It’s a boy! The Royal Baby has been born, weighing in at a healthy 8lbs 6oz!
Category: Entertainment
![BILL HAS GONE AND DONE IT AGAIN...
They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
I can't even talk the way these people talk:
Why you ain't,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be...
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
And then I heard the father talk.
Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.
People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around.
The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.
$500 sneakers for what?
And they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was 2?
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?
And where is the father? Or who is his father?
People putting their clothes on backward:
Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong?
People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?
Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from??
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa .....
I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.
I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don't have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany , Scotland , England , Ireland , or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already! ! !
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ......... And all of them are in jail.
Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.
We have got to take the neighborhood back.
People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now.
We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.
Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.
We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..
We cannot blame the white people any longer.'
~Dr.. William Henry 'Bill' Cosby, Jr., Ed..D.
WELL SAID, BILL
It's NOT about color...
It's about behavior!!!](https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/1013001_596858327012074_1818788898_n.jpg)
They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.
I can’t even talk the way these people talk:
Why you ain’t,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be…
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
And then I heard the father talk.
Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.
People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around.
The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.
$500 sneakers for what?
And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was 2?
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol?
And where is the father? Or who is his father?
People putting their clothes on backward:
Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong?
People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something?
Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from??
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a thing about Africa …..
I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.
I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don’t have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany , Scotland , England , Ireland , or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already! ! !
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ……… And all of them are in jail.
Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.
We have got to take the neighborhood back.
People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now.
We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.
Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.
We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..
We cannot blame the white people any longer.’
~Dr.. William Henry ‘Bill’ Cosby, Jr., Ed..D.
While performing in Canada, Stevie Wonder stated his displeasure in Florida and their Stand Your Ground laws that, although it wasn’t mentioned in the case, was most likely one of the underlining hand that helped George Zimmerman to walk free.
“I decided today that until the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law is abolished in Florida, I will never perform there again As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world.
“For those that we have lost in the battle for justice, wherever that fits in any part of the world — we can’t bring them back,” he said. “(What) we can do is we can let our voices be heard. And we can vote in our various countries throughout the world for change and equality for everybody. That’s what I know we can do.”
HMMM …Maybe these Kids should have been on the Zimmerman Jury….
It appears a bunch of kids are more mature than some YouTube commentators. When a Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial couple launched two months ago, it was met with so much racist backlash that YouTube had to pull the comments section. But ask a group of 7 to 13-year-olds what they think of the ad, and you’ll find no hints of racism or surprise at seeing an interracial family on screen. Instead, their responses range from “it’s just a Cheerios commercial” to laughter.
There’s new fuel for the fire that Apple’s working on technology for an updated TV set top box or TV platform.
Citing unnamed sources, tech writer Jessica Lessin (formerly of the Wall Street Journal), saysApple’s been meeting with cable companies to pitch a service that would let TV viewers to skip commercials.
That feature would be worked into a “premium” service Apple TV owners would buy into, the report says, adding that Apple would then pay networks when it occurred.
h/t – cnet
Legendary R&B singer Lester Chambers was attacked by a crazed woman Saturday night during a musical festival in Hayward, California.
The attack came after Chambers dedicated Curtis Mayfield’s hit “People Get Ready” to Trayvon Martin following the announcement of George Zimmerman’s acquittal of all charges related to Martin’s death.
With a “crazed look in her eye” the woman jumped on stage, yelled “it’s all your fault” and attacked the 73-year-old soul singer.
The 43-year-old attacker, Dinalynn Andrews Potter of Barstow, was tackled and subdued by people at the festival until police arrived. She was arrested for suspicion of battery and released with formal charges expected to be filed.
Chamber’s family stated that they plan to file charges against Andrews Potter for what they believe was a hate crime.
Chambers was taken to a local hospital. The attack left him with a large bruise near his ribs and walking with a cane. He is now resting at home.
h/t – guns.com
Andrew Weber blogs about TV at The Drug of the Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
In the light of The Sopranos’ star James Gandolfini’s unfortunate recent passing, and the end of Mad Men’s sixth and penultimate season, there’s no better time to answer the most pressing question concerning those two shows. Who cheated on his wife with more women, Tony Soprano or Don Draper? To find out we’ll dive through the respective sordid pasts of these two legendary television philanderers, going back and forth one-fo-one chronologically between the shows. Because the Sopranos started first, we’ll start with Tony. Apologies if I’ve missed any; I did my best to scour through the episodes of both shows for every affair, no matter how brief, but these two characters didn’t make it easy.
Tony:
Irina Peltsin – One of the two longest extramarital relationships Tony is involved in over the course of the series, Irina is Tony’s comare from the pilot until the second to last episode of the second season when he attempts to break up with her, thinking she deserves to have a real life. She doesn’t take it well, breaking down and trying to kill herself, which will be the start of somewhat of a tradition for Tony’s mistresses. Tony sends Silvio over to her place to give her a nice $75,000 severance package and urge her to move on.
Don:
Midge Daniels – Like Tony, Don Draper is cheating on his wife from the get go. In the first episode we meet the bohemian artist Midge who seems fittingly more reminiscent of the late ‘50s than the ‘60s. Seemingly opposites, they nevertheless have a fairly good run, as one of Don’s longer extramarital affairs, lasting until the eight episode of the first season, when Don unsuccessfully tries to get her to go to Paris with him. Things don’t go well after that for Midge who shows up in a later season as a drug addict.
Tony:
Connie Desapio – Desapio is a receptionist at Barone Construction, a Soprano family operation which Tony spends some time at, based on legal advice to appear like he’s actually doing the job he claims to have. They have sex to pass the time in season two, episode 11, “House Arrest” until Tony goes back to Satriale’s eventually out of boredom.
Don:
Rachel Menken – Rachel, who initially hires the firm to create interest for her department store, was a very different kind of woman from Midge. She meets done in the series’ first episode as a client, and initiaully rebuffs Don’s advances, upon finding out that he’s married. They finally begin the affair in the tenth episode of the first season. She puts the kibosh on the affair in the 12th episode of the first season, when, after Don proposes running away to LA together, she realizes that he just wants to run away, but not necessarily with her.
Tony:
Gloria Trillo – Trillo is a car salesman who Tony meets in Dr. Melfi’s office in season three’s “He is Risen.” The most mentally unstable of Tony’s affairs, which is a dubious honor, she tries to provoke Tony into violent reactions. Tony breaks up with her because of this, and Patsy Parisi threatens her, telling her to never come near Tony or his family again. Later she hangs herself.
Don:
Bobbie Barrett – Barrett, introduced in season two’s “The Benefactor,” is married to and manages insult comic Jimmy Barrett, who Sterling Cooper recruits to appear in ads for Utz potato chips. Barrett is the only woman Don sleeps with that we know is married, and she affirmatively seduces Don, who makes a brief attempt to turn her down. The affair hits an awkward moment when Don and Bobbie are caught in a car accident together, but ends finally when Don finds out Bobbie has been gossiping about him behind his back.
Tony:
Valentina La Paz – La Paz is the other long-time Tony Soprano comare. She’s dating Ralph Cifaretto at the time that Tony and her get together after having lunch at Hesh’s house in season four episode “Mergers and Acquisitions.” Tony breaks up with Valentina towards the end of season five when he arranges to move back in with Carmela, after she suffers a serious burn injury. She, continuing a pattern, threatens to kill herself when he leaves.
Don:
Joy – In season two, episode 11, “The Jet Set”, Don takes a trip out to Los Angeles, where he meets a young woman, Joy, near the pool at his hotel. They attend a surreal dinner party and afterwards have sex. Later, she and her friends and her dad move to the Bahamas, while Don returns to reality in New York.
Tony:
Svetlana Kirilenko – Tony and Kirilenko, earlier comare Irina’s cousin and Junior’s nurse, have sex just once, as far as we know, in season four episode “The Strong, Silent Type.” She is far and away the most put together woman Tony cheats with on the show and she breaks off their relationship, though Irina later spills the beans to Carmela, helping to lead to Tony and Carmela’s separation.
Don:
Shelly – In the first episode of season three, “Out of Town,” Don meets a stewardess named Shelly on a flight to Baltimore. She invites him and Sal to dinner at the hotel at which they’re all staying and after their meal, one thing leads to another.
Tony:
Sonya Aragon – An exotic dancer Chris used to hang out with, Tony meets up with her in Las Vegas after Chris’s death in season six episode “Kennedy and Heidi.” They have sex, smoke weed, and take peyote.
Don:
Suzanne Farrell – Suzanne and Don first meet during a parent teacher conference in the second episode of season three while she’s Sally’s teacher. They meet several times before the relationship becomes romantic. She’s a bit of a hippy, and has a troubled brother who she cares for deeply. She falls for him and wants to go out together in public, something Don almost grants while Betty is out of town. The affair ends when Betty returns early and inquires about Don’s past which causes Don to call Suzanne to let her know it’s over.
Don:
Sylvia Rosen – It seemed like Don had finally become faithful with Megan, but his faith waned at the start of the most recent sixth season when it turns out he’s been having an affair with neighbor Sylvia. This affair was doubly nefarious because Don seemed to actually like Sylvia’s husband Arnold, and there aren’t very many people in Mad Men that Don likes. The affair came to a temporary end when Don was simply too cruel and Sylvia decides it’s over, but is rekindled when Don helps get Sylvia’s son out of serving in Vietnam.
Don:
Betty Francis – Yes, I almost forgot this but Don cheats on his second wife with his first wife.
Don takes a tight 8-6 victory, but with all the other people Don and Tony must have slept with before the shows started, who can possibly say what the actual score might be.
A couple of quick notes on women who were excluded:
This is a comparison of women Don cheated with, so in season four, when he was divorced, all his affairs were on the up and up. Still for completion’s sake, here’s a quick rundown of all the women he slept with in season four. His most ongoing relationship was with the age appropriate Faye Miller, a ratings analyst who he breaks up with at the end of the season when he instead chooses to be with Megan, who he proposes to soon after. In between, he sleeps with a call girl Candace, in the first episode of the fourth season, a secretary named Allison whose heart he breaks in the second episode, a waitress named Doris in the sixth episode as well another unnamed woman, and Roger’s wife’s Jane’s friend Bethany in the eighth episode.
Tony was separated from Carmela for most of the fifth season of The Sopranos, so I chose not to count any sleeping around during the separation. In the 11th episode of the fifth season, “The Test Dream,” he hires an escort while he’s staying at the Plaza, and they presumably sleep together. In the first episode of season four, Tony and his gang party with a bunch of Icelandic stewardesses but there’s no clear evidence indicating Tony necessarily slept with any of them. Tony almost has an affair with real estate agent Juliana Skiff, but they never consummate it as Tony decides to remain faithful to Carmela, and Skiff and Chris take up together instead.
Awareness. A crazy thing, because once you have been made aware.. you can never “un-know it”
As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger strikers continue their silent protests in Guantánamo. More than 40 of them are being force-fed.
Via a leaked document which explains the military instructions to force feed, or “standard operating procedure”, for force-feeding detainees, Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteered to undergo the procedure and make a shirt film. Below is the four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and BAFTA award-winning director Asif Kapadia. You can never un-see or un-know this.
Warning: This video is extremely graphic and may be hard to watch for some.
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BLACK SAINT: Billy Harper
Andrew Weber blogs about TV at The Drug of the Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
The Bridge, which debuted on FX last night, is about a Mexican detective and an American detective working together to solve the mystery behind a pair of bodies left on the border between El Paso and Juarez. However, upon hearing the show’s title, a couple of far superior premises sprang to mind. Here’s five of them:
1. The Brooklyn Bridge is New York’s most famous bridge. Here’s the amazing story behind the people who built what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world upon its completion in 1883. Starting with the untimely death of original architect John Augustus Roebling, the show follows his son, Washington Roebling, who had to do his work from afar after he came down with depression sickness, and Washington’s remarkable wife, Emily Warren Roebling who learned about bridge building on the fly as she acted as a crucial link between the sick Washington and engineers on the site.
2. The Bridge is a period drama centered around the group of German expressionist artists known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge” in German), including Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel,Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Emil Nolde who came together in Dresden in the early 1900s. The group of artists dreamed of taking on the current establishment by reviving older artistic traditions, publishing in a statement, “We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces.” Follow the movement at their studio, where the charismatic and ultra-talented artists flouted social conventions at the same time they were flouting artistic ones.
3. The Bridge is the in-depth story of some of the megasupporters of Chelsea football, centered on the characters’ time together in the Matthew Harding Stand of Chelsea’s home stadium, Stamford Bridge. The show focuses on lives of a small cadre of otherwise relatively mild-mannered supporters as they eagerly look to make it through the week to spend their time cheering all out for their beloved Blues and bonding with one another after every Chelsea goal. The Bridge tells the story of how their obsession with Chelsea both brings their lives completely together for the better while sometimes almost causing them to fall apart.
4. New York’s Queensbridge is the largest public housing works in North America, with almost 7,000 people residing there. The Bridge revolves around a few residents of these projects, detailing the constant everyday struggles and little victories, the families making it work everyday in the light of the drug trade, and the young people hoping to get out, some using music as their gateway. Queensbridge’s most famous ex-resident Nas narrates.
5. The Bridge begins with a handful of characters making their way in the go-go lifestyle of the late ’80s on Long Island, and is prominently soundtracked by Billy Joel tunes from the album of the same name. In each episode, we see, in addition, stories about the same characters at different points in time set to contemporaneous Joel music. The segmented time periods allow for complex storytelling, with each time featuring its own stories, which are cleverly interrelated over the course of a season with the stories from the other eras. The Billy Joel soundtrack provides a musical connection that both links together the different time periods, while making clear the specific times in which each story is taking place.
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Magna Carta Holy Grail Review
I’m not much of a fan of Jay Z so I didn’t start listening to his newest album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, with some sky-high expectations but, I know what he’s capable with his music so I expected something that I’d love to put on my iPod. I was quickly reminded why I’m not much of a fan.
The first song Holy Grail pretty much sets the bar for this album, songs with sick beats, good intros, and good/decent hooks. Jay Z’s lyrics are another story; his lyrics seem uninspired, his flow seems off, and no matter who he has with him in his songs (Justin Timberlake, Rick Ross, Beyonce, or Frank Ocean) the songs just fail to want me hit replay. The entire album seems less of a big money album and more like a quickly done mixtape.
It seems as if Jay Z, who can surround him with the best in the music industry, just sat down and said “this is good enough”. Perhaps Jay Z should really retire from music and focus fully on his business ventures, those seem like something he won’t be happy just at “good enough”
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Review: Under the Dome
Andrew Weber blogs about TV at The Drug of the Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Under the Dome is an extremely literal title. The main characters, primarily the residents of the small (presumably New England, since it’s written by Stephen King, but not specified that I can recall) town Chester’s Mill, along with some people who were passing through, are completely trapped from the outside world under a giant mysterious dome. So far, we know nothing can go through the dome, including sound, and citizens haven’t yet found a way to contact anyone outside the dome. The only method of communication is through sight on either side of the dome.
So that’s our big premise, taken from a recent Stephen King novel of the same name. That’s by far the most important part of the first episode. The second task of the pilot is to get a passing look at who we can guess will be our major characters. Here they are in short. First, you’ve got chief of police veteran Duke (Jeff Fahey, pilot Lapidus on Lost), and his younger chief deputy Linda, engaged to a firefighter outside of the dome. Due to poor timing, many of the town’s police were out of town participating in a parade. There’s “Big Jim” Rennie, car salesman and town council member (played by Dean Norris, Hank from Breaking Bad). Big Jim and Duke have a tet a tet most of the way through the episode and appear to be keeping some sort of secret from most of the town involving bringing in lots of propane.
There’s a pair of erstwhile summer lovers, teenagers Junior and Angie. What was a fun little fling goes bad when Angie doesn’t reciprocate Junior’s love, and Junior turns out to be some sort of psycho and kidnaps Angie and locks her away in a fallout shelter. Joe, a high schooler, is Angie’s younger brother. They’re both parentless for the duration of the dome.
There’s a Barbie, an ex-military out of towner who was looking shady at the beginning and could be either good or bad. He appears to have been on some sort of mission that involved needing a gun and looks a little like Jeremy Renner. He’s staying with local journalist Julia for the time being whose husband is missing and/or dead and/or having an affair.
Phil is a local radio DJ, and Dodee is his engineer at the station. Alice and Carolyn are parents just passing through en route to drop off their troubled, rebellious daughter Mackenzie at camp, before they get trapped (if only they hadn’t stopped at that one gas station).
Those are from what I could suss out the major characters, though there may be more introduced later, and some of the characters I described may turn out to be more minor than I could have figured from the premiere.
There are two major fronts then to work with in Under the Dome. There’s the question behind what the dome actually it is, how the characters find that out, if they can communicate outside the dome, get anything in, etc.
Then, what will probably occupy more time, is how everybody deals with the situation that arises when the characters realize they’re cut off from the rest of the world. Separating all the characters from the rest of society under the dome should give us a set up for the classic science fiction situation of an external futuristic (or supernatural) power forcing humans into difficult and unusual situations. They’ll have to decide whether to work together or compete and act outside of the ways they do every day, revealing their true natures. Do people look out for each other and help to store food for the good of the whole town? Do they form gangs and compete and engage in violence? It’s a classic Lord of the Flies scenario, and the dome is their island.
As I’ve said time and again, I’m a sucker for high concept serial science fiction shows. I know by now better than to get too excited from a mere one or two episodes of a series. Big sci-fi series like these so often disappoint, and they’re a thousand times easier to begin than to end (or to, well, middle, for that matter). It’s not particularly difficult to think of a wacky situation and create a cast of characters; it’s much harder to flesh out those characters with realistic and believable motivations and create a plot that obeys the rules set out by the show, and is compelling, well-paced, and not anti-climactic.
This has the building blocks. The reason it’s intriguing is solely the future possibilities but it’s hard to ask for too much more out of a first episode. There’s nothing about the writing or the characters or the film work that stands out, but I’m affirmatively intrigued due largely to the plot, and with pilots, if the plot is compelling enough that can be enough, especially for sci-fi or fantasy.
Will I watch the next episode? Yes. It’s on CBS. I can’t remember the last show I’ve watched a second episode of on CBS. I’ve repeatedly faced let downs with these types of shows; I watched multiple episodes of Revolution which I regretted quickly, as well as Terra Nova. I’m probably never going to learn completely. All I can do is know my own biases and prepare myself for the likely disappointment. In its favor, this at least this has some source material by a credible writer to work with, and is created by Brian K. Vaughan, a comic writer whose work I’ve enjoyed.
