For it to be the semi-embarrassing moment that it was, Allen Iverson’s “Practice? We talkin bout practice?!” press conference is one of my favorite times with him as a Sixer. I remember listening to it live as I drove up Haverford Avenue. And now it has a remix, along with some other classic moments from other press conferences.

Shout out: Huffington Post

Two characters in the new Transformers movie, Skids and Mudflap, are getting a lot more attention than the film’s creators probably anticipated. Given their use of slang, their shuckin’ and jivin’ personae, and the fact that they are unremorsefully (unashamedly?) illiterate, particularly vis a vis the behavior of the other Autobots, some people question whether they are stereotypes of Black people. Knowing the historical stereotypes quite well, it’s very easy to see the precedent for this line of concern. One could go back even further, but by looking at the depction of the males in Coal Black and De Seben Dwarves, it’s fairly easy to see a strong continuity from that 1940s cartoon to 2009’s movie. But for me, there are a few questions that expand the discussion beyond the presence of any stereotypical characters.

First, I think it’s important to look at the character in totality. That is, it’s not enough just to note whether he has one or a few stereotypical traits, you’d have to have some understanding of that character overall. I’ll be right up front and say that I did not like Skids and Mudflap because they did not bring anything to the movie. Director Michael Bay claims that they were supposed to be there for comic relief, but I didn’t find them funny. Not in some hypersensitive ‘mad cuz he makin fun of Black folks’ way, they were just generally unfunny. A perfect character to look at to demonstrate this would be Kramer from Seinfeld. For those of us who watched Seinfeld, Kramer was hilarious. But if Kramer had been Black, he might’ve been decried as a stereotype. However, because we have a fairly good understanding of the character, we see that he’s just very quirky — and funny. Well, I would think that Black characters should have the same latitude to be funny, even if the portrayal borders on what would be stereotypical. The limitation with Skids and Mudflap is that they display the stereotypical traits without any counterbalances. They’re not shuckin and jivin and jive-talkin AND smart or particularly brave or anything else. Nope. Just shuckin and jivin and illiterate. With gold teefis. True, one gets eaten by Devastator and doesn’t continues to fight, but that 30 seconds doesn’t really offset anything that’s happpened up to that point. He still shows no particular level of valor.

Another question is this: to what extent should we be concerned about the portrayal of Black folks (or ostensibly Black folks) in the media, in the first place? For instance, I’ve heard the claim that the stereotypes help to perpetuate or justify racism. But do they? I definitely wouldn’t suggest that they do anything to ameliorate racism, but given that racism is itself illogical, I don’t know that anything can be legitimately said to justify it. That is, a racist person is not racist because of anything external, he is racist because of what is inside himself; the racist hates Black people neither because of nor in spite of what we do. He hates irrespectively. So the idea that showing Black folks of noble comport would somehow change his mind really does not follow. Bearing that in mind, does it ultimately matter? The answer I’ve been trained towards is yes, but I think it’s debatable, even if I’m not quite sure what the counterargument would be.

Then, there’s the question of what difference the background of the product’s creator makes. For instance, if you look at the stereotypes of Blacks in the cartoons in the 1940s, you’ll see some of the same actions and activities that are described in Zora Neale Hurston’s works. From my perspective, the obvious difference is that Hurston’s characters were developed and imbued with a full humanity, as opposed to being mere caricatures. However, many of her Black contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance did not see it that way. Hurston faced a good amount of scrutiny because of the stories she told and the characters in them bore some resemblance to the stereotyped characters in the popular (read: white) media at the time. Nowadays, I wonder whether Tyler Perry’s Madea would have anywhere near the traction if she was the creation of a white author. For the people who like TP’s work (cuz there are a lot who don’t), I wonder if they would still be able to relate to the character if everything but the author’s race was the same — or whether the people who protest would be going even harder.

Next question is this: because the characters are literally not human, are we doing too much in projecting humanity onto them based on a couple of characteristics? This one, I’d pretty much give a quick ‘no’ to. With any any anthropomorphic representations, as in animated works, there is a certain ‘type’ of humanity that’s given to the characters. So in the movie Cars, we know that the tow truck (I don’t remember his name) was supposed to be a ‘good ole boy.’ That’s not projecting onto the character, that’s reading it as it’s written. Same thing here. Jokers can try to deny, but in giving the robots human attributes, they also give them some racial elements — the Autobots, that is. The Decepticons, on the other hand, seem to have no distinguishing characteristics other than being Decepticons. There are no Decepticons with British accents, no ‘old man’ Decepticons, none of that. Well…there was one, but he had switched allegiance, so he was, for all practical purposes, and Autobot. But the fact that the Decepticons are all generic robots is proof that the creators know that the individual Transformers are representative of human subgroups, because they know if Megatron spoke with a [insert group] accent, there would be questions whether the portrayal indicated some sort of suggestion that that group was evil.

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, I wouldn’t want to see media that is so scrubbed of any potential offense that the characters essentially became all the same. On the other hand, I would expect somebody with a budget in the hundreds of millions to know how to do better characterization than I saw in this movie. But given the number of wasted characters I saw, maybe that’s expecting too much.

The Sixers are going back to their classic logo. Now let’s see if they can go somewhere in the playoffs.

I’ma try, try, try to do this without spoiling the movie, but we’ll see what happens.

Overall, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was okay. Not great, not totally wack, it was okay. Was it worth gettin up and going to the 12:01 show for? Probably not. But y’all couple of people lookin at this probably didn’t do that, so that part’s not really a concern. One thing that I pretty much knew was gonna happen happened, although I wasn’t really expecting it to be resolved the way it turned out to be. I think I was hoping for something better, or just different. Overall, it was mostly entertaining, but there were some fairly significant annoyances.

Things I Liked:

- The interaction between Megatron and Starscream seemed to be closer to what I remember.
- Bumblebee’s knuckle game
- Seeing the Constructicons form Devestator (prolly my fanboy highlight of the movie. I was literally about to geek OUT)

Things I Didn’t Like
- The jive-talkin, gold-toothed, illiterate twins. Jive-talkin and gold teeth I might coulda dealt with. Illiterate? That’s the part that got me.
- The “people” part of the story, was once again, wack juice. Like, I really could not have cared LESS about them. There was literally not one human in the movie that moved me…in any positive sense. I kept thinkin, ‘get on with the robots!’
- The officious government agent seems to be as much of a stock character as the crackhead wife/mother in a Tyler Perry movie, but maybe even LESS necessary.
- The resolution to The Thing I Knew Would Happen. Like, really?
- It was maaaaaad long. I got outta there at like 3 o’clock.
- Considering the target audience, there was a whole lotta cussin. Much more than I was expecting, including some words I was not expecting to hear.
- Again with the comic movies introducing characters for what are tantamount to cameos. While I loved seeing Devestator, I was less than enthusiastic about his actual role in the movie.

For us old Transformers vets, I obviously recommend it. For people who don’t really care about the series but are looking for a decent summer blockbuster, it’s cool. If you’re looking to see a good story with your explosions, maybe not.

One statistical projection says that by 2034, 100% of Black women will be overweight, as defined by the BMI. When it comes to people, it’s usually the case that all of anything is nothing, so it’s not gonna be true that literally every Black woman will be overweight, but statistically all. And I know the limitations of using BMI as a measure of weight or obesity, but overall, it still gives a good idea. It’s close enough that research like this should cause concern.

Our projection models show that by the year 2030, ~90% (86.3%) of all American adults would become overweight or obese and 51.1% of them would be obese. Black women (combined prevalence 96.9%) and MA men (91.1%) would be the groups most affected. In children and adolescents, prevalence of overweight would increase 1.6-fold (to ~30%) by 2030. MA young boys and black adolescent girls would have the highest prevalence (both 41.1%), a level that would be 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Further, the prevalence in MA adolescents will increase by twofold and among African-American teens, by 1.8-fold, the largest increases.

…

In ~15 years, by the year 2022, 80% of American adults would be overweight or obese; and the prevalence would reach 100% in ~40 years (by the year 2048) (Table 2 and Figure 1). For black women, the time course to reach 100% prevalence is <30 years (by 2034). Half of US children and adolescents overall will become overweight around the year 2070, but this level will be reached among black girls and MA boys by 2050.

Again, in this case, 100% cannot really equal all, but it should be enough for a real look at our lifestyle choices. Having had numerous discussions about the topic, I’m aware of many of the factors that go affect Black womens’ dietary and exercise choices, but at some point, some of that stuff has to fall by the wayside. I’m fairly fatalistic, in the sense that I believe people die when it’s their time, regardless of circumstance, so I’m not necessarily gonna say that a person could prolong her life, but maintaining a healthy weight will definitely help to prevent a lot of diseases and complications.

Flippin through the channels while my daughter was here, I saw a commercial for a TV show a friend of mine was complaining about. Make Me A Supermodel She’s Got The Look is about over-35 women who think they have what it takes to model. Per my friend’s observation, the contestants on the show had already been professional pretty women at some point in their lives. Moreover, they fit well within the standard definition of what a model should look like, they’re just older than 35. Like women stop lookin good after 35. Her critique was that the show is actually missing its opportunity to include a multiplicity of body types. What about the women who aren’t 5′10″, svelte, and drop-dead gorgeous? Why can’t they do a show about average women who would like to be supermodels?

I probably wouldn’t watch it, but then I don’t watch very much. I definitely think it would be interesting, though. But I wouldn’t want it to be a segregated show in terms of having all the contestants be big jawns. I might not even necessarily want it to be a contest, either. More like tracking ordinary, everyday women who are attempting to get a shot at being models.

Probably wouldn’t sell, but it might be interesting.

One of the things I think people need to be very careful about is pointing out the difference between being racist and acknowledging that there are certain differences between racial groups (which may or not apply to a given individual within that group.) These days, the popular mode of thought is that because we are all equal, we are all the same. One of my core tenets is that while sameness and equality may proxy for one another, they are not the same. In fact, they are very different, especially when we start talking about people.

The fact is that each of us is different. We are very similar. But similar is not the same. When we use the phrase “all men are created equal,” what we’re really talking about is intrinsic value. All people have a certain worth. Period. Just because. It has nothing to do with the family they were born into or their financial status or anything else that is attached to them. The fact that they exist as a human being gives them worth. That’s very different than saying that another person is the same.

To use my favorite example, in a wrestling meet, every person represents the potential for 6 points for his team. In that respect, everyone is equal. Two guys might be winless and undefeated, respectively, but the super-stud killer can only bring as many points with his pin as the scrub could bring with his. At the same time, they’re obviously not the same; one has never lost and the other has never won. There could be any number of actual differences between them, but they are equal.

So it is with this idea in mind that I watch this video. It’s one of those things that’s, at first glance, cringe-worthy. The idea works, I guess. The execution is…meh. I don’t know if it’s necessary to go to theeee broadest stereotypes possible to make the illustration, but I also think that we (and I’m definitely included) have trained ourselves to be offended at anything that points out racial differences. So bearing that in mind, why would it be a bad idea to illustrate the differences when doing the song “Jesus Loves The Little Children?” That’s actually the point of the song; they’re all equal even though they’re not the same.

But this video is crazy, though. No gettin around that.

Because they’re in the Finals again, and because they’re the first basketball team I ever really even cared about (but I never loved them like I loved the Knicks), here are my top 10 LA Lakers, in some semblance of an order.

1. Magic
2. West
3. Kareem
4. Shaq
5. Kobe
6. Worthy
7. Wilt
8. Baylor
9. Cooper
10. Rambis (not really, but I just liked seein the horn rims come off the bench.)

This is not so much in order of overall basketball greatness, merely their level of play as a member of the purple and gold.

And while I’m on it, I cannot stand the Lakers’ white uniforms. Their gold home uniforms are classic. I grew to accept the newer version, but the Magic version (without the hot pants) was probably one of the best jerseys in all of sports history.

Apparently, Crunchberry Crunch does not contain actual berries! Forgive my skepticism for never having thought so in the first place, but a California woman found out for sure, and because she wanted to protect us all, tried to sue the manufacturer to get them to stop fooling us. She, apparently, had been fooled for four years. Emphasis on fool. But she’s not the only one. Apparently, the same firm represented a plantiff who wanted to sue because Toucan Sam’s cereal doesn’t really have any Froot.

Stuff like this makes me think that there really is something with our society. No jive. I mean, while I’m pleased that the judge dismissed the claim, the fact that it got that far is disturbing. What this means is that some woman got the crazy idea in her head that she could sue for fraud because Crunchberry Crunch doesn’t have any crunchberries. That’s beyond ridiculous just on its face. Then it’s far exacerbated by the fact that some lawyer actually took the case and the senior members of the law firm approved it. Seriously.

Last night, I did something atypical: I watched television. I probably watched more TV last night than I had all year, not counting sporting events. There wasn’t anything that I particularly wanted to see, but when I saw that they were running a marathon of the Tyler Perry shows, I wanted to take a look, just to see what the fuss was about.

I should say going in that I was fairly biased. I knew from the get-go, and had been warned by a couple of my friends, that the humor was going to be a little lowbrow for me. Course, that’s kinda funny to me, because in real life, I’m probably the lowbrow guy out the bunch. Then too, all the shows I like most have some lowbrow elements, if they’re not entirely lowbrow themselves, so that wasn’t a real deterrent. So I watched.

Neither show really impressed me too much. I didn’t think House of Payne was any worse than most sitcoms that I can sit through without a whole lotta laughing. I think one of the episodes I watched may have gotten a decent “HA!” outta me, but that was about it. Otherwise, I was not terribly impressed, but not terribly disappointed. For the most part, I didn’t necessarily find it funny, but I didn’t think it was coonery at all.

Meet The Browns, though, was emphatically not my speed. Let’s just say it like that. If this is the show’s first season, I guess I won’t say too much because it does take some shows a minute to really catch their stride. In Sanford and Son, for instance, it probably wasn’t until the 2nd or 3rd season that the interaction between Fred and Lamont actually felt right. Season one had its moments (especially the episode when Lamont almost got married), but it was a little shaky. By Season 2, the characters had developed a little nuance and the show got a lot better. Knowing this, I try to give Meet The Browns a little leeway. But the basics of the show, being about this dude who wears outrageously loud clothes and mispronounces about 1/3 of his words…that’s just not funny to me.

A couple of things I liked about the shows was that they tried to address some fairly serious issues, and they showed a range of body types. Really, the body type thing is a fairly major plus for the shows. Not like I watch a lot, but you don’t really see a lot of heavyweights on TV in roles that don’t use their weight as a source of comedy. I give them kudos for that.

All in all, I’m not gonna start watching TV habitually, and if I was, I probably wouldn’t be watching the Tyler Perry shows. I don’t find either one particularly funny, but I don’t think House of Payne is all that bad. Meet The Browns, on the other hand…suffice it to say that it’s provided me another disincentive to watch television.