Not too long ago, I resurrected the good ole seating chart. The initial post was because of the new trend of white girls with booties. But those are, as the saying goes, the exceptions that prove the rule. For the rest of the beckies, there’s Booty Pop Panties.

On the dead serious, I wouldn’t have believed that there was such a thing if I hadn’t strolled by The War On Folly. I’m lyin. I’d believe it. This type of figure enhancement has been available for years and years. I guess what’s really got my attention is the marketing. This is plainly being marketed to teenagers. That’s problematic. Let the little girl be a little girl while she’s a little girl.

Posdnuos’ line seems particularly apropos here:

And her facial gleams are sweet, but soon to switch to bitter
cause when she reaches sixteen she’ll be considered a piece of meat
Not a treat but a trick to sex in showers

Maybe not even sixteen any more.

Philly won’t be a wireless city for much longer.

Philadelphia’s citywide wireless network, which drew international attention and praise when it was launched, is likely to be scrapped. EarthLink Inc., which built and maintains the system, announced yesterday that it would end service June 12 and begin dismantling the system’s physical infrastructure soon after.

As recently as two weeks ago, a deal seemed imminent that would have let the network survive and even grow under the ownership of an Ohio-based nonprofit called OneCommunity, all at minimal co

While there are obviously folks of different races running around, the amount of import that we give to it differs. Take this article in which it’s written that at three months, babies prefer to look at faces of the same race. When that’s the race of the faces they’re used to seeing. Sorta. The experiment was done with Israeli babies in Israel, Ethiopian babies in Ethiopia, and Ethiopian babies in Israel, the latter of which would be the control group, since they would be expected to regularly see faces of both races. Just thinking about it real quick, an interesting follow-up experiment would be to see if babies make intra-racial distinctions. That is, would an Ethiopian baby from Ethiopia look more at the face of a Nigerian or an Israeli? Simple questions can’t get at the good complexities.

Even more complex is something that we take for granted in the United States, because even though we have different dialects, the differences are minor. We’re all basically intelligible to each other, which means that language bias doesn’t come into play (at least, not among babies). To wit:

[Babies] like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’

These findings make perfect sense according to two California-based pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. In the Stone Age, race was next to useless as an identifier, because most people would never have travelled far enough to see anyone of a different skin colour. Accent, vocabulary and dialect would have helped distinguish friendly tribes from foes. Tooby and Cosmides concluded that humans are born with a predisposition to divide the world along ethnic lines traced out by language and accent, more than racial lines.

This also explains the preference of “Black” Hispanics to think of themselves as “Hispanic” first, and Black second, if at all. Having been raised in the US, where skin color trumps all, I always thought something was weird about that. But then, I’m in the linguistic majority. I suppose that in a country where the primary language was different than my own, I’d fall in with other speakers of my language group, too.

Darling Nikki - Prince
Rain Maker - Harry Nilsson
Ashley’s Roachclip - Soul Searchers
Break My Heart - Jimmy G & The Tackheads
Boulevard Connection - Masta Ace
Da Ill Out - Redman
Quimbara! - Bamboleo
Gatur Bait - The Gaturs
Where Do the Children Play? - Take 6
Watching You - Slave
Pump Your Fist - Kool Moe Dee
I’m Goin’ Away - Walter Hawkins
Maggot Brain - Funkadelic
Maybe The Last Time - James Brown

Free - Deniece Williams
Have A Talk With God - Stevie Wonder
Sweet Sixteen - B.B. King
Everybody Ought To Know - Tramaine Hawkins
Can I Kick It (Spirit Mix) - A Tribe Called Quest
I Wanna Be Yo Ho (Remix) - AMG
I Used to Love H.E.R. - Common
At Last - Etta James
Got To Be Real - Cheryl Lynn
Humpty Dump - The Vibrettes
Crown Royal - Jill Scott
Anti Love Song - Betty Davis
The Louisville Lip - Eddie Curtis
God Made Me Funky - The Headhunters
17 Days - Prince
Passions of a Woman Loved - Charles Mingus
Never Knew Love Like This Before - Stephanie Mills
All I Am - Heatwave
I Put A Spell On You - Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Minute By Minute - Michael McDonald
Come Sunday - Cannonball Adderley
I Just Want to Celebrate - Rare Earth
Holy Calamity (Bear Witness II) - Handsome Boy Modeling School

Not the song, just the act of being there.

From Power 99 DJ, Cosmic Kev … (jacked from 215hiphop.com)

215: Mentioning how hip hop has such a huge generation gap now when do you think old school hip hop will have its on dial on FM radio? Now it’s either very young (Power 99) to very old (WDAS.)

Kev: Well it’s already on satellite but as far as Urban AC (Adult Contemporary) stations go they feel like rap is a young audience, which it is. They feel that old school rap is also still for the younger generation. They gotta understand that the average 35-40yr old was brought up on rap. They may have been exposed to the Temptations & Barry White but they were brought up on Kurtis Blow, the Melly Mels, and even the EPMDs. Urban AC’s are afraid to touch it because to them it’s still just rap. Where the problem is that when they hear of old school rap and an audience of 30-40yr olds, they don’t think that exists. They think that age demographic doesn’t want to hear rap anymore. I personally don’t think that’s true. I think it could happen on FM, someday, we’ll see.

That’s pretty much exactly what I think. While I would argue that rap is still a young man’s game, there is a growing body of people who came of age listening to it, who are now in the neighborhood of 40 years old. While I’m not exactly sure whether there could be an FM radio station that plays strictly classic hip-hop, I don’t think that Adult Contemporary stations should stay away from it. But there are whole sounds and movements that, as far as you might know from listening to the radio, never existed. 21 years ago, LL spoke for many of us when he said he couldn’t live without his radio. Seems that if we had to depend on the broadcast stations to hear that song, we’d have to.

This Karl Malone story is outrageous.

Bell is the son of Malone, but the Mailman had no role in Bell’s success except passing along athletic genes.

The two have had very little contact during Bell’s life. His mother, Gloria Bell, reportedly was only 13 years old and Malone a college sophomore at Louisiana Tech when Demetrius was born. Malone might have served jail time had her family asked the district attorney to file criminal charges.

Bell didn’t even know Malone was his father until after graduating from high school. When they finally met, Malone told the 18-year-old Bell it was too late to be his father, and that Bell would have to “earn his money on his own.”

In a 1998 story in the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune, Gloria Bell said, “Demetrius is ashamed that his dad doesn’t claim him. But I’ve told him it is not his fault.”

Malone also fathered twins while in high school. One of them is WNBA star Cheryl Ford. It took years to claim the twins, and now he and his wife, Kay, fully accept them as part of their family.

But what about Demetrius? Doesn’t he deserve the same measure of love and recognition?

Now granted, the child has now been drafted in the NFL, so I don’t know that there’s anything significant to be said now, but…naw. Nix that. There are some things to be said.

1. Dude got some ath-a-letic genes. One child gets drafted in the NFL, one child played in the WNBA? Wow.

2. “It’s too late for me to be your father. You’re gonna hafta earn your money on your own?” From an NBA player? Really?

Having not met my father until after high school, I can absolutely say that I have zero respect for Karl Malone at this point. I thought he was a whiny basketball player, and that he was a dirty player on the sneak tip, but now? This here? Boo!

Swanee - George Gershwin
Ode To Billy Joe - Lou Donaldson
Millenium - Outkast
Everybody Is A Star - Sly & The Family Stone
Brooklyn - Mos Def
One Thing - Amerie
Dreams - Earth Wind & Fire
Yes To The Lord - The Stovall Sisters
Short Change - Ohio Players
Takeover - Jay-Z
Ooh Child - The Five Stairsteps
Licking Stick-Licking Stick - James Brown
Ether - Nas
Moonshine Heather - Parliament
You Gotta Believe - Rose Royce
I Spend My Life - Ramsey Lewis
Peace and Love - Movement IV - Mandrill
Only One Way Out of This Mess - Sly And The Family Stone
Dat Dere - Cannonball Adderley
!!!!!!! - The Roots

First up, of course, is the Sean Bell trial.

Police brutality - or suspected police brutality concerns me a lot. Even as somebody who has worked closely with policemen in the past, and as somebody whose longest friendship is with a police officer, I’m still always disconcerted by the death of a civilian at the hands of police. When the civilian in question was not in the commission of a crime, I’m even more disturbed. Nahmeen, I have all the respect in the world for police officers, but I don’t think that respect demands a blind loyalty. I couldn’t care less about the race of the police officers doing the shooting, either. It just worries me. And I’m sayin’ - the days when I’d be at a strip club at 4 AM are long gone, but I still can’t shake the idea that I could be the victim of some type of “accident” at some point.

More bothersome to me than the actions of the police officers in question is the attitude of the police union. While I appreciate the fact that a union exists to support its rank and file, I generally like to feel that police unions are there to protect the citizenry as much as they are there to protect the police officers. Kinda like if the mission of police officers is to protect and serve, the police union should have the same objective. When I look at he statements of the official police unions on this case, I’m not really left with the impression that I’m protected. Not even in a casual, lip-service sense.

Having said that, while I think the judge was probably legally correct, this verdict leaves much to be desired. And borrowing from McWhorter, this is exactly the type of case where name-brand Black conservatives (or conservative Blacks, imo) lose their credibility with lots of Black folks. There’s lots of space between riding intractably hard for the law enforcement and running down the street yelling “eff the police!” A simple, “we applaud the job that the police do, and we appreciate the difficulties of making split-second life-or-death decisions, but the fact that yet another unarmed Black man who was not in the commission of a crime has died at the hands of police is cause for concern” might do wonders for their position. But then again, I’m not even sure I want any of those name brand Black conservatives (cuz a conservative Black, e.g., Massie, Peterson, et. al) to gain any traction in the community.

The Sixers could’ve gone up 3-1 on Detroit. I think game 4 was the key to the series. While I’m pleased that they made it this far, I don’t think they’re gonna win 2 of the next 4 games.

I’m not even sure what to make of the Eagles draft. It would be nice to be headed into the summer thinking that they’re all set and stocked to make one last run for the goodies, but I’m not sold. I know the NFC East is gonna be the best division in the NFL this year. Who knows, the Cowboys might actually make it out of the first round this year.

Your Madden 2009 cover boy? Brett Favre. Not that he’s necessarily crazy about it.

The Flyers are for real, too.