Entries from May 2009 ↓

Did white women have a rabid response to Asher Roth’s recent April Fool Day’s “remake”, right, of D’Angelo’s 2000 “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”, left?

You know: The kind you’ve seen erupt over and over in Black females since D near-dangled his dingle on MTV. Even more, what’s weirder: That the pallid Roth would choose to mock himself this way, or that D’Angelo has taken nearly a decade to follow up his last album, Voodoo?

[via racialicious]

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?

That, and who’s going to be the first VJ to mashup the track to footage of Brown’s green-hued, “Forever” Wrigley Doublemint Gum commercial? Hey: Download the mp3 of the “Flow So Tight” extended version and make up your own mind. Or your own commercial.

It’s no secret that Katie Couric, above, had some serious problems with the ratings when she took over the CBS Evening News in 2006. For a couple of years, there, her future didn’t look good, and management reportedly started speaking in low tones about pulling the plug on her broadcast.

But that was until she triumphantly body-slammed Republican VP hopeful Sarah Palin in September 2008, with a series of interviews that almost certainly helped nominee John McCain lose the November election, that boosted Couric’s viewers by millions, and that proved she was not to be messed with.

So: Where do you go from there? You go where Hillary Clinton, FOX’s Sean Hannity, CNN’s Kiran Chetry, and The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus have all gone: With Auto-Tune, the so-called “T-Pain/Cher-style” vocal processing technology that’s sweeping the nation.

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Beloved as the Emmy Award-winning Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has been for decades—my sis couldn’t get enough of the show when we were kids—and rightly honored as creator Fred Rogers, above, was in his lifetime—he died in 2003—ya gotta admit that there’s something just a little…odd about his persona.

I mean, think about it: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a show where, ostensibly, kids, unaccompanied by adults, go to the house of a single, middle-aged man, who is there, alone, on his lunch hour.

A guy whose middle name is McFeely.

That Rogers’ intentions were, of course, so honorable only makes writer/scholar/media critic/co-sponsor of my recent Iowa lecture Kembrew McLeod‘s disassembly of the TV host’s airy monologues just that more wicked. By isolating Rogers’ trademark, singsong platitudes (“I’m glad you’re my friend…I like you very much”), and adhering them to droning drum tracks, a kind of loopy hypnosis takes over…certainly Rogers’ nefarious intent. It’s long (9:15), but worth staying with to the final utterance.

Just when you thought that the dreamlike logic of white supremacy couldn’t produce any further absurdities, the Caucasians drag another one out of the cornfield: According to the Associated Press, a study, conducted by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, to be published in the September edition of the journal, Psychological Science, has concluded that

Black Fortune 500 CEOs with a “babyface” appearance are more likely to lead companies with higher revenues and prestige than Black CEOs who look more mature, an upcoming study says.

In contrast with research showing that white executives are hindered by babyface characteristics, a disarming appearance can help Black CEOs by counteracting the stigma that Black men are threatening….

As the AP notes,

A babyface is characterized by combinations of attributes, including a round face, full cheeks, larger forehead, small nose, large ears and full lips, the study says.

You know: The kind of visage typified by folks like American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, above; E. Stanley O’Neal, right, former CEO of Merrill Lynch; almost everybody in this 2005 list of Black CEOs; or by this famed board chairman, after the jump:

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I’ve just gotta shout out actor Kim Fields, above. She’s perhaps best known for playing “Tootie,” in the popular 1970s TV show, The Facts of Life.

She turned 40, beautifully, yesterday, May 12th.

Happy birthday, gurl!

What really comes through in O.J. Simpson’s 1970s commercials for Hertz is how much charm and charisma he possessed, and how much the camera loved him. It’s really easy to see, even apart from his much-heralded performances on the football field, why he was a natural, and extremely popular, spokesperson for the brand.

That O.J. Simpson was ever beloved, of course, may certainly be a revelation for lots of young people, many of whom are not even old enough to remember to remember his 1994-95 murder case and trial, not to mention his TV spots or NFL triumphs. Now, of course, Simpson couldn’t even get an endorsement from a knife company, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t necessarily believe he killed his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman in June ’94. But what do I know?

Thanks to a heads-up from one of my readers, billy aka mr_spacials, I’ve got some good news, and some bad news, for you:

The good news is that, if you’ve got musical skills, you may get to use them and win cash prizes in a brand new contest, above.

The bad news is that you have to listen to talking head John Tesh’s flat, flavorless “rapping,” quote-unquote, to get the details.

Apparently, the Danish didn’t want to go with the U.S.’s apples-and-oranges cover graphic, right, when they published their cracked yolk version, above, of economist Steven Levitt’s and journalist Stephen J. Dubner’s 2005 smash, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Levitt and Dubner’s treatise on the economics of drug dealing, sumo wrestler cheating, and the effects of abortion on crime has sold over 3 million copies to-date. That kind of worldwide success, you think, would move other countries to tow the line, stay with what works, and, from the look of these other versions, most did. Not the Danes, though…or the British, for that matter, who avoided foodstuffs altogether for both the hardcover and paperback versions of the book.

Why? Hopefully Levitt/Dubner will explain it in their upcoming text, SuperFreakonomics. I kid you not.

“Beer goggles”—sexual judgement impaired by booze—is the excuse millions will be pushing this weekend, in order to explain why the eager hottie they eagerly shagged the night before looks like blechh in the golden morning’s light.

Well, if that’s your steez, why not just do you? “Beergoggles” are by Chicago-based custom eyeglasses maker Scott Urban of Urban Spectacles. They’re crafted out of spent containers of actual ale. That’s them to the right, and perched delicately on the suds-sucking lovely, above.

Explains Urban,

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