I watched the State of the Union last night. It was OK, I guess, way too much clapping. If you give applause to every other sentence the president says, eventually it loses it's effectiveness. It's like reading something where half the words are underlined. By doing that, you essentially make nothing underlined.
It will be interesting to see if Obama wins reelection. I think he will, but I wouldn't put much money on it. These things are very hard to predict with any accuracy.
[Obama doing a little Al Green.]
On a completely different note, on a blog I read there was a video of the hip-hop group TLC performing on the Arsenio Hall Show in about 1992. It's so bizarre in retrospect that I had to mention it here.
The song harkens back to an earlier era when it was cool for hip-hop kids to where the least flattering clothes possible -- giant baggy pants, track suits, and overalls with one strap undone.
I was in junior high then, but I wasn't that into hip-hop. There was kind of a divide between rock kids and rap kids, and I was on the rock side. Predictably, the same divide was also between white kids and black kids. I never liked that, so I always put a picture of Jimi Hendrix on my binder, just to say, "Hey man, I might listen to rock, but I am totally down with black people." (Of course, I doubt anybody of any color really gave a shit about my musical tastes, anyway.)
The Hendrix picture came from the cardboard box of his greatest hits CD. This was back when CDs were attached to those weird antitheft plastic things, so they had to be packaged in super elongated boxes. I used to cut out the covers and save them. Every so often, I'd put a new one on the other side of my binder opposite Jimi. I can remember going through Guns N Roses, Use Your Illusion II; Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine; and Big Audio Dynamite, The Globe, to name a few.
Anyway, watch the TLC video. You have to copy and paste the url or click on it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-YGwLJpxt4, as the embed option seems to have been disabled.
Crazy, huh? For one thing, they look so young, which is probably because they were so young. According to Wikipedia, "Left-Eye" was born in 1971 so she would have been right about 20 or 21 when this was shot. (Her page is pretty interesting, she pretty much broke up the group, died in a car crash before her 32nd birthday, and once burned down the house of former NFL wide receiver Andre Rison.)
For another thing, what the hell are they singing about? Begging their men for sex? Is that a feminist message, a misogynistic message, some weird mix of both? I don't know. And the lyrics, "Two inches or a yard, rock hard or it's saggin', I ain't to proud to beg"... Um... OK.
Oddly, I remember some girls in junior high lip-syncing this song and performing a skit to it for a class project. That doesn't seem right, but I swear it's true. (Was there a clean radio version?) For the same project, I used Nirvana's Territorial Pissings, for the skit part I just repeatedly beat a stuffed bunny with a club. It was pretty damn funny, as I recall.
Anyway, since I'm talking about music I'll leave you with this song. I heard it in the grocery store the other day and thought to myself, "This might be the shittiest song I've ever heard." It's certainly the blow-hardiest.
Seriously, can you imagine anybody listening to this and actually enjoying it, I mean, not ironically? Me neither.
Hi DG,
ReplyDeleteA few comments in response to your previous post (#102) ...
Your political comments are spot-on, and it sounds like I and/or Paul Krugman have been influencing you. Or maybe you're influencing me.
Secondly, while I don't have any good advice on your computer issues, I would like to relate my own experience.
I had a long and ugly history of computer malware and viruses on my previous two computers. It finally stopped when I did two things: got Avast anti-viral software and had created two accounts, an administrator and a secondary user account in which the latter had more limited privileges. This meant that most things that tried to jump onto my computer typically needed permission (entering the administrator password). In other words, if you are working on your computer as administrator all the time, it is open up to anything.
At least that worked for me.
I now have a work laptop with its own anti-viral software.
More generally, the internet is a disgusting sewer. You need not go to any "bad" sites for attacks on your computer.
Thirdly, I enjoyed our Thursday night dinner and drinks. That was fun, except for the parking ticket. Any update on that?
Oh, yes, also ...
ReplyDeleteI tend to post my entries on blogger with Chrome because Blogger / Google and Explorer don't really like each other. Using Explorer creates all kinds of formatting issues.