Greetings from Pittsburgh

I bring you belated Holiday Greetings and Current Kwaanza wishes from beautiful Western Pennsylvania.

FW and I and the babies are all relaxing and releasing in my mother's house.

I will be back in TX to open the new year properly here on the blog on the first of the year.


I mostly just came over here to pour a little out for James Brown and Gerald Ford (for entirely different reasons.)


The hardest working man in show business will finally get his rest and the accidental President is still the only US president I actually had a real conversation with, so he will always have a place in my heart, since he was pretty cool whenever we spoke.


Rest well Gentlemen and happy new year to all ther rest of you.

2006 in one word

It has been a year. A year that just makes you wanna cuss.







It was tricks like that, that made me Time Magazine person of the year. and for THAT, I am truly grateful.

Many people think the whole Time magazine POTY thing was a cop-out.

I disagree.

It was a cop...but not a cop-out.

Time Magazine is publicly admitting what the media has long feared.


The monster it created has gotten out of control and taken over.

No longer do we HAVE to sit and wait to be spoonfed what it is the media wants for us to believe. Some of us...many of us, even...choose to remain spoonfed, but NOW that is a choice that we get to make.

Going into 2007, the rules are different.

WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY different.


There is NO escape.


So, you're a washed up sitcom star who can't seem to get it together and you find yourself tanking onstage and think you wanna drop a few N-bombs on stage and no one will find out? Hell toda Naw.

So, you're a rising star Senator of a bellwether state and you think you can toss around a few archane pejoratives against a person of colorand then roll on to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Not so much.

So, you think just because you are either a washed up sitcom star, an up and coming but not necessarily sexy tv star or a washed up boy band member, you can run around gay and not tell anyone? Uh....no.

So, you think you can chasedown teenage boys for several years as a congressman while simultaneously championing laws against pedophilia? GTFOHWTBS



Yup, 2006 was the year all the dirt came out...if you dont believe me, ask the Repbulican Party.

stumbling and bumbling towards the finish line

It has been a year for the ages. Then again, all years, ultimately round out like that.

As for me, It has been an experience.


I have laughed and cried quite a bit this year.

Tonight I am doing a fair bit of both.


Tomorrow, we try and write again.


In the meantime, the world keeps spinning and the Fools keep grinning.

Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss

I have two jobs and I am still unemployed.

Oh, sure I got somewhere to go, and they even pay me.

But the future is bleak.

The great rugrat ranch experiment will go on, but without me.
This runaway slave visits the plantation, but they got no hold on me. I's a sharecropper, now.


And now, we dust off the old resume and get out there to go and get it.

IN light of that, writing about much of anything else, just seems uncivilized.

I'll come back to comment on the world's foolishness later.

HipHop Isn't dead, just ask Lupe Fiasco

The next person who tries to tell me HipHop is dead should be made to watch Lupe Fiasco's AOL Sessions.


This is proof that HipHop has a pulse. It clearly has some serious issues going on upstairs, but it cannot be dead.

Even as the Now generation seems to be hell bent on disrespecting every rap legend not already gone on to HipHop heaven, quality music still gets made and the industry moves on. HipHop has turned into the brother that came back from the war all messed up in the head. He has some good days, and some bad days. You know he ain't all there, but at least two or three times a week, he says or does something that reminds you why you love him so much. Of course, then he will go and drink up all the koolaid and not make anymore, or steal from Mama, and you gotta put his ass in time-out again...

But that passes and before you know it, you are back laughing at his simple jokes and hitting him off with a 10 or a 20 when no one is looking so he won't go and do something stupid.

But he always does.

Cause something still ain't right.


That's life.

On Naked Houses and the obligations of homeownership

My house will be naked this year. No lights, no tree, just one fabulous, yet to be purchased wreath.


FW and I will be flying to Pittsburgh on Christmas night to celebrate the holidays with my Pittsburgh based family, including DaveyWayne 3.0 and 3.1. IN consideration of that, we have decided to forgo extraneous decarations. Then again, having a 78 dollar electric bill for a 2K+ sq. foot house is not something you poo poo in the interest of peace on earth and good will towards men.

So, in case Bill O'Reilly is reading, I celebrate Christmas, I just don't feel the need to climb on top of my house to do it.

Merry Christmas, Mofo.

The Story of Doris Miller

On today, December 7, 2006, exactly 65 years after Pearl Harbor, we honor Doris Miller


Taken from The Navy Website
Doris Miller, known as "Dorie" to shipmates and friends, was born in Waco, Texas, on 12 October 1919, to Henrietta and Conery Miller. He had three brothers, one of which served in the Army during World War II. While attending Moore High School in Waco, he was a fullback on the football team. He worked on his father's farm before enlisting in the U.S Navy as Mess Attendant, Third Class, at Dallas, Texas, on 16 September 1939, to travel, and earn money for his family. He later was commended by the Secretary of the Navy, was advanced to Mess Attendant, Second Class and First Class, and subsequently was promoted to Ship's Cook, Third Class.

Following training at the Naval Training Station, Norfolk, Virginia, Miller was assigned to the ammunition ship USS Pyro (AE-1) where he served as a Mess Attendant, and on 2 January 1940 was transferred to USS West Virginia (BB-48), where he became the ship's heavyweight boxing champion. In July of that year he had temporary duty aboard USS Nevada (BB-36) at Secondary Battery Gunnery School. He returned to West Virginia and on 3 August, and was serving in that battleship when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Miller had arisen at 6 a.m., and was collecting laundry when the alarm for general quarters sounded. He headed for his battle station, the antiaircraft battery magazine amidship, only to discover that torpedo damage had wrecked it, so he went on deck. Because of his physical prowess, he was assigned to carry wounded fellow Sailors to places of greater safety. Then an officer ordered him to the bridge to aid the mortally wounded Captain of the ship. He subsequently manned a 50 caliber Browning anti-aircraft machine gun until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.

Miller described firing the machine gun during the battle, a weapon which he had not been trained to operate: "It wasn't hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us."

During the attack, Japanese aircraft dropped two armored piercing bombs through the deck of the battleship and launched five 18-inch aircraft torpedoes into her port side. Heavily damaged by the ensuing explosions, and suffering from severe flooding below decks, the crew abandoned ship while West Virginia slowly settled to the harbor bottom. Of the 1,541 men on West Virginia during the attack, 130 were killed and 52 wounded. Subsequently refloated, repaired, and modernized, the battleship served in the Pacific theater through to the end of the war in August 1945.

Miller was commended by the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on 1 April 1942, and on 27 May 1942 he received the Navy Cross, which Fleet Admiral (then Admiral) Chester W. Nimitz, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet personally presented to Miller on board aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) for his extraordinary courage in battle. Speaking of Miller, Nimitz remarked:

This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race and I'm sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts.

On 13 December 1941, Miller reported to USS Indianapolis (CA-35), and subsequently returned to the west coast of the United States in November 1942. Assigned to the newly constructed USS Liscome Bay (CVE-56) in the spring of 1943, Miller was on board that escort carrier during Operation Galvanic, the seizure of Makin and Tarawa Atolls in the Gilbert Islands. Liscome Bay's aircraft supported operations ashore between 20-23 November 1943. At 5:10 a.m. on 24 November, while cruising near Butaritari Island, a single torpedo from Japanese submarine I-175 struck the escort carrier near the stern. The aircraft bomb magazine detonated a few moments later, sinking the warship within minutes. Listed as missing following the loss of that escort carrier, Miller was officially presumed dead 25 November 1944, a year and a day after the loss of Liscome Bay. Only 272 Sailors survived the sinking of Liscome Bay, while 646 died.

In addition to the Navy Cross, Miller was entitled to the Purple Heart Medal; the American Defense Service Medal, Fleet Clasp; the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal.

Commissioned on 30 June 1973, USS Miller (FF-1091), a Knox-class frigate, was named in honor of Doris Miller.

On 11 October 1991, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority dedicated a bronze commemorative plaque of Miller at the Miller Family Park located on the U.S. Naval Base, Pearl Harbor.

This world isn't very real at all.

Clearly, the word Nigger is making a late push to be the word of the year.



So...The gay white Christian dude on the Real World drops the N-bomb on a 280 lb black dude from Nebraska AFTER grabbing him all about the face, and does not meet his maker.

So, TWO white men have uttered the N-word Publicly and lived to tell the tale. Not only lived, but have gone on to receive public forgiveness and endorsement of one kind or another.


THIS is not a good sign.


We need a white man to catch an ass kicking after uttering the N-word on camera.
We need a black man to catch a case for providing said ass kicking.


If this keeps up, soon white folk are going to assume it's possible in the real world to go around dropping N-bombs with no real impunity.

And someone is going to get killed.

Brothas are catching hell all over the world.

They are bound to snap soon.

Do your public duty and remind all your white friends not to believe the hype.

Dropping N-Bombs WILL earn you a spectacular ass whoopin.

Thank you in advance for doing your minimize the obvious fallout.


Tomorrow I will comment on how easy it seems to be to forgive what used to be unforgivable.

I am all N-d out now.

First, props to Wise for putting this on blast.

Now...


In light of....


Blah.

I refuse to give this garbage a warm and fuzzy intro.

John Ridley wrote an essay on Niggers vs. Black People. It borders on offensive. No, it IS offensive, it is just that regard I have (had?) for him allowed me to briefly (I am thinking it was about 8 minutes from the time I threw it on the floor and the time I picked it up to play Jordan vs. Blazers in Game one of the 1992 NBA Finals )

Because of my humble upbringings, I bristle at the notion of differentiating Black Folk from Niggers(-az,-as, whatever) because the first time I or someone I love ends up on the wrong side of the argument, I am gonna be furious.

He wasn't even talking about me and I was furious.

It is not a poorly written essay. Ridley is a good writer and it shows.

What is slightly less clear, is what prompted him to use an incident with police shooting an unarmed black man on one side and GOP foreign policy on the other.

If the man is still in possession of any racial integrity, he must be hating life right now.

I am sure he didn't mean to at the time, but he managed to crystallize the lives and times of black folk in America in 2006. Rulers and conquerors on one side...cannon fodder on the other.

Funny thing is most of the rest of us are in the middle. Or ARE we?

I'm thinking that most of us are actually closer to cannon fodder than we are to Rulers and conquerors.

Mr. Ridley seemed to have left that part out.

One question seems to nag at me about this seemingly obvious hack job.

Is this part of Ridley's descent into the deep dark recesses of of the Black Right movement?




(Sidebar: watching Sanaa Lathan on Nip/Tuck makes paying my Dish/phone/DSL bill just a little bit less painful. Sure shes catching it from a white guy, but at least he is a cool white guy.)

My Crush Speaks most of the Truth: Jemele Hill on Larry Johnson

Yes, I have been called a stalker of Jemele Hill.

The "stalking" continues today, as Ms. Hill hits another one out of the park.

The backstory is that Larry Johnson asserted that he has a better relationship because he has a Black Coach(Herm Edwards)

Hill deems him a studio-gangster, holding his hood credibility in question, citing his stable two-parent upbringing in a suburban neighborhood.

While my crush propels me to trumpet her skills to the hills and co-sign, to a large extent, what she is saying, I must object to a few things.

she takes exception with this:

"They hadn't been in a situation as a young, black athlete and know what we had to go through when we go out," Johnson told interviewer Cris Carter about the previous coaching staff under Dick Vermeil. "We like to go out. We like to have fun, but then you have to worry about the guy around the corner with the gun. You've got to worry about this girl on the block. You've got to worry about your parents, your homeboys taking advantage of you. So many things you have to worry about being a young, black athlete. And to be able to have a father like mine and a coach like Herm, I was able to escape a lot of those realities and find myself in a new ray of light."

By retorting as such:

Not to belittle Johnson's experiences as a young, black male -- because I'm sure it was tough growing up in a two-parent, suburban household and playing at Penn State, where his father was the defensive line coach -- but why is Johnson trying to act like he has a 'hood pass when he's more Will Smith than Tupac? His comments were childish, but Johnson made things worse by irresponsibly suggesting black coaches are better-suited to handle African-American players. I don't know of any coach -- black, red or green -- who could have coached Lawrence Taylor better than Bill Parcells.

As much as it pains me, my attraction to Ms. Hill (as a writer and estrogen-fueled sports mind) does not prevent me from pointing out what I believe to be a slight flaw in her logic.

While Mr. Johnson's pedigree and mine are quite opposite(Him: two-parent, suburban household and playing at Penn State/ Mine: largely single parent, inner city slum[well Y'ALL would call it a slum because of what it looks like now, I call it solidly working class], HBCU dropout) our attitudes tend to be directly opposed, as though I have his pedigree and he, mine.

That is a product not of any studio gangsterism, but a product of a certain attitude which lends to a general presumption that "THEY" do not understand how we have it; that they could never understand what it is "WE" think and how "WE" work best. This is the attitude that prevails in our culture, a culture that portrays all black men as complex and misunderstood. (Black male) Athletes and Entertainers especially enjoy a lifetime pass from responsibility for accepting authority from on the grounds that the powers that be do not except them for who they are.

Sigh.

The reality is that GOOD coaches on all levels, of any race make a point of understanding the uniqueness of the Black Male, almost because of the fact that they make up a large percentage of the workforce. My quibble with the divine Ms. Hill is not in her conclusion but in her determinance of Mr. Johnson as some sort of fraud by tossing out the race card with the pedigree he has, as though if he had an upbringing more like mine, it would be more understandable.

It is my assertion that Mr. Johnson is not so much a fraud as he is a victim of the same malady that afflicts many people in his position. The fact that he was used to being the be-all-end-all and living a charmed life, due to his upbringing and his prodigious talent.

He, like Chris Webber and many others, internalize the broader struggle of the young black male, not for fraudulent reasons, but for the same reasons that innocent black honor students can find themselves lumped into the same category with hardened criminals when faced by the police.

We are all the same to THEM, so we must all BE the same.

This is the unfortunate byproduct of the Black culture insistence on the cookie-cutter black man, a culture that values style over substance(I dig both, but thats irrelevant). This culture insists that all brothers embrace "the struggle".

The struggle is real, I feel it everyday. The reality is, there is a significant portion of the Black male population that does not. Their struggle is significant, but different. They need to focus on THAT struggle and stop embracing one that is not relevant to them. It confuses the hell out of white folk and only makes all this being Black in America thing more complicated.

Word For The Week

While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown."

When he said this, he called out, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

His disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,

'though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.'

"This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.

Luke 8:4-15

It has been shown that 75% of all Christians accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior before the age of 21, 90% before the age of 30, so why is it that the overwhelming majority of Christian evangelism targets people over the age of 30? The answer is simple, really - people reach out to their perceived peers, but in most of our cases our peers are quite comfortable on their rocky ground. We are certainly required to share the good news of Jesus Christ with whosoever will hear the word of reconciliation, but we need to focus our attention on the good ground, ground that is ready, willing, and able to receive the word of truth. Scattering seed on concrete is good for feeding the birds, but it would be foolish to expect a harvest from such seeds. Besides, we are called to resist such birds, erecting scarecrows to keep the birds at bay instead off feeding those who seek to steal, kill, and destroy the fruit of our labor.

All too often we stand along the sidewalk spreading seed and wonder why nothing's growing. All too often we walk along the pavement pointlessly searching for some simple sign of life. All too often we think that God is not blessing our labor when in fact we are being irresponsible with the seed that has been entrusted to us. We shouldn't expect a harvest when we haven't sown seed into ground that can actually support new life. We shouldn't expect to see people coming to Christ when we are spreading seed among those who are firm in their convictions that any road they choose will get them to eternity. Jesus made us fishers of men but we shouldn't expect to catch anything by dropping a net into a cup of water.

Although with God all things are possible.

What Jesus teaches in our text today is that different people will receive the word of life differently, some gladly for the moment, some happily but with no substance, some fully, and some not at all. We who have been entrusted with the message of reconciliation - "we" being all Christians - must be wise regarding how and where we sow our seed. In all things and in all places we must let our light shine so that men can see our good works and glorify God in heaven, but we shouldn't waste so much time on bad ground and pavement that we end up having nothing left for the good ground that would receive the word of truth and produce a great harvest.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

May the LORD bless you and keep you;
May the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
And may the LORD,
Who wants you to reap a great harvest,
May He turn His face toward you and give you peace.

Things Black Folk Say #9 - David Banner

David Banner gives a speech...a fairly long speech as he receives a Humanitarian Award from the Congressional Black Caucus. (please, do yourself a favor and click this link...you'll be glad you did)


David Banner is an interesting dude. If any of y'all actually KNOW David Banner, please tell him the next time he is in DFW, dinner is on me, wherever he wants to go. I have got to pick this man's brain.