Black History Month

It's Black History Month once more and with the celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday and the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the Unites States of America last month, it's going to be hard for me to find or write about something that will be of equal relevance and or stature.

So for now, until I am able to think of something worthy of your attention on this great occasion I will, with your permission show a brief video on a cause that is of great concern to many black women around the world. I hope that after seeing this, if you can find it in your hearts, you will contribute as generously to the cause as much as you can.

Thank you.

The Return of And the award goes to...

Okay, Part 2.

If you haven’t read the first part, don’t worry about it. It’s really not that relevant to what I have to say here. All I will say is that you’ve missed what will amount to be one of the great masterpieces of the 21st century, a virtual tour-de-force in literature. In fact I’ve heard it rumored that there may be a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. For those who have read it, well who doesn’t pad their resume a little?

A few weeks ago I was nominated or maybe acknowledged would be a better word, for being an inspiration to the blogger RunningMom who stated that and I quote, ”The best picture-blogger I know. If his blogs don't speak to you the pictures will…” on her blog Blackshoes Whitesocks.

At first I was surprised to be mentioned at all. I had seen many blogs with many awards and accolades stating that they were the best this or the most that and I was sort of envious. I was just sort of envious because in actuality, I really had no interest in looking for that kind of recognition for myself. I have nothing against anyone else receiving awards, but that kind of dick stroking, and please don’t think I’m saying it was done here, but it does very little for me.

The reason I had started blogging was because I thought that I might have something to say and it would be a cool way to improve my written communication skills as well as say a few things that I would find difficult to say in front of certain people. If someone read what I wrote, then that would be reward enough. Although, I can tell that very few people do read what I write from the stats they keep on Feedburner.

Nowadays I get about 2000 hits or more a week. 50 of them are probably mine and about 90% of the rest are from people who have found me through Google images and are just interested in looking at the pictures. Look up “nude nigger” or something else as obnoxious and you’ll find a photo from my blog. But I like the numbers, hence I won’t complain or object when the subject of pictures is brought up. Why do you think there is a picture up here now?

So, without meaning to sound insincere or irreverent, I would like to thank RunningMom for her recommendation for the award and I hope that I can live up to her expectations. It is truly an honor to spoken of so highly by someone who’s work I consider not just refreshing and entertaining, but so real, honest and sincere.

I have to take care of some housekeeping by listing the rules of this award and list 5 bloggers who gave me a hand in helping me either directly or indirectly in developing the blog that I have now and 5 blogs or bloggers that I would like to pass on my appreciation in order to help encourage them in their pursuits. I need to "pay it forward."

I shall try not to bring up anyone that I already know has received this award before but first the rules:

1. Select 10 bloggers: 5 you consider your blogging Helping Hand then "Pay it Forward" by extending your "Helping Hand" to 5 additional bloggers in support and encouragement for their efforts.

2, In passing on the Emblem, each recipient must provide the name of blog or blog author with a link for others to visit.Each recipient must show the Emblem and put the name and link to the blog that has given it to her or him.

3. Link the Emblem to this post: Helping Hand: Much Obliged and Paying it Forward so that others will know it origin and impetus.

4. If you have not already done so, show your recipients some love by adding them to your blog roll, Technorati Favorite list, or in any other way to further let them know that their blog voice is important to you and being heard.

5. Add your name to The Helping Hand meme and don't forget to leave a comment as a permanent record of all Helping Hand recipients.

6. Display the rules.

This looks like it’s going to be long and I should edit it, but times are hard and ideas sparse. So lets make a trilogy of the thing, end it here and just say I will list the 10 in the final chapter of this thing …to be continued...

Still Waiting

Sometimes life's a bitch and you're stuck in the pits looking for that which will turn it around. It's not a good place to be in. If you have any sense, you'll just move on and find what you need. But me, I'm too spoiled. I'm still waiting.

Let Them Eat Cake

Generally I try to stay away from other peoples ideas for the posts that I do. It's kind of a professional courtesy. I believe that bloggers should be allowed to write and develop their stories or work without having to worry about someone else trying to beat them to the punch, ride their coattails or steal their thunder. But this time I'm saying "Hell with that." I can be just as gossipy as the next person and when it comes to food and silly stuff, I'm there; especially if it's bakery goods. Even more than the cigarettes and the drinking, cookies and cakes are my by biggest addictions, so I'm there.

I read a post called White Folks Who Still Don't Get It Chronicles by Professor Tracey at Aunt Jemima's Revenge. In it professor Tracy says there is a bakery, Lafayette French Pastry Bakery near St. Vincents in the Village that is selling cookies called Drunken Negro Face Cookies. Apparently the bakery was so proud of its product, it even went out of its way to dedicate and rename the cookies as Obama Heads on the day of the Inauguration.

Now the professor and many others have found the whole idea of these cookies as offensive and racist and there is even talk of boycotting the bakery and possible protests to show how upset they are. Since I go to the bakery on Bleeker St. whenever I'm in New York, I know this really would not affect me, but I have to think that even if I did go there I still wouldn't protest the bakery. I just wouldn't go there any more.



I think people can be too thin skinned about certain things. I would much rather have someone call me nigger or faggot and host of other things to my face than smile, take my money and wait until I had walked out of the door before they showed how they really feel about me. The baker may not like me or my kind but I have to respect the fact that he's telling me what he feels up front. Besides he'll get his.

After all I think it was during the French Revolution when both the baker and his wife lost their heads when she told her subjects to eat cake when they were starving. The same thing will happen to this baker when his business has been closed down by spring and he's looking for work serving at Denny's.

Aunt Jemima's Revenge: White Folks Who Still Don't Get It Chronicles - Upscale NY Bakery Sells "Drunken Negro Face" Obama Cookies

The original source for the above post.

Aunt Jemima's Revenge: White Folks Who Still Don't Get It Chronicles - Upscale NY Bakery Sells "Drunken Negro Face" Obama Cookies

Mine and Christina's World

Since I don't believe in deleting stuff that I put up, I need to do more than the two line entry of my last post. And so to cover it...Andrew Wyeth died last week.

I had heard the name before and had assumed that Andrew Wyeth was an artist, although I had no idea what he done and thought,"wasn’t he dead already?” Apparently he wasn't, not until last week when he passed away at 91.

He was a painter who lived in Chadds Ford just outside of Philadelphia and he was known for painting scenes in Pennsylvania and Maine and just using two or three models over and over again in his portraits. I saw on the news that one of these models was Christina Olson. And then they showed the painting Christina’s World and I was transported back.



I remember when I was 12 or 13, we were shown this picture in class, English or Art or something else I don’t really remember which, but we had to write about what we thought was going on in the picture and what had happened before. I don’t know what I wrote, probably nothing because it looked like nothing was happening. But I do remember at the end of the class when the teacher discussed what the some of us had written and what he thought.

He brought up the theory that maybe the woman in the painting had just woken up in the field and was now staring at an empty house from which a sudden and mysterious noise had come from. Or maybe she was crippled, to you young PC folks that would be physically challenged, and that she was calling out for help from someone. These were the two theories that I remember, but more importantly, that was when I started to wonder why I could think of stuff like that, especially since there didn’t seem to be a right or even a wrong answer.

Of course many years later I found out that Christina was real and was in fact an invalid and that the teacher probably wasn’t the Sherlock Holmes of secondary education as I thought he was. But more than that, maybe because of that, I had learned to ask questions of myself and others. Sometimes they won’t be the right questions or even the questions that will give me that answer that I looking for. But they will be the ones that I can use to explore and discover new areas of thought and ideas that are foreign to me or the ones that will question my own beliefs.

Thus if you have ever thought that I asked too many damn questions, which some of the nearest and dearest have accused me of and have actually turned their backs on me while I ask them, then you have only Andrew Wyeth to blame for that.

An iPod Test Post

Am I the only who was not upset by Aretha's hat yesterday? Actually it
looked kind of warm and comfortable to me.

Sent from my iPod

I am a free man!

Alright just to please RunningMom. Apparently the the previous video of the Boy Wonder was offensive to some, so I have decided to move on and add more posts so that it will eventually disappear.

I had intended to write something about Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan, both of which passed away this week, or this weekend when we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. with a day of service and welcome the the first African American President as he takes office on Tuesday. I would something like a week in review. But there isn't much more that I could say that you haven't thought of or couldn't find out and read for yourselves. So just a note.

Most people will remember Mr. Montalban as Mr. Roarke, the nattily dressed host and may I say Architect of Hidden Dreams on the show Fantasy Island, or as one of the old MGM actors they called in when they needed a latin type and Cesar Romero wasn't available. But I have and always will remember him as one of the best science fiction villains that has ever graced the silver screen and the man who is probably responsible for the success of the most successful science fiction franchises ever, Khan. Without him there would never have been a 3rd or 4th or 9th Star Trek movie.

"He tasks me. He tasks me. I will chase him 'round de mooons of the Antares Nebula..." Which really isn't a direct or even correct quote from Khan on Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan, but it's what I remember and it's what I think of and sometimes spit out when I get into that trekkie kind of mood and I'm surrounded by the right people, trek people. With all the sex and danger that he exhibited at age 61 when he did the movie, he has kept me going if only in the hope that maybe one day, some day I could be as smooth real life as he was on screen.

I think I was under 10 when I first saw The Prisoner and I didn't understand it then. Truth be told, when I saw the series being repeated on PBS about 10 years ago, I still didn't understand it. But at the show's opening, which is posted below, Patrick McGoohan runs around trying not to give up information about something and not willing to accept himself as just a number but instead claimed that he was a "free man." This also is something that I strive for, although it's kind of hard to try to do as in a few weeks from now I will be sending in my personal information on tax forms about how I live and what I do and get to be able to live that way and all with a big fat social security number on top.

Speaking of a free man or freedom itself, MLK, 'nuff said.

It can also be said that an Obama in the White House will be will be a direct result of the efforts for freedom that the good reverend Dr. King gave his life for, as did so many others from the march from slavery to the March on Washington DC and beyond. And this is the part where you come in. This is the part where I realize that there is nothing I can say or do that will lift this moment any higher or greater than it already is. This is the part that I will leave to the poets and the historians and to you to record and honor, this moment and this time.

On the way to DC

Video Quickie

Did you ever wonder why health insurance rates are so high?

Alright so I'm a facist, but he has no shame. Who among us is perfect?

And the award goes to...

“What this country needs is a good 5¢ cigar,” somebody’s vice-president said at the beginning of the last century.

That is a quote that you can look up on Google to find who said it, but I think you would be hard pressed to find who it was who may have said or decided that what the entertainment industry needed was one more award show. Yes it’s that time of year again.

From the People’s Award to the Oscars, from the Grammys to the World Music Awards, from Essence Magazine Awards to I don’t know, People Magazine’s sexiest man alive award, this nation is rife with award giving shows where everyone pats themselves on the back and congratulates one another for having survived the previous year with work or some other attribute being recognized for being above and beyond that of others.

The only award show that I ever really watch has been the Oscars and that is only because I grew up watching movies, the classics on TV so there is some sort of affinity there that I can’t really explain. Although the last Oscar show, I should call it the Academy Award Show, that I actually appreciated was when John Wayne left his sick bed to present the Best Picture award wearing a tuxedo and hairpiece that were both much too big for him and kept slipping; he had lost a lot of weight at the time. Then he died like two weeks later. But that’s show business and I loved him for it.

I think the best appreciation for an award was done by George C. Scott for his award winning performance in Patton. He not only did not show up for his award but he told them what they could do with it. He was only interested in his work and not the petty politics that go with movie industry that he thought had burned him, as I'm sure petty politics burn other people in other industries or companies. As far as I know that Oscar is still sitting on a shelf in the back of a warehouse somewhere waiting for someone to claim it.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that awards are fine and everything, but it is the work that is really what it’s about and trying to do the work even more so. The fact that one piece may seem to be better than other pieces to certain people at a certain time is really arbitrary and unimportant in the long run. It’s the work that counts and so I would like to thank the…

Actually I was working up to what this piece was going to be about, but this has already gone on much too long as is that there will have to be a Part II to this, or a So & So Returns to finish up the arc.

By the way, am I only the only person in the world who thinks that Viola Davis who was on screen all of 5 minutes in the movie “Doubt” should get more than just a paycheck for her performance? For a black woman to come up and knock Meryl Streep on her ass when they were together and send her back to acting school, and you know I love me some Meryl, is an achievement worth seeing and experiencing.