in my reminiscing about the halcyon days of rap and hip hop i put my rap playlist on the ipod and enjoyed the sounds of the late 80s and early 90s.
i think part of my enjoyment of the early days of this musical artform was the sampling; not so much the blatant ripoffs a la Puffy; but the snippets of tracks. i grew up with a diverse musical background with all manner of influences. my mother had music appreciation on Sundays after church and she`d unleash the Al Green, Bob Marley, Handel`s Messiah, Ace Cannon, Herb Albert, whatever she thought was appropriate. I also spent a lot of time at my aunt`s house and she had children in their late teens to early adulthood who shared their music as well. this sound musical background help me rediscover music i`d know and loved as an element in music i was just discovering.
i`ve always said i would give almost anything to go through Fatboy Slim`s record collection, his use of obscure samples is sublime. there also used to be a website that kept track of samples in popular hip hop but it seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
lately i`ve been enjoying the smash-ups. i`ve never been a big fan of either the Beatles or Jay-Z but i love Dangermouse`s Grey Album as well as the Kleptones` Queen/hip hop smash-up and the London bootmixed which is a remix of the Clash`s London Calling.
we have digital cable because that`s the only way i can get speed channel which is where i get my Formula One fix. season starts in two days. digital cable has also afforded me the music video channels, you remember those, what MTV and VH1 used to be when they launched. to ensure they can still be called “Music Television” and Video Hits One” they have a plethora of channels that show only music videos.
i`ve realised that i`m getting older because of the eight or ten possible music video channels i watch only one with great regularity; VH1 Classic; home of blocks of videos from the 70s and 80s; and i am content. lately i`ve been drifting to VH1 Soul because they`ve been featuring blocks of music and when i do get sucked in it tends to be artists i like; on sunday there was a one hour block of Bob Marley videos.
i really started writing reflecting on rap and hip hop. i`m not a fan of most of the current crop of hip hop, primarily because it all sounds the same. i`m not saying that rap was always a fount of originality but there was a moment when everything was new and dare i say it; fresh.
the misogyny and violence don`t bother me as much as it should; i own the first two Ice Cube albums and at the time the sound was new and interesting but there comes a point where it gets old and you find yourself wondering what you enjoyed. then there is the concept that the only purpose for recording a lot of this music is to increase profit margins. i think fundamentally that`s what bothers me; the anger, sexuality and violence perpetrated on records don`t come for some place genuine; it`s all about making a profit. and it`s not just hip hop, the music industry is all about profitability; if they can`t make money off you with the trite pop, they can make money by appealing to your baser instincts; anger, lust, you get the idea; they believe there is a niche for you.
i long for the days of the pure storytelling and fun that were the roots of rap and hip hop. or maybe those days never existed and it was just the innocence of youth.
tomorrow will be one year since i arrived on these shores. and what fun and exciting adventure it`s been.
so much has changed and so many things have gotten better since i got off than plane one year ago. i think the timing for filing this paperwork is kind of appropriate, it`s another milestone and quite possibly the final hurdle in securing our life together.
in the past year i have been welcomed completely by vic`s family, celebrated our birthdays, holidays and special days together. we`ve got to go to bed nightly without the worry of how many days it will be until we see each other again. we can sit and talk or just sit and savour each other`s company. we`ve had our disagreements but we`ve worked them out. things have been difficult but we continue to persevere. we have each other; to sound off, to comfort, to congratulate, to support.
it`s been a very good year and i`m eternally grateful, i`m truly blessed. here`s to many more of these years.
little Mac insider joke there.
the boychick has a snow day today. how many inches were dumped on Nashville, TN to warrant a snow day you ask? zero. zip. nada. how many inches are expected today? more of the same. it`s flurrying outside my window at the moment, but the temperatures are climbing and by midday any chance of flurries will be over.
i come from the tropics and i find this completely laughable. there is absolutely no reason for a snow day. there are reports of patches of ice on the interstates and i`ve managed to find the national weather service advisory for Davidson County:
URGENT – WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NASHVILLE TN
658 AM CST TUE MAR 1 2005
.COLDER AIR WILL REMAIN IN PLACE ACROSS THE REGION TODAY ALONG
WITH GUSTY NORTHWEST WINDS. THE COLD AIR…ALONG WITH LINGERING
MOISTURE…WILL CONTINUE TO BRING SNOW SHOWERS TO THE REGION.
ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS WILL VARY DEPENDING ON EXACT LOCATION AND ELEVATION. GENERALLY…MOST AREAS WILL HAVE UP TO 1 INCH OF
ADDITIONAL SNOWFALL WITH GREATER AMOUNTS POSSIBLE AT HIGHER
ELEVATIONS ALONG THE PLATEAU.
this is astounding, there are places where an inch of snow fall accumulates in minutes. i got in the car this morning and i didn`t even have to scrape. there was light powder on the car. i don`t get it.
i shouldn`t let this upset me, i should know better. this is the same city, where i never saw a snow plough on my street when it actually snowed and froze just before Christmas, but there was one clearing the lot of the neighbourhood mall.
That`s all from Nashville where the current weather conditions are partially cloudy and 29F (-2C) with a 30% chance precipitation.
List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you`ve read. Italicize the ones you`ve read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur`an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterleys Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
If you have an e-mail address you probably received unwanted e-mail of some sort, this is known as spam or junk mail. There is no sure fire way to stop spam, but these pointers may help reduce the amount of messages you have delete on a daily basis.
1. Create a separate e-mail address for signing for lists or online services.
Spammers tend to trawl mailing lists and online discussion boards for addresses, by creating another e-mail address you can ensure your main address is smothered by unwanted e-mails.
2. Use a service like BugMeNot (www.bugmenot.com).
BugMeNot is a service created to bypass logging into websites like the New York Times that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information.
3. Blind CC your forwards.
Actually this guideline was initially, don`t forward anything, but that would be almost impossible to convince people to do. But to prevent spamming yourself, your friends and family, use the BCC or Blind CC field to address bulk e-mails thus ensuring privacy.
4. Use your address book
Most, if not all e-mail applications; even the free online ones; include an address book. Using the address book to keep the e-mail addresses of your friends and family address, as well as the mailing list administrators; if you`re on mailing lists, allows the junk mail filter of these applications to work more efficiently. If an e-mail shows up from someone not in your address book it will get flagged as junk.
5. Don`t click the remove button
A lot of spam comes with an option that offers to stop sending or remove you with a simple click. In an ideal world that would work, but most spammers are operating illegally, so clicking on that button only confirms your e-mail address is valid and causes more spam.
If your current e-mail account is already overwhelmed by spam, now might be the time to set up a new account; using the current account as the spam catcher; implementing these rules and see how your inbox fares.
we have an opportunity to clear up a financial albatross but; there is always a `but` isn`t there; i can`t get a loan from our bank to make the settlement because i have no credit.
i don`t exist, well at least until about 9 months ago, i didn`t pay bills, i had no debt, no social security number. i haven`t lived anywhere long enough, i haven`t worked anywhere long enough, so i`m a non-person. vic has a credit history but isn`t working full time anywhere and doesn`t qualify. i`m hoping to hear from our bank today to see if our combined job/credit history situation is good enough for us to settle the credit card and repay the bank at a significantly lower interest rate.
this whole concept of existence based on your social security number smacks very much of the mark of the beast. who you are and what you can and cannot do based on a series of number is a more than a little distressing.
i live in a town with at least two major college campuses which means there is no shortage of nubile young bodies on display, however i`ve come to realise that i prefer my eye candy, mature.
the most attractive and interesting women i`ve seen have been mothers. they are for the most part comfortable in their own sexuality and their own bodies. there is none of this need to show off their new bodies to every passer-by.
maybe i`m weird but i don`t see the fascination and fixation on young girls. or maybe it`s because i have daughters, i`d like my eye candy to be outside their age group and that of their idols.
there is also something to be said for the curves of womanhood. i like women lush and curvy which is not something you see in the average college student, i think it`s something that comes with motherhood.
i`m realising that until i have a piece of paper that says i can colour within the lines, i`m going to be stuck within my current salary range. doesn`t matter i have 13 years experience in my field and i could probably teach some of the course work, i have to go back to school and get a degree so i can even begin to get paid what i`m worth.
i did one year of university, then i dropped out, because it bored me and at the end of the day it was my money i was spending. now here i am 14 years later and one of the only wise decisions i made in those halcyon days is biting me in my ass.
the concept of starting as an undergraduate just angers me. there is a dedicated art and design school here and they don`t even accept CLEP credits. and that`s another problem, there is no CLEP exam that would enable me to skip the fundamentals of design. of course there is another option; Central St. Martin`s in London offers an MFA programme with a minimum entry requirement of three years design experience, a portfolio they deem worthwhile and £20,000 or US$35K a year. not happening right now, but i can`t dream can`t i?
if i could find that kind of money, i would work my ass for the year and a semester that it takes to complete the programme, especially in the typography pathway.
HST is gone. and it`s affecting me more than i expected.
the first thing of his i ever read was the Great Shark Hunt and from that moment i was hooked. i wanted to write like that when i grew up, i still do. my interest and understanding of American football and politics were pretty much shaped by his writing.
i think if i hadn`t just read Hey Rube, i wouldn`t been as affected, reading it just reminded me how much i admire his writing and now there is no more.
there is nothing new from my two favourite writers; one fairly prolific, the other constantly plagued by writer`s block; except, ironically, for movies based on their works later this year.
some time later and i think i`m a little close to figuring out why HST`s death bothers me so much; he was my icon of American journalism and now that he`s gone what hope is there left for the rest of us.
