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.

Apparently, in DC, you can get a ticket for parking in your own driveway. Not car-obstructin-the-sidewalk in your driveway, but in-the-front-of-the-house in your driveway. Why? Let’s check the ordinance:

“Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner.”

For real? Are you serious? Not like I was actually thinkin of moving into the District in the first place, but that right there is a powerful argument against.

jacked from parablemania.

I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks. It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? no, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.

- from Dust Tracks On A Road.

So I’m over my homeboy’s crib, leafin through a Newsweek at the end of the Lakers-Denver blowout, and I see they have an article on Sesame Street. First page is the big three: Ernie, Bert, and Big Bird. Second page is Oscar, The Count, and Elmo. Then it just kinda hit me that Elmo is Grover 2.0. Now, I haven’t watched Sesame Street in a good while, so I really have no idea about Elmo’s rise, but I kinda felt some typea way that Elmo stole Grover’s shine.

I recently jumped into the modern era and got a Blackberry. It’s cool and all, but I wasn’t all wowed by it until I put on the google mobile apps and did the speak-n-search. THAT got me siced.

It’s weird that I own Coming To America on DVD, but get excited to see it when it’s on TV. The only other movie that’s even coming close with that, is Baby Boy — with the difference being that I really dislike Baby Boy, but am compelled to watch it over and over.

Yet another off-her-rocker white lady has claimed that a Black man (or in this case, two) physically accosted her. This time, she gave a little more detail, saying that they were driving a Cadillac. No word on whether they were eating fried chicken and drinking kool-aid.

THE FIRST BULLETIN Tuesday that a Bucks County woman and her 9-year-old daughter had been kidnapped made national news because it was all just so unbelievable – a car crash on a busy street, mysterious men in a black Cadillac and a mom who made a frantic 9-1-1 call while trapped inside a trunk.

Yesterday, the world learned exactly why the saga of 38-year-old Bonnie Sweeten and her 9-year-old daughter, Julia Rakoczy, was so incredible.

It just wasn’t true.

And in an ending that was ironic beyond belief, mother and daughter were tracked down last night in America’s ultimate land of make-believe, Orlando’s Disneyworld, where police learned the pair had fled Tuesday on one-way airline tickets with $12,000 in cash.

One time…just for kicks and to make it interesting…can the ostensible assailant be a white man?

Travis Henry has been bumped down the ranks a little bit. Make way for the new king. By some distance. Try this out: 29 years old. 21 kids. 2X w/ four kids in the same year.

Oh. And he makes minimum wage.

As my dude, Blackink would say, he is NOT fulfilling the dream.

I haven’t gotten into the whole waterboarding-torture discussion, because I’m deliberately staying away from the partisan politics of it. But suffice it to say that, having almost drowned on several occasions, that sensation ain’t nothin nice. Understanding that, I give the side-eye to anybody who’s all talkin bout ‘it ain’t torture’ all cavalierly.

Now, Ta-Nehisi Coates shows the video of some cat who had it done to him. Dude lasted 6 seconds.

Now, I’m not tryina draw a larger implication from this. I don’t know that I would necessarily say that torture is off the table, except for the very pragmatic problem of the fact that somebody will say anything to get the torture to stop. But to argue semantics over whether waterboarding is torture…come on, now. I see your lips movin, but you ain’t sayin nothin.

Born in the comments of a post on the most famous Jackson at False Hustle is this question: who’s the all-time most famous person with the first name Michael? Some contenders:

I’m thinking your top 3 are, in order…

1. Jackson
2. Jordan
3. Tyson
….
- Moore
- Vick
- The Archangel
-
There could be any number of people after that, but the distance between 1 and 2 is great; the distance between 2 and 3 is light years. With the first two, as long as the conversation is understood to be about their field of endeavor, you could get away with only using their first name and everybody would know who you’re talking about. Tyson, on the other hand…if he were to get a one-word appellation, it would probably be Tyson rather than Mike.