A quick remembrance of Bernie Mac in the Root.

rips Bernie Mac.

50 years old. Keep your insurance up to date, go to the doctor regular, watch your weight, take a walk, all of you.

photo courtesy flickr user mama wolff; used under creative commons license

"Republicans wear sneakers, too." - Michael Jordan on why he wouldn't endorse Harvey Gantt in Gantt's run for Jesse Helms' senate seat. h/t Christopher Chambers for the reminder.

May he rot there for all eternity.

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.

florent, by flickr user DrewVigal

I wasn't a regular at Florent, but had three to four good meals a year there while I lived in New York. (More before I got the day job in '99.) This tidbit from the NYT's coverage of the place closing kind of blew my mind:

On June 29 Florent will close. Its rent was to rise to more than $30,000 a month, said [owner] Mr. Morellet, now 54. He started out paying $1,350. The neighborhood, the city and the people who felt it belonged to them were different then.[full story]

30k a month!

Malcolm X would have been 83 today. h/t Bomani Jones for doing the math for me.

from Susie Bright:

The next guilty teenage boy you see on the street... buttonhole him, and whisper, "You're not doing it ENOUGH! You better beat off like your life depended on it!"

A new study shows that regular masturbation can reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer. Seriously.

The Australian researchers who carried out the tests found men who ejaculate more then five times a week were better off then men with more modest numbers. And the younger you start, the better the results.

And, no. I have no idea why C-3PO is up there. It just felt right.

I don't have a proper segue for this, but: My father had funny ideas about the prostate. Sometime in the mid-70s, ground pepper was banned from our home because he picked up the notion somewhere that the grains somehow enlarged the prostate. When a male relative came down with some trouble down there, my father leaned over to me - at dinner, while dude was sitting across from me - to whisper that the relative had taken ill because dude masturbated into the pocket square he always wore six times a day. (The beauty of that story is that I must have been, like, 9. Me and Dad didn't see eye-to-eye much, but nothing brought us together like the male urinary tract.)

In stark contrast, my father claimed not to have touched himself since his days at an all-boys military boarding school, which, besides being a bold-faced lie (I found "the stash" when I was 10) gave me the raw material for a lot of likely homophobic - but good natured, I swear! - innuendo-making at his expense. Dad subscribed to a lot of quack "newsletters" - this was before the intertubes, they came in the mail - and had clearly picked up both the pepper thing and the prostate-wanking connection in their pages. When his own gland swole up unexpectedly one day, I couldn't resist telling him how it just couldn't be his prostate seeing how he had given up his life of dickcrime way back in boarding school. He didn't have much in the way of snappy comeback, but that might have been because he was howling in agony in the bathroom trying to pass a drop and a half of urine, poor old guy. :(

The bumper for the New York State Education Department's Bureau of Mass Communications, creators of one my favorite shows "Vegetable Soup." Of course I grew up completely in love with bleeps and blips.

Couldn't much on the wonderfully named "Bureau of Mass communications," but did find this bit in history of the NYS Ed Dept:

Starting in 1886 the Department of Public Instruction loaned glass lantern slides to teacher training institutions, school districts, and adult learning groups. This popular service supported instruction in geography, history, and science, and continued until 1939. Thereafter a small unit promoted school use of audio-visual aids, including the new media of film, radio, and television. The Education Department fostered the development of educational and public television services in New York. In 1953 the Regents obtained seven FCC permits for UHF channels; under a law passed the next year the Regents chartered educational television (ETV) councils to operate the stations. After successful closed-circuit and broadcast ETV experiments, state aid authorized in 1961 helped over a thousand schools purchase and use ETV equipment during the decade. The Department acquired or produced educational video programs (such as the popular "Vegetable Soup" series on inter-racial relations) and distributed them to schools. In recent years the ETV program has promoted interactive video-computer networks and remote learning systems. Statutes passed in 1961 and 1978 authorized a continuing program of state aid for New York's non-commercial public television (and also radio) stations, which provide educational programming to schools, institutions, and the general public.

From glass lantern slides to trippy shows on "inter-racial" relations.

On the news that the Electric Company is coming back, Caro over at Sound Taste recalls "a bicultural childhood, spent mostly in the DR, but with yearly visits to Queens, where I gorged on Cocoa Pebbles and Underdog. For learning English, Sesame Street and other "educational programs" were key." [full post]

I have to confess that, owing to my lifelong habit of picking oddball also-rans, my favorite show was actually the thoroughly bizarre Vegetable Soup:

Frick! I could have sent myself to Mars!

Elvis, bin Laden and Hitler Join Mission to Mars
Elvis, bin Laden and Hitler Join Mission to Mars A NASA spacecraft is headed toward Mars and is expected to land later this month. When it touches down on the dusty red planet, so will "Adolf Hitler" and "Osama bin Laden."

With the exception of the kids, all of the people pictured below not only went to my high school - Saint Francis Prep - but they're all a year younger than me. Apparently they participated in a segment on CBS' morning show to surprise anchor Julie Chen for her b-day.

I think I recognize two red-hairish women to the left - the fourth woman from the left wearing the gray dress and black/white shoes, and the woman in black to her right (peeking out from behind the Asian woman). But I can't say for sure. My class was actually significantly more diverse than this picture indicates, but I have a feeling the students of color tend not to, er, cling to Saint Francis Prep the way the more emblematic Irish and Italian graduates might and missed the memo about Julie Chen's b-day. Saint Francis could graduate a million black, Latino, Filipino and Indian kids and it would still be imagined as an essentially Irish and Italian school. I remember hearing somewhere that our school lost more people in 9/11 than any high school in the city (owing to the large number of cops and firemen it's produced over the years) but that may be because Mychal Judge, the NYCFD Chaplain who died in the North Tower went to Prep.

Dock Ellis, talks to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel about pitching a no-hitter on LSD:

We flew into San Diego and I asked the manager could I go home, because we had an off day. And he said, "Yeah."

She said, "I don't know but you better get to that airport."

from boing boing:

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it.

The first few years after he died, I would call my father's old number every 2 or 3 months, letting it ring a few times before hanging up. The number had been reassigned to new people, who I liked to imagine wondered what the quarterly prank call from Boston was about. (This was circa 2004 or so, Cambridge days.) I never left a message, don't think I ever held the line long enough for anyone to pick it up. I can't say for sure what I thought I was doing. There was no ghostly recorded voice on the other end, and I harbored no supernatural fantasies about Dad himself answering. My father was a strict materialist and good with electronics, and I figure that he'd find a way call me directly should he find himself inhabiting the phone system.

Omega Man NRA

Charlton and Rosalind

i am who be

brock and charlton

Sidney, Harry, Charlton

charlon, james, marlon

brownface touch

brownface switcheroo

the kiss

rips Charlton Heston.