See Orlando, the one in the middle, above? He’s smiling, but, like a lot of Black people, deep down inside, he’s tired of being ignored. Passed over for promotions. Always asked to work on his company’s “ethnic marketing” campaigns.
I mean, look at him: He’s the oldest guy in his unit, because everybody who got hired when he came on has moved up. Meanwhile, Jenny, right, is team leader, and in line for the division president position. Ignore the Asian guy!
Grrrrrrrrrrr. It’s enough to infuriate a person.
Or, at least, it was. But that was before we, at Microsoft, introduced The Microsoft Advantage, courtesy of our most advanced software to-date: Windows RaceChange Suite Express for Vista.
With a few quick taps on his laptop, Orlando, above, becomes “Bob,” below.
WOW! Look at him now! Wouldn’t you like that guy running North American sales? Notice the respect, the vitality! That’s the kind of man that leads men…and Jenny to the bedroom!
Plus, he speaks Polish!
Microsoft Windows RaceChange Suite Express for Vista: And, remember: At Microsoft, race isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
You all get Fs: Mixed Company sets Asians back thousands of years
Adam Clayton Powell was fond of noting that Harvard University had “ruined more Negroes than bad whiskey.” Well, perhaps his Korean counterpart is somewhere saying the same thing about Asians at Yale.
That was my first random thought when I saw this bit, today, on YouTube: Purported members of the Mixed Company of Yale University chorale, above, shuffling to their reworked version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”: “Single Asians.”
Suck on this: A little girl demos Bebé Glotón’s remarkable talent
Does Bebé Glotón, Spanish manufacturer Berjuan‘s “breastfeeding” toy, above, mark the end of the world? Does it simply represent that less delicate, more raw & direct quality Spain seems to possess as a cultural birthright? Or is it an innovative and educational device, fitting for today’s more introspective age?
I haven’t figured it out. What I know, however, is that the chance you’ll see it on U.S. shelves any time soon is exactly zero. No, make that -8.
How I spent my summer vacation: Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ mugshot
As the final questioner at last night’s press conference in support of Barack Obama’s health care plan, The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Lynn Sweet asked the President for his thoughts on the recent arrest of Harvard University’s Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, above. As certainly anyone at all knows by now, Dr. Gates, a few days earlier, had suffered the indignity of being arrested for the crime of being in his own home, in a case now widely being seen as one of so-called “racial profiling.”
President Obama, right, gave a nice, reasonable answer, of the kind at which he is, arguably, flawless. He cracked a joke or two. He appealed to a sense of fairness that the blindingly white press pool, no doubt, possesses as fair and balanced journalists. He said he didn’t know “what role race played” in Gates’ mistreatment, but then cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” adding, for certainty. “That’s just a fact.”
He said that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly,” that quote being the one which, subsequently, was the most widely reproduced, and, to this writer, the one that came the closest to expressing any sort of a feeling or passion about the incident on his part.
What he did not say, however, or speak to, was the irony of what I had immediately noticed, soon as word of Gates’ arrest hit the wires: The scholar’s detainment had occurred mere hours before Obama gave his address, right, at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary convention. There, in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in New york City, the nation’s first Black president had hailed the organization’s history and astounding struggle, efforts which, in his own words, had directly led to his being “here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
The real question, though, is when Jump Smokers‘ “My Flow So Tight (Anti-Breezy),” released last month, comes on in the clubs, with its harsh verses (“There’s a curse to this last name ‘Brown'”) and brutal hook (“Chris Brown should get his ASS KICKED!”), does he dance to it?
Did you know that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster of April 26, 1986 reportedly released 400 times more fallout than the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast of August 1945? Even more, did you know that, despite the fallout, both literal and political, the plant continued operating until 2000? Russia depends on nuclear energy for fully 16% of its electric power—nearly a sixth of the total. (Nukes provide 20% 0f U.S. electrical needs.)
But that’s just a start. Rosatom, Russia’s equivalent to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plans to be generating 23% of the massive country’s electrical power with atoms by 2020, and fully a quarter of it ten years later. Clearly, the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history hasn’t made former Soviets the least bit gun shy. Perhaps that’s why they had no qualms about letting a photographer inside their 2.7Gw Smolensk nuclear power plant, 200 miles from Moscow, so he could take pictures of everything from a worker handing out safety helments, above, to the colbalt-blue glow of fuel rods in water. Take a gander. See it before it blows up.
Now, the world don’t move! To the beat of just one drum
What might be right for you, may not be right for some….
To folks familiar with cheesy sitcoms from the late ’70s and early ’80s, the theme music to Diff’rent Strokes is so well-known that merely reading its lyrics, above, not to mention hearing its earnest strains, is enough to trigger soppy memories of the show’s early opening visuals. There, each week, good-hearted millionaire Phillip Drummond (Conrad Bain) would escort his new charges, brothers Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Todd Bridges), above, from a basketball game in the hood, past the wonders of late 20th century New York, to his luxurious apartment building, all in his chaufferred limousine.
Indeed, the gentle innocence and curiosity of children, coupled with the wizened kindness of their doting patron, is what makes UK YouTuber MontyPropps’ “Disturbing Strokes” so unsettling. By switching the spirited soundtrack to a mysterious, mood-laden instrumental, then slightly desaturating the colors in the footage, Propps turns the classic intro into something vaguely hinting at pederasty. By the time Arnold and Willis look up at the towering, phallic structure Drummond calls home, giving only furtive backwards glances as he leads them inside, if nothing else, you’ll believe, as said one poster on Propps’ YouTube channel, that, in film, there is truly no such thing as “incidental music.”
Charlotte, NC public relations consultant Charla Muller had a problem.
Her husband, Brad, was about to turn 40, and she needed to appropriately commemorate the date. She wanted to give him something unique and original, something that nobody else would think of giving him, “something so dramatic and different that Brad would never ever pause to remember what I gave him for his fortieth birthday.”
She thought, and thought, and strategized, and when she finally told her husband what she wanted to give him, “he literally fell over”:
Sex. Every Day. For a Year.
Her story of their experience, 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, tells how gettin’ it on every 24 hours “transformed a marriage.” But as opposed to being a diary of Charla and Brad’s technique, “it’s a book about the ups and downs of married life, trying to have it all (and failing) and figuring out how to get back to the basics of a grounded, faith-based marriage,” Charla says on her web site.
Charla Muller is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, January 16, at 2 pm ET.
Following my conversation with Charla, I’ll also be talking with Jackie Salloum, director of the documentary Slingshot Hip-Hop, right, and Ora Wise, education director / associate producer of the project.
Given the logarithmic escalation over the past three weeks of the ongoing atrocities in the region, I’m thrilled to have these brave activists on my program.
You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
Freelance writer, novelist, and screenwriter Erica Kennedy‘s Facebook group, Feminista’s Advertising Hall of Fame (or Lame?), documents the “best and worst examples of commercial advertising.” In fact, this winner, above, isn’t an ad, as American Apparel rushed to make clear, shortly after the page ran in i-D Magazine back in 2007, but part of that publication’s own outré fashion pages. (You’ve gotta be offensive if a scummy advertiser of half-naked immigrant women like AA doesn’t want anything to do with your editorial.)
Readers who recall my quasi-crusade against VOGUE’s foul LeBron James / Gisele Bundchen cover almost a year ago aren’t surprised at the way racist imagery continues to be subsumed into white High Style, and neither am I. However, upon sight of this photo, I have to admit to a flash of weariness. Like, the need to create this stuff never dies, does it?
How I spent my summer vacation: Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ mugshot
President Obama, right, gave a nice, reasonable answer, of the kind at which he is, arguably, flawless. He cracked a joke or two. He appealed to a sense of fairness that the blindingly white press pool, no doubt, possesses as fair and balanced journalists. He said he didn’t know “what role race played” in Gates’ mistreatment, but then cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” adding, for certainty. “That’s just a fact.”
What he did not say, however, or speak to, was the irony of what I had immediately noticed, soon as word of Gates’ arrest hit the wires: The scholar’s detainment had occurred mere hours before Obama gave his address, right, at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary convention. There, in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in New york City, the nation’s first Black president had hailed the organization’s history and astounding struggle, efforts which, in his own words, had directly led to his being “here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
