One real, one fake.
This one is real… a guy on a Japanese TV show using a samurai sword to slice a baseball.
That reminded me of this second video, which is fake, but would have been the most awesome thing ever if it were real… Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with nunchucks (and then lighting matches with them).
Celebrity deaths offer us an opportunity to reminisce about more innocent times, to laugh at ourselves and what we thought was cool back then, to take stock of where we’ve come. They also offer us a chance to post YouTube videos.
I have to show my age here and admit Farrah Fawcett was a bit before my time – I mostly know her from cultural histories and stuff as the poster that graced every teenage boy’s wall in the ’70s – but I heard that the documentary she did a few months ago about her battle with cancer was incredibly moving. It’s a shame she passed away only a few hours before…
Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. The very epitome of cool when Charlie and I were young. (Danny was too young and missed this, I think.) I remember the first time my dad got a car with a cassette player, one of the first tapes he had in there was Thriller, and I swear we wore that tape out. I remember being confused because Michael was singing a song about a dude named Billie Jean but referring to him as a “she.” The lyrics of that song didn’t make a lot of sense to me back then. Regardless, in my youth, there was nothing cooler than Michael Jackson.
Of course, in the ’90s, he got weird. I imagine the adults around me had some inkling that growing up without a childhood and living under constant pressure to perform was only bringing him closer to some kind of breakdown, but he got weird at about the same time as we hit the teenage years… and we turned on him. (Not that he made it that hard, what with the plastic surgery and Neverland Ranch and the constant allegations of pedophilia.) I know that throughout my teenage years, I chalked up my once thinking he was cool to my being a kid and not seeing all the weird that had been there. (That, of course, also wasn’t helped by the rise of grunge and the fall of the ’80s pop-glam look that MJ personified.)
But, of course, all that was before the rise of YouTube… which, judging from the top videos tonight, is reintroducing a whole generation to the earlier MJ – the one whose moves we spent our childhoods trying to emulate, the one whose songs make it impossible not to start dancing a little. And I have to say, for the record: Man, did that guy have it back in the day.
Sure, his music was tinged with all that ’80s optimism and “Heal the World” myopia, but there’s an anger in his voice that I don’t think I’d noticed until I rewatched some of his stuff tonight. The later MJ, the one I came to know and mock in my teenage years, was saccharine-sweet, in a constant race to recapture the childhood he never had; the MJ of the early to mid-80s had an edge, a passion, some fire in his eyes.
But that MJ is no more, and the weird MJ is also gone; it’s now up to us to construct how we all want to remember him. As for me, I’m going to remember the earlier MJ, the one who always made me tap my feet, the one who got me and Charlie and my cousins and all my neighborhood friends trying to do the Moonwalk on solid-wood floors in our socks.
Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.
From a Columbus Dispatch article on the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, at which they kicked out a church that actually dared to treat LGBT people as human beings and expressed concern over a report that the SBC could lose 50% of its population by 2050 because they’re seen as old, white, and conservative:
[Johnny] Hunt, who was re-elected to a second one-year term yesterday, said, “One of the reasons — and it is a true reason — is we need to really join with our brothers of ethnicity in this convention.”
Brothers of ethnicity? Really? That phrase is probably the key to the SBC’s problems – and the reason they won’t get fixed.
First, the fact that he ascribes “ethnicity” to non-white people is probably a pretty big part of the reason that people who aren’t old southern racists aren’t too keen on joining a Southern Baptist Church. It’s apparent that to him, white people aren’t “brothers of ethnicity”; only people with darker skin have ethnicity. If there’s a more obvious statement that the SBC considers whiteness the norm and non-whiteness as Other, I’d like to see it.
Second, the fact that he only seems to think that the SBC needs to reach out to “brothers of ethnicity” is also telling. Gen-Xers and Millennials, with a few exceptions like the followers of the abusive Mark Driscoll up in Seattle, seem to have picked up on the obvious fact that women can do anything men can do, including lead churches. Yet the SBC seems trapped in the 1950s, when men were supposed to be the leaders and women the followers. The rest of the Western world has woken up to the basic fact of gender equality, at least in principle; why do conservative churches lag so far behind
Third, unrelated to that phrase – is it possible that there’s a relationship between the SBC kicking out, without any apparent controversy, a church that at least partially acknowledged the humanity of LGBT people, and the report indicating that the SBC is in decline? Is it possible that younger folks like me are realizing that anti-gay attitudes – by which I mean any notion that LGBT individuals aren’t entitled to acceptance and equality at all levels of our society, including in the church – are contrary to the love of Jesus Christ, just as racism and sexism are? Is it possible that churches that still hold such attitudes are going to shrink, while churches whose attitudes are more in line with Christianity are going to grow?
One can only hope.
Sorry I missed a week in there… the cucumbers are coming in! Last week I had about a hundred male flowers and one female one (the females are the ones that actually have the cucumber behind them). Now I’ve got more female flowers growing in and getting fertilized – in a few weeks, I’ll have full-grown cukes!
Tomato flowers. (Click to embiggen.)
My first cucumber! (Click to embiggen.)
…but Gordon Edes has a point: We should rename the Cy Young award after Satchel Paige.
Let’s rename the award after a man who won more games than Young, struck out more batters than Nolan Ryan, pitched in at least twice as many games as anyone else, and had a persona that rivaled Babe Ruth’s.
The name is Leroy “Satchel” Paige, and it deserves to be etched on a trophy that would guarantee he will not be forgotten.
I agree for a couple of reasons: first, it would rightly continue to bring attention to baseball’s greatest sin, the institutional racism that reigned from the 1880s to 1947. Josh Gibson probably was a better hitter than Babe Ruth, and Satchel perhaps the greatest pitcher ever to play the game, but we’ll never know just how good they were because they weren’t allowed to play in the major leagues.
Second, while Cy Young’s 512 major league wins are perhaps baseball’s last unbreakable record, we shouldn’t forget that he was pitching in a different time. Quite simply, it was a lot easier for a pitcher to last a long time in the dead-ball era, when every hitter wasn’t a threat to put the ball out of the yard. A pitcher could relax a little more, throw some easy ones, induce a lot more grounders. Satchel pitched in times that, while certainly not the equivalent of the (hopefully recent past) steroid era, were a lot more analogous to the way baseball is now than Cy Young’s era.
So I’m with Edes… let’s rename the Cy Young Award after one of the greatest pitchers and greatest entertainers ever to play the game.
My new iPhone 3G-S came in the FedEx yesterday… and after spending a couple of frustrating hours on Skype with AT&T when the delays in the activation process bricked both new and old iPhone, it finally activated and I was off to the races.
Now, I’ve spent less than 24 hours with 3G-S, but it’s a marked improvement over the 3G. Things are just a lot snappier; email opens right away, webpages render more quickly, even Sudoku is a lot faster. The compass is cool, but I really haven’t used it yet, as north and south are pretty easy to identify in a city with a square N-S-E-W grid system. The new camera with auto-focus is another thing I haven’t had much of a chance to use, but from the few test pictures I took, it’s a lot quicker, the auto-focus is cool, and the added megapixel is a welcome addition.
By far the most useful feature – one I’ve already used three or four times – is the new Spotlight search function, which finds emails, contacts, calendar items, etc. It’s about a hundred times easier than searching back through the inbox when I needed that one message. Apple’s recent history with OS X shows that they can be really good at on-machine search – and the iPhone 3.0 software is no exception.
All in all, am I happy? Yeah. I still don’t know if I’m $400 happy (the mid-tier upgrade price), but since I get to gift my old iPhone 3G to my mom (who gets all of her kids’ technology hand-me-downs) as a birthday present, I’m glad I made the purchase.
Yep. The Republican Party has once again put their ideology ahead of my rights as a DC resident and American citizen. The DC Voting Rights bill is dead.
For those who aren’t aware, we residents of the District of Columbia pay full federal income taxes every year. We can be drafted to fight in America’s wars. Yet unlike every other taxpaying American citizen, we do not have representation in either house of Congress, and our laws are subject to review and veto by a Senate subcommittee that is completely unaccountable to us and our city’s interests. We are, in essence, second-class citizens, residents of a colony. We suffer under that which the founders of this country fought against – taxation without representation.
Many bills have gone before Congress to rectify this injustice – including one just this year, that almost passed – until Republican John Ensign attached an amendment stripping DC’s post-Heller restrictions on gun ownership. Whether it was intended as a poison pill or just another part of the Republican Party’s irresponsible “let’s all have guns” cowboy politics, it killed the DC Voting Rights bill.
Let me put that a bit more clearly: Republicans don’t care about DC residents’ rights – or at the very least, don’t care about them enough to put their ideology aside and do the right thing. They think I should have a right to keep an AR-15 assault rifle in my house, but they don’t think I should have the right to representation in Congress. (Of course, the real reason I suspect that Republicans are trying to kill DC’s congressional representation is that we’d invariably send a Democrat – and, of course, to the contemporary Republican Party, political gain trumps all principles, ideals, morals, or values.)
There were questions about whether the bill would pass constitutional muster, and it’s still only half-a-loaf – even if we do get a voting representative in the House, we would still be second-class citizens because we would lack representation in the Senate as well as the right to make our own laws without Congressional veto. But still – half a loaf is better than the none at all we currently get.
It’s becoming all too clear to me now that the only acceptable option for the District of Columbia is full statehood rights – at least one representative, two Senators, and full, unrestricted home rule. Anything less is continued acceptance of the colony status for DC – and that is absolutely unacceptable in a democratic republic.
Democracy begins at home. Those of you who have voting representatives have an obligation to contact them and demand statehood for DC.
Sorry about the delayed garden porn… my friend Nirvana is in town from LA and we’ve been seeing the sights. This week’s garden porn: the cucumbers are blossoming all over the place! Also, the sweet peppers seem to have re-blossomed… which maybe means they’ll do a little growing for once?
Cucumber blossoms! (click to embiggen to wallpaper-size image)
Pepper Blossom (click to embiggen to wallpaper-size image)
The Coen Brothers’ first movie, shot with their 8mm camera when they were children, was entitled Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go.
Is there a title any more rife with possibilities?
