Posts from August 2008

So if you had to guess, who you would say was the highest paid rapper last year? Jay-Z, Sean Combs? No - it was 50 Cent, who earned $150,000,000 last year. You surely must be wondering, as I did, how the hell he earned that much money in 12 months.



The new king of hip-hop wealth banked $100 million after taxes on one deal alone when his stake in VitaminWater's parent, Glaceau, was bought by Coca-Cola as part of a $4.1 billion deal.

He's a true businessman!

LeRoi Moore, saxophonist of the Dave Matthews Band, died at the age of 46 as a result of complications from an ATV accident two months ago - - it always bothers me when musicians die too soon.

An unfortunate legacy of Heath Ledger's death is his daughter, Matilda, growing up without her father. It turns out that Heath Ledger's will was never updated to include Matilda, so the actors that completed his role in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law) donated their earnings from the film to the little girl. It isn't as if the girl wasn't destined to be a millionaire and wouldn't have lived off of her father's money the rest of her life, but I still think it was a touching gesture from a few heavy hitters in Hollywood.

Here is an ad hoc manga avatar that reflects today's look and general demeanor!

Growing up I was a real product of my generation - dad used to play Genesis, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Miles Davis (the bad stuff), U2, Sade and so on whenever we were in the car. So the soundtrack to my early life was heavily laden with the likes of:

No Jacket Required



and Face Value.



Awesome albums that came from the man's soul while dealing with a painful divorce. "If Leaving Me Is Easy?" Only a wounded bird can chirp a song like that my friend.

Well, it hasn't been Phil's year, I have to say. Mr. Collins will now live in infamy as the British record holder for largest ever payout to an ex-wife. Article - Even larger than Sir Paul's payment to that beeotch Heather Mills! That shit hurts. I'd weep too, man. He's paid a total of $84 million to his ex-wives!

Since the songs were so great that came from what he was feeling during his first divorce, one can only speculate as to what kind of record he'd make based on this most recent unlucky mishap.

I'm a dick so I went ahead and speculated for everybody:



OMG! Oh, and by the way, please take note of his innovations in the sport of love. You've heard of the most recent Hollywood trend of dumping people via text, right? Consider this evolutionary precursor to the text dump:

After taking advantage of technological advances and infamously dumping wife No. 2, Jill Tavelman, by fax back in 1994, he was forced to pay $34 million.

That is a special kind of loathe.

I was introduced to the works of Cormac McCarthy during the wintertime, which I suppose is a bit of a poetic time to be introduced to the works of a man who typically writes violent, post-apocalyptic books vaguely reminiscent of Faulkner's prose style. His best work I'm told (I'm going to study it this fall) is Blood Meridian, which is an incredibly rich text and is widely compared to Moby Dick. I say study rather than read - almost every page is littered with accurate historical references (even seemingly innocuous sentences), and most people that read the book never really understand how monumental a book Blood Meridian is in that regard. It is like reading Tolstoy and not ever really having an intricate grasp of 19th Century Russian society, or like reading Nabokov without an intricate grasp of 19th Century Russian literature.

The one book that has won Mr. McCarthy the most recent praise (and the cringeworthiness of being associated with Oprah) is The Road, which won last year's Pulitzer Prize. Like most of McCarthy's books, the plot is not the focus and is sometimes non-existent. The strength of his writing, particularly with The Road, is how he draws out the most human of our elements in the midst of an end of the world scenario. The focus of the book is not the setting but the journey, and how a father and son cope with survival when civilization has been lost. McCarthy refers to it in the book as "carrying the fire," which is simply another way of saying that in many ways civilization, the goodness and the very humanity that we exhibit really hasn't been lost, and you learn that the "fire" is encapsulated by the boy.

Well, like "No Country For Old Men" and "All The Pretty Horses," The Road has been adapted for the screen and will be released this November. Viggo Mortensen plays the role of the father, and a relatively unknown child actor from Australia plays the son. The film was largely shot in Pittburgh, with some locations elsewhere. The NYT has an article about the movie you can read here - - apparently the final scenes were filmed in Erie, near the shores of our Great Lake. Does this mean that our general area is good for filming what seems to be bombed out landscape half of the year? I don't know, but Viggo seems to be really excited about the child star they brought on to play the son - apparently he is a savant in the same mold as Haley Joel Osment.

Setting aside the political stuff, the Olympics have been incredible to watch thus far. The opening ceremony was a true spectacle. I've been watching the swimming events mainly, but I caught the USA - China basketball game as well, where Christian democracy triumphed over atheist totalitarianism (metaphorically, of course) to the score of 101 - 70. One billion human souls were said to have watched the game, which would be the most watched basketball game in history.

Last night I think it is safe to say that we witnessed live on air yet another legendary American sports moment, and perhaps the greatest swimming relay in the history of the event. I feel so lucky that I saw it live - e:jay and I were jumping in the air screaming at 11:30pm (sorry to our new neighbor!). Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who became an international star after Athens 2004, had his chances of winning 8 gold medals hanging off of the arms of Jason Lezak and his two other teammates in the 4x100m freestyle relay. The opposition: the French quartet, who were heavily favored. Drama was present prior to the relay, with the French having talked a copious amount of merde and stating that they were going to 'crush' the Americans.

The result was one of most exciting events of any kind I've seen in my life. The final relay member, Jason Lezak, was forced to make up nearly a body length while facing the fastest relay swimmer in the world, Alain Bernard. After the first 50 meters it looked as if Phelps' dream would die; the American was behind about half a body length with the final 50 meters to go. 40 meters, still trouble. 30 meters, it appears as if Lezak was making up some ground. 15 meters, by God Lezak appeared to be pulling even! 5 meters - underwater cams reveal the two swimmers are even. In an amazingly poetic moment the two swimmers glance at each other in the final few feet and the American reaches out his arm to beat the Frenchmen by eight one-hundredth of a second! It was such an unexpected and dramatic moment that the entire Cube burst into wild excitement, the spectators shouting and screaming as loud as I've ever heard. The NBC commentator was practically out of his shoes. In the end, Jason Lezak swam the fastest relay leg in history to beat the Frenchmen and earn gold for himself and his team. 5 of the 8 teams eclipsed the previous world record, which was newly set by the Americans during their winning relay.

Sports are great for a lot of reasons, but for me the best part about sports is shown at times like these, where the moment of truth arrives and you show the world exactly how big your heart is. It seems that the Olympics magnifies these kinds of moments and we had one of the best last night.

Here is an article with a video of the relay - it gets my highest recommendation. Drama doesn't get much better than this under any circumstances!

This is for the Ho sisters, or anyone that appreciates gossipy/scandalous news.

Escapist or psychopath? You decide.



Woman in England decorates her home in traditional 50's TV style, down to the smallest detail. Read the article - - it is completely worth it. The freak show gets more intense as you scroll down. By the way, she is married. Can you imagine coming home to THAT? Imagine coming home from a long day at work and being forced to submit to your wife's fantasy of being June Cleaver.



Don't get me wrong. This could have some potential in a different context - you know, once a year in the privacy of your bedroom. But every single day of your tortured marriage? Is this England's DHS version of alternative treatment when the drugs get too expensive?

Take a look -



Would you have the stones to do that? Of course, domestic "trouble makers" are either jailed, under house arrest (with varying degrees of access to media for interviews) or simply intimidated into silence. My personal "favorite" - one Tibetan lady who had spent time in the United States had been threatened with confiscation of her children if she did not buy plane tickets and go back to the United States. So, foreign protesters are finding a degree of success, which China finds utterly unacceptable. I applaud their bravery - China is not morally equivalent to the West under any circumstances so they should not be treated as such. In my view putting yourself in personal danger, as these protesters have, is another kind of war. There are no bullets - at least on the side of the good guys - but being a dissident in a country whose legacy includes murdering 70,000,000 of its own people constitutes a personal danger that everybody should respect.

President Bush is criticizing their government heavily - - as he should. Some say he isn't doing enough and that he should have considered staying home rather than attending the games. I'm afraid it isn't that simple. American presidents tend to criticize China at the beginning and the end of their term, but rarely in between. For him to have not attended would have been the right thing to do morally, but the wrong thing to do for the country. President Bush is right to levy his criticisms, which I would wager most Americans share.

Will that stop me from watching the Olympics? No. It is a sporting event, and frankly my interest is in supporting our own athletes. Politics should never mix with sports - the results can be seen all across Europe with one of my favorite sports, football (soccer). However, the entire premise of these Olympic Games is to cast China as a world power ready to take a grander stage. They are using the Games as a means to enhance their stature globally. For them it isn't just a sporting event, so I reject the cries from China to set the politics aside. The world is too wise to accept fallacious suggestions from China such as that.

I want our athletes to go in, have a healthy place to compete (which seems dubious at best), collect more medals than everybody else and get the hell out of there. I want to see Phelps dominate. I want to see our footy teams do better than most would think, although yesterday's loss to Norway hurt. I want to hear our national anthem and see our flag raised in the capital of a Communist country with an oppressive political system, with medals slung around the necks of people standing on pedestals who know what freedom is all about.

One such athlete who knows exactly what I'm talking about is Lopez Lamong. Mr. Lamong is a former Sudanese refugee and Darfur activist who spent 10 years in a Kenyan refugee camp. He became an American citizen in July 2007 and is representing our country in the 1500m. The American team captains got together in the Olympic Village and voted him to be the flag bearer during the opening ceremony. You can read about it here - - it was a decision that made me so proud that I got emotional when I heard it.

In his words: "The American flag means everything in my life -- everything that describes me, coming from another country and going through all of the stages that I have to become a US citizen."

That is something worthwhile to see, Friday night, Channel 2, 7:30pm.

EDIT: More, via Drudge. If you have 10 minutes check these out.

Just an apparently not so short blast - lots of work to do today that I can't feasibly put off.

1. One of the points of pride for the Obama campaign has been, according to them anyway, that their campaign is a grassroots campaign driven by legions of small donors. It turns out that this isn't entirely true. Big donors ($1000 or more) account for a third of all donations Obama has taken thus far. The article questions his rationale for not taking the public financing - he claimed he didn't want to neuter the grassroots nature of his campaign. Personally, I thought his rationale was transparently BS - it was painfully obvious that by taking the public money he would stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. Anyway -

2. In the meantime, McCain is at Sturgis! When someone says "Buffalo Chip" I wonder how many people reading that article actually know what one is.

3. Since it is the eve of the Olympics I thought it would be appropriate to stick it in Communist eyes once again. The fact that China was awarded the Olympics, in my view, was ill-advised to the extreme. Did anybody actually believe them when they said that they weren't going to abuse and oppress foreigner and native alike while the Olympics were being staged? In the meantime, the world watches aghast as their totalitarian eccentricities devolved into the beating of two Japanese journalists - what a disaster. This, on top of obvious health concerns for athletes, blocking of several sites on the Internet (standard practice - lord knows people hearing contrary opinions is a bad thing, even if you are a foreign journalist), chicken pens for protesters, the establishment of rules for athletes so as to not provoke the delicate sensibilities of the assholes that run the country - China's government lacks morals and has set the stage for an incredibly indecent country. You can say what you want about the United States, but we do not have US Army soldiers strewn about the streets intimidating the public, nor would we ever tolerate an American soldier beating a foreign journalist on American soil, or anywhere else. China is a shitpot with a frivolous and fraudulent veneer. The fact that their citizens manage to defend and even ignore this kind of behavior can only be the result of one of two circumstances. Either they are afraid of the consequences of being critical, or they actually believe what they are saying. Both are unacceptable by any standard.

China was quick to apologize, but I say FUCK 'EM. They acted like spoiled children over the Cafferty incident and refused to accept CNN's apology, and cruelly his sharp comments about China were proved true. The irony is that because they are utterly incapable of helping themselves by resisting the urge to crack down on things they don't like, the Olympics are only magnifying how far China still has to go. Their indiscretions and the cavalier way in which they employ oppressive rules on foreigners are turning their Olympics into a caricature. The IOC is a disgrace - we have Jacques Rogge shrugging his shoulders while dining on sumptuous meals and traveling to exotic places in promotion of the Beijing Olympics. Ahh, taste the smog.

For more ludicrous and anger-inducing news regarding Beijing's calamitous Olympic Games and their trivial and alarming rules for foreigners, the New Yorker put out an excellent article. Highlights include forcing journalists to surrender their press credentials in exchange for translation equipment.

I was sitting here drinking my coffee, contemplating what albums I wanted to buy as I listened to the Decemberists. As the song ended, I could hear a truck backing up in the street outside and the warning sounds (beep.... beep.... beep....) matched the pitch and the mood of the song perfectly, which I have to say was a very surreal moment. The song was "Shankill Butchers" - if you know anything about "the troubles" in Northern Ireland you may be familiar with the subject material. Having the end of a song about murderers be somewhat interrupted by a noise reminiscent of a heart beat emanating from a monitoring machine in a hospital was strange. Maybe it was that same effect as that character in The Tell Tale Heart... not that I'm harboring any guilt or anything. It was one of those moments you have when you are alone that make you stop, gaze out of the windows and think for a moment.

@jason left for the Adirondacks so it has afforded me some time alone to get some things done. Last night I went back to Lagniappes for jambalaya and my luck was spectacular. Just as I walked in, the jambalaya was just coming out of the oven! The chef said to me, "you're not going to find fresher jambalaya anywhere around here!" Knowing that he was not telling a lie, I stood in silent anticipation. It was the shortest wait I've ever had there, which was merely a bonus in my mind, but nice nonetheless as I walked back to Mariner St. thinking I was the cat the got the cream.

After enjoying my favorite comfort food I watched No Country For Old Men.... well at least the first half of it. It was as if my eyelids were anchored down by cement blocks last night. I very much want to see the movie since it won multiple Academy Awards and is based faithfully on a novel written by Cormac McCarthy, an author that I'm reading currently (The Road, and later Blood Meridian). If you are on Facebook and you are my friend, you can check out my bookshelf. I try to keep it current because it is one of the few things I keep track of regularly. Facebook's captivating allure is lost on me - for me there really isn't much utility to the site.

Every month when the new copy of Spin arrives I sift for an hour and read it from front to back. The back end of the magazine is where you will find all of the music reviews and it is this section that I read with the most care. I read music reviews with a grain of salt, or in the case of Pitchfork, with an entire truckload of salt. When half of the music reviews get 3.5 stars only one of the following can be true. Either there really were a host of average albums for this month's issue, or the reviewers just don't have the courage to call a bad album a bad album. I also notice a very provincial attitude - I'm tired of reading about Brooklyn bands, half of which are absolute shit. In any case, there are some notables this month - Stereolab, Sigur Ros, Black Kids, The Hold Steady and a few others that I "question marked." Subscribing to Spin is one of the better media choices I've made in a while. I get a hell of a lot out of the magazine each month and occasionally they do have some brilliant spurts of rock journalism.

The Golden State is truly golden in many ways, but it is a statistical reality that in our lifetimes we will see an earthquake similar to the scale of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. How real is this reality? Take a look for yourself. Call me paranoid, but when I was in SF I was very conscious of the unstable earth beneath my feet. Californians seem to ignore the danger and rely greatly on their excellent warning systems, but there are inherent dangers to living in one of the most seismically active places on earth that are ignored at their certain peril. Living in California means that in many ways you have the best of things and the worst of things in America; Californians are quite accepting of that fact and live their lives without much concern for the inevitable. It is an interesting mindset and somewhat unique to this area of the country.

A book I've ranted and raved about, and suggest every single California resident read, is A Crack In The Edge Of The World, by Simon Winchester. The book is a historical study of the San Andreas fault, how settlers approached living through natural disasters, how dramatically such a seismically active area can affect the landscape, and most beautifully he recreates the morning of the "big one" using historical accounts from survivors. Mr. Winchester is an Oxford-trained geologist and an author of many excellent books - his writing style is captivating and engrossing. Why do I bring up the book? Because he studies the historical nonchalance with which Californians choose to approach any risks to living where they do. This mindset, according to Mr. Winchester, originated with the risk-averse settlers that put everything on the line to migrate to the mine fields in the mid-19th century. Also, he mentions something very, very prescient to current events.

Yesterday, southern California was struck with a magnitude 5.4 earthquake, the epicenter of which was a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In Winchester's book he mentions in particular that seismologists have undertaken revealing studies about how very seismically active areas often suffer smaller earthquakes before a much larger one. Lo and behold, today an article discusses the subject.

One of the most alarming facts of this situation I have found was from a different article in the SF Chronicle, which was special report regarding the exodus of the middle class in their fair city. SF residents are becoming a dramatically richer demographic as a result of high property values. Many regular folks simply can't afford to live where they work, and the statistics are alarming. The article is a good read in any case, but in particular I found this a very, very scary situation -

High housing prices are also a key reason that among 2,227 sworn police officers in San Francisco, only 675 live in the city, a little more than 30 percent, said Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.

The nightmare consequence of this would be an evening earthquake that shuts down BART and bridges, blocking two-thirds of the city's police officers and large percentages of other first responders from quickly attending to life-threatening building collapses, injuries or fires.

In other words, it is certain that a vast percentage of law enforcement and first responders will not be able to access the city during the time of its most vital need when an earthquake strikes. If you live in SF, you better think carefully about that. It seems apparent that if another massive quake hits the Bay Area that San Francisco may very well suffer just as badly, if not worse, than the city did in 1906 despite all of the better construction techniques and warning systems. If many first responders cannot access the city, how will a massive fire like North Beach suffered in 1906 be stopped? How can an orderly evacuation be conducted, if at all? What about triage? I hope their first responder plan is water tight despite what seems to be an alarming weakness. Part of the warning system relies on seismologists monitoring murmurs that indicate an earthquake is coming, but there is no way to predict exactly when an earthquake will strike.

The good news for ol' Frisco is that the area truly due for a big one is southern California. Los Angeles suffered an earthquake in the early 1800's that, based on survivors' accounts, was at least as severe if not more severe than the one that struck in 1906. La La Land is overdue, but in truth the San Andreas Fault could rupture anywhere and the scientists say that enough pressure has built up along the fault line to expect another big one within 30 years.