, it seems like the chain of command is in willful bliss while they dance around on a shaky pedestal.

-- PS - No offense meant to Hakeem & Shaq in comparing them to recent events in Iraqi prisons. It's just an analogy ;)

Dismay

A blogger I occassionally read has a term for re-building the Arab World - Draining the Swamp. You can read some of his specific posts for his thoughts on this. I'm not going to comment on his thoughts since that's not my point; I'll leave to you to decide if you agree with him or not. Lately however, I just keep finding new reasons for why this is going to be a much much more difficult thing to accomplish (let's assume that it is indeed something we want to accomplish). The latest reason, of course, is the news of degrading torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. President Bush went on Arab TV yesterday condemning this stuff and essentially to try and placate a huge Arab audience and basically tell them, "Hey, we don't stand for this and don't you forget we're in it to win it and improve everybody's lives" Personally, I think Bush really believes in what he says. Whether what he believes is based on any point in reality is another story.

I don't think these abuses are the end-all-be-all, but it's yet another thing to point to and hang your head in shame that we can't do better. So outside of the human rights and the general "oh my god, you can't do that to our fellow humans!" thing, I think the main problem here is that the revelation of all these abuses just makes it sooo much more difficult to stand up on a pedestal and show that We Americans know what's best for for the world and We Americans have a plan to get You there. Bush seems to not want to get off that pedestal and really do anything serious about it. He keeps saying we're making progress, but that's about it. I know that's just his style of speaking, but c'mon...at some point, you've got to offer more than that.

It remains to be seen what actually comes of these prison abuses. We're told that many service-people at the prison are being reprimanded. I don't know what that entails, but I'm sure it's certainly not enough for the Arab audience who watched Bush's interview yesterday. We're being told that Sec. Rumsfeld is on the hot-seat for this as well. Personally, I don't care if the admin finds a fall-guy for this. Afterall, a fall-guy is just the person who's been chosen to take the heat so the rest of the folks can continue on their merry ways. Besides, I don't think Bush will bail on him. If he hasn't bailed on the poster-child for fall-guys, George Tenet, than he's not going to bail on his boy Rummie.

The only type of thing that's going to make difference is a demonstration of what's being done to improve the lives of people in Iraq. I'm really surprised that we don't get more of that news. The media love to show "human" stories when the Olympics come around, why not when it comes to Iraq? You'd think the Admin would be pushing CNN and the like to cover more of that stuff. While we do get some tidbits here and there, they seem more like isolated instances rather than parts of an improving picture. The cynic in me figures it's because there just isn't much good news to report. Who knows, I know I selectively read news and find news which supports my belief that the Admin will implode on itself.

Either way, I'm dismayed.

And with dismay, it's always good to find a good laugh. So here's Jon Stewart's take on this. Have fun.

The Last Straw

So after weeks and weeks of random people begging me to start posting on my blog again, I finally had it yesterday. Someone knocked on my door and when I answered it there was a crowd of bedraggled looking children who told me they wouldn't eat until I posted to my blog! Can you believe it?! The children want me to write! So I decided, I've gotta blog for the children. Do it for the kids man! :)

But seriously, I really got lazy and busy so the blog went to the side while I took care of some things. Let me just say that buying a house is really all-consuming. Not only do you have paperwork, you've got all the HGTV to watch! In the last couple of months I've felt guilty for not writing...not for denying the handful of people who read this stuff, but for not spending time to think about my life and document my thoughts and interesting things around me.

So this past weekend we went to agreat hip-hop show at The Warfield. If you've never checked out the artists on the Quannum record label, now's the time. I got DJ Shadow's Entroducing CD a while back, but that was about it. A few months ago, a friend told me about this rapper named Lyrics Born, but I hadn't heard of his stuff. Well, after checking out this show, I'll be listening to a lot more from all of the artists. They're mainly from the Bay Area (UC Davis, in particular) and the whole label is touring together. The Warfield show was their last on this tour. As you can tell from the samples on their website, it's a wide range of hip-hop, but underground beats to more funky stuff. After just 10 minutes at the venue, I was sold on these guys. Overall, I'd say this was almost as good as the Mos Def/Talib Kweli show we went to last year. Of course DJ Shadow ripped ish up. He not only spun beats the whole show, he had this trippy DVD turntable which let him scratch video in sync with the rest of the beats. We were stunned.

Anyways, check 'em out if you get a chance. If you've been looking for something different, anything from this label should please you.