Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Gregory Kane writes in the National Examiner:
Consider this a “sagging pants” tale.
A while back, Don Lemon, an on-air personality for CNN News, boldly sallied forth into the cauldron about American racial and cultural mores.
Specifically, Lemon offered five pieces of advice to black American men. They were:
1. Stop wearing sagging pants.
2. Stop saying the n-word.
3. Stop littering.
4. Finish high school.
5. Have fewer children out of wedlock.
Though I was a bit confused about Lemon point number three, I have to admit the other four all amounted to cogent, sound advice.
Black liberal cognoscenti tended to disagree. They skewered Lemon, almost unmercifully at times.
Music mogul Russell Simmons’ response was to call Lemon a “slave” and then imply the CNN personality is black America’s enemy number one.
All Lemon was doing was offering advice to young black men about how to make themselves more employable in the job market.
A lot of what passes for “liberalism” nowadays amounts to little more than narrow-mindedness. Draw a tight circle around accepted “underdog” ideas, and refuse to entertain anything from outside of that tight, tight circle, under any circumstance whatsoever. Everything inside that circle is a “hill I wanna die on,” even though most of it’s just a bunch of junk; clogs skewered from the drainpipe; diapers pulled from the swimming pool filter; chaff separated from the wheat. Residue. Detritus. Counter-culture nonsense. Crap.
It’s just truckloads and truckloads of “must” floating around, without the vital balloon-anchoring companion to that intoxicating and fun word, “in-order-to.” Metric tons of supercilious command without so much as a gram of genuine, practical rationale.
Which was aptly illustrated in the tale Kane heard second-hand:
This young man, whom I’ll give the name Jack, had the habit of wearing his pants in that sagging-down-over-the-rear-end style.
So it came to pass one day that the lead dispatcher called Jack into the office. The topic of discussion was Jack’s pants, and how he was wearing them.
“Pull ‘em up,” the dispatcher told Jack. And he did, but not before subjecting his fellow workers to a lot of his grousing and kvetching.
“I’m a grown-ass man,” he hissed, prompting some of his co-workers to wonder why he didn’t dress like one.
Jack is a young black male in his 20s. He failed to notice the difference between him and his black male co-workers who were in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.
All of them wore their pants up around their waists, where their pants should have been.
Nor did Jack notice that the two black male office managers – men not much older than he is – also wore their pants up around their waists.
As might be predicted, all of Jack’s black male co-workers – including the dispatcher who brought him to heel – still work for the company in question.
Jack does not.
Kane parts with some thoughts worthy of careful consideration, by anybody, of all ages, regardless of skin color:
I remember when black Americans used to talk about home training all the time. Actually, we talked about the lack of it.
Whenever we saw someone out in public acting either the fool or shamelessly and disgracefully, we’d shake our heads in pity and proclaim, “No home training.”
Anyone – no matter race, ethnicity or gender – who sallies forth into the streets wearing his or her pants down over the butt has shown a total ignorance of Home Training 101.
I look, with cautious optimism, at the “sagging pants” fad as something that’s come & gone. I live in a western, urban area, so my information is probably somewhat okay there. If this hasn’t disappeared altogether — and what ever does, really? — it seems to have dried up, having isolated whatever is left of it into smaller pockets within the first-world.
Although, boy, it sure did hang around a long time. Heh. “Hang around,” I made a funny.
Fashion history will not look back on it favorably. The whole thing was just stupid. You want to look tough, so you dress like a prison gay-sex toy. You want to look like a gangsta or hoodlum or graffiti tagger or thief, or someone else operating outside the law, so you wear your pants so you can’t run. And, yeah, if the C.O.P.S. episodes are any indication, yes it does actually work out that way. Just dumb.
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Yeah, what got up Simmons’ butt about that? I remember the parents of the black kids I was friends with when I was in school and they didn’t seem to go in much for having their kids dress, talk or act like bums, dick around in school or dick around with their…you know. I can pretty much guarantee you that Mr. and Mrs. Simmons didn’t put up with that crap. And how’d it work out? Daniel Jr. is a recovering child-support bureaucrat turned painter and poet. Russell helped make Def Jam practically the pioneering rap recording label and is now a multimedia entrepreneur. And Joseph is Run (after his ordination, Rev. Run) from Run-DMC, as much a pioneer in performing rap as his brother was in producing it. You tell me.
- Rich Fader | 09/14/2013 @ 13:23Heck, I think it’s pretty simple. Things were working for that community until the Liberals got involved. Sixty odd years of the “Great Society” have done wonders, haven’t they? I think I would probably do the same thing, after sixty years of “help” from rich, white liberals who get to go home to gated communities….
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 09/14/2013 @ 14:12