October 2011
30 posts
SPIN: DJ Drama, The Art of Yelling on a Mixtape →
no-trivia:
My column’s back after a short break that happened for reasons that will be clear in a little while. So yeah, this one’s based on a pretty awesome conversation I had with DJ Drama about the aesthetics of mixtape hosting and his new album, Third Power.
Excerpt:
In 20 years or so, when all the stigma of Southern rap finally fades away and a proper historical perspective emerges,...
abbyjean:
Ignorant Citizens Are Not Stupid
One of the things that I’ll say all the time is people’s opinions are inconsistent: for example, they’ll approve of cutting government spending in the abstract, but support increasing virtually all the individual components of that spending. Or that they don’t know very much, with the classic example being that virtually...
“Fact: Cake is not evil. There is no such thing as a bad food, nor is there such...”
– Lesley Kinzel, writing for xoJane (via lenachen)
UN Recommends Everyone Stop Telling Women What To... →
The UN recently issued a report that declares that countries that restrict access to either abortion or contraception are violating a woman’s human rights. The report also declares it Officially Messed Up when a woman is prosecuted for taking illegal drugs or drinking during her pregnancy, because it’s her body and the state has no right to it. The Pope, The Democratic Republic of...
“The ACLU says that a discontinued Florida study found that welfare recipients...”
– Welfare Drug Tests Are A Load Of Crap
disappearance | frequencies →
Recent surveys reveal the guys are unlikely to orally pleasure young women outside of a relationship. Some young men I talk to explain that they want their sexual partners to be shorn so they don’t get smells and urine traces on their faces, so that oral contact is more direct. In a society that has banished all human odors through washing, deodorants and cleansers, tooth pastes and mouth...
disappearance | frequencies →
The same is now happening with the vagina. Even women who are about to deliver babies make emergency calls to their aestheticians to get waxes. “Everybody is going to be in that room,” one explained to her waxer, “and I don’t want to have any hair.” Pubic space is becoming public space.
Le Nouvelliste en Haiti - Haïti sur une grande... →
Pour la première fois des nouvelles d’Haïti sont présentées sur une grande chaine de Télévision américaine par des Haïtiens. Depuis juin dernier, Haïti et son créole s’imposent tous les soirs (10h pm) sur NBC Miami avec la voix et le visage de Christalie Parisot. HPN a rencontré en Floride Elisabeth Guérin, l’un des artisans de cet exploit.
“Narcopolitics is everywhere, though it manifests itself differently in different...”
– “Narcopolitics is Everywhere:” An Interview with William Garriott | Left Eye On Books
lowendtheory:
NLC: You found that people in Baker County felt that meth addicts were often “the people you would never expect.” Can you unpack this a bit for us? In particular, what anxieties undergird this sentiment? And, what does this perception reveal about contemporary American culture?
WG: This phrase, “the people you’d never expect,” was one I encountered frequently among adults when I...
Staff Lists: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s:... →
Here is another “top albums of the 2000” that’s just a bad excuse for putting anything by Radiohead at #1. Kid A?! Really?! By most measures, Kid A is Radiohead’s weakest album.
Occupy Herbstreit movement - Our 13 Demands
occupyherbstreit:
1. Equal pay for all SEC Quarterbacks
2. Schools may only purchase Fair Trade Gatorade for use on sidelines
3. Guaranteed Bowl appearances regardless of won-loss record
4. Let the mascots unionize
5. All sidelines must be made Segway-accessible so Ralph Friedgen can return to coaching
6. One trillion dollars so the Big East can buy some new teams
7. Free nachos
8....
Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser Already | Just... →
once you made the move to Firefox 3, you started to notice the browser getting slower and slower, and hanging more and more; and the advice you got on how to fix that kept coming back to suggestions like “use SQLite’s VACUUM command to remove empty space from your Places database” and “your Places database is fragmented; delete it and start over with a clean one“.
Which, not to put too...
The Maddow Blog - Virginia Foxx explains it all →
Don’t tell my congress representative Virginia Fox she hasn’t fought for women’s rights:
And for my colleagues across the aisle who say this is a misogynist bill, nobody has ever fought more for the rights of women than I have. But 50 percent of the unborn babies that are being aborted are females, so the misogyny comes for those who promote the killing of unborn babies....
‘I am Haitian, not a Creole, and I speak Haitian’... →
Despite some linguistic similarities with other former French colonies or territories like Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Haitian language is very distinct and serves as a strong representation of Haitian mental processes and world views. Creole identity, if there is such a thing, can be seen as a form of ghettoization of the colonized self that has not yet mitigated the burden of its colonial...
Mitt Romney Still Plagued by Successful Healthcare... →
ilyagerner:
Those fecund Mormons, always fathering telegenic children and centrist health reform initiatives! In any case, Romney denies paternity of national reform, but he sure did look like a proud Dad in Commonwealth Care’s first baby picture.
No way to write about Romney’s healthcare reform woes without invoking the Onion piece. I’m personally haunted by the idea that Romney wasn’t a...
“We have lots of communities in America that have drug use, drug dealing and no...”
– Criminologist David Kennedy responding to skepticism that violence can be diminished in the inner city unless drug use and dealing are first eliminated. (Reality-Based Community)
Women Are The Real Victims Of The So-Called 'Men's... →
Since we now know that colleges across the country hold young women’s applications to a higher standard, girls’ substantially greater commitment to volunteerism has become a female competitive necessity. Though voluntary community service has been a graduation requirement at many secondary schools since the 1980s, it has taken on greater significance in an era of rampant grade...
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What I WAS going to say on Outside the Lines… |... →
I am incensed by people who have made whiteness part and parcel of being Southern. After all, how could the Stars and Bars be defended as “Southern culture” without taking black people totally out of the equation? To be told I’m not Southern by a man who has never met me, who then didn’t listen when I told him where I was from, and remarked “yeah right” when I said he was no more Southern than...
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“‘You have to think of a different kind of menu,’ says Alice [Waters, owner of...”
– Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and People Who Cook
Bourdain devotes an entire chapter of his book to decimating Alice Waters, who has been lauded in a 60 Minutes puff piece as “the Mother of Slow Food” (which is a bullshit claim). He admits that he was...
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ilyagerner:
Welcome to N****rhead, Rick Perry’s Totally Non-Racist Hunting Camp
Every high-powered official needs a quiet retreat, preferably with an evocative name, to which they can escape from the thrust and parry of politics. Richard Nixon found respite from bombing the hell out of Cambodia at the ironically-named La Casa Pacifica. The Not-Yet-Zombie Reagan spent an eighth of his...
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“But America is also this: a long history of using policy—not just name-calling...”
– How America Works - Atlantic Mobile (via robot-heart-politics) 