Social/Cultural: May 2008 Archives

The folks at Email Our Military are giving away a copy of Final Salute by Jim Sheeler:



Sheeler won a Pulitzer for this book, and a number of my colleagues at DailyKos have raved about it.

Go here to enter the contest at emailourmilitary.blogspot.com.

There should be two categories of rap, tunes whose accompanying music is original, and those who simply sample the music of others. The latter is more akin to a recorded poetry reading accompanied by background music.

And f'sure, rappers should pay royalties on music they sample:

Rapper Kanye West and his record label are being sued by the daughter of a jazz musician who says he sampled her late father's music without permission.

Kathleen Firrantello says that, in his track Gone, West used a sample of Joe Farrell's 1974 song Upon This Rock.

If high school bands are required to pay royalties for tunes they play at football games, Kanye and the others should pony up. It's not like they can't afford it.

Sculptor Lei Yixin with a model of his MLK statue destined for The Mall in DC

All Things Considered did a segment on the National MLK Memorial, which will be built on the Mall, between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. The inspiration for the statue that will dominate the memorial is from King's "I Have A Dream" speech:

In the original design for the MLK memorial, a bust of King emerges almost organically out of the side of the Stone of Hope. To get to the stone, a visitor would walk through two rocks symbolizing the Mountain of Despair. That design won the competition set up by the U.S. Fine Arts Commission, the federal agency that approves anything that gets built on the National Mall. But in the new model for the statue, King is much bigger. His arms are crossed defiantly and he has a solemn look on his face

The commission overseeing the project thinks MLK is too harsh, severe, in his expression. I'm good with that. MLK shouldn't be turned into Uncle Fluffy. I'd like to put up a copy of that statue outside Vitty-cent's office door, and another one outside Scalise's office-when he gets to DC to remind those pigs that the world is watching them.

how would you like this to be left on your answering machine:

Sandie Petee came home from running an errand to find a message her son had accidentally left on her answering machine. She hit play and heard the sound of Stephen in the middle of a battle with insurgents in Afghanistan. Petee talks with Andrea Seabrook about the scare.

talk about a parent's nightmare!

NOLA-disu's post on the behavior of the criminal organization known as Tulane's chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha brought me back to memories of being in a fraternity at University of New Orleans.

I'm a member of Lambda Chi Alpha, initiated in December of 1976 at UNO. We were (and still are) the only fraternity to own a house. Since it was off-campus, we didn't have any sort of obligations to the university or monitoring from them. It was up to us to maintain standards of proper behavior at social functions and in daily life around the house. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we failed. Still, we never crossed the line to criminal. Of course, most of us were local boys, not out of town kids with no ties/roots in the city.

The pikes are one of the reasons we rarely went to uptown bars back in the day. We'd go to Bruno's on Thursday nights because one of our fraternity brothers had a gig spinning oldies there, but that was about it. I never set foot in "The Boot" until I was something like 26 years old, mainly because it would be like going into a pub near White Hart Lane in London with an Arsenal shirt on. What scares me is that the current crop of pikes aren't just guilty of "high spirits" as they call it in English public schools, they appear to be pathologically violent:

One of the alleged assailants in the hazing incident, Kevin Dunn, has a previous battery conviction. Dunn and another man were booked on charges of second-degree battery and negligent injuring in March 2006 after kicking and punching another student after they got into an argument, according to court records.

In terms of the current hazing incidents, we see a clear example of why stupid white boys from the Middle Colonies shouldn't be allowed near Creole cuisine:

The fraternity, commonly called PIKE, now faces allegations that members poured boiling water on the bodies of pledges and caked them with flour, crab boil, vinegar, cayenne peppers and wasabi sauce. The victims were treated at a local hospital with second- and third-degree burns, according to New Orleans police.

Crab boil? These boys are idiots. That stuff is so concentrated that it stings when it comes into contact with the skin. And it got in the eyes and on the genitals of those pledges? Incredible.

Still, I'm guilty of the one thing that the rest of the fraternities and sororities bemoan when incidents like this happen, focusing on the negative. I like this quote from a guy in ZBT:

Gibson, sitting on his fraternity house's stoop Wednesday afternoon, likened fraternity life to an airport. "Planes land and take off all the time, but only the crashes get magnified," he said.

So true. I enjoyed my fraternity experience and am proud to be a Lambda Chi. My first born (a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology) isn't a fraternity kid, but that's OK. The oldest kiddo of one of my best friends is a Theta Xi at UL and is loving it. We have to chalk up the pikes in the "shit happens" category. Hopefully Tulane will flush this shit down the toilet and pipe it back to New Jersey.