Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Come on, Tina….

[via omg!]

Available in XS-XL for $16 ($22 in heather gray), this t-shirt, above, boasts an outline of the U.S. map that, celebrating our recent general election’s outcome, forms the words, “UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”

But given the passionate American outburst over Barack Obama and his ascension, not to mention the upcoming inaugural, perhaps, evoking singer Miki Howard’s exultant 1989 hit, right, that shirt should read “IN LOVE UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.” You know what I mean?

And, in a related-unrelated, here’s a surprise that surprised me: Squint and check the director’s credit on Howard’s video.

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This ferocious Siberian tiger cub, above, Antares, born at the Berlin Zoo, overpowers his prey by waving his widdle paw, overdosing victims on his saccharine adorableness. As loud “Awwwww!“s then fill the air, the people being entranced are stunned and deafened by the volume of this approval, allowing him to select a victim, pounce, attach himself to his vicitim’s shoulder near the jugular vein, as seen below, and cuddle, rendering his target utterly weak and unable to resist. Sigh. Nature is truly cruel.

[via MyModernMet.com]

Is space exploration photography an art or a science?

Geologist Jim Bell, an associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University, lead scientist for the Panoramic Camera (Pancam) color imaging systems on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MERM), and creator of the book Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet, would certainly say that the best space photos seamlessly combine compositional creativity with observational objectivity.

Bell’s Pancams are literally the eyes of the identical Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. (In the artist’s illustration, above, you can see the device perched atop the rover’s high, white, T-shaped mast.)

For example, this composite, panoramic image, below, taken by Opportunity about two years ago over a period of three Martian weeks, is of the Victoria Crater, on Mars’ Meridiani Planum, or meridian plain, near its equator.

It was shot, in pieces, bit by bit, from the Cape Verde promontory on the rim of the half-mile wide crater. (Click on it, or here, for a larger, more detailed view of this amazing planetary feature.) To accommodate these extremely wide shots, some of the gatefolds in Postcards from Mars are three feet wide.

To create such images, the rovers have been operating continuously on the Red Planet’s surface since January 2004. Mars, right, is 150,000,000 miles from Earth—equal to the distance one would cover during a round-trip airplane flight 60 years long.

As such, the 150, literally otherworldy images in Postcards from Mars, fewer than 1/1,000th the total number taken by the crafts, are like vacation photos from a place no human has ever seen with her own eyes. That is, until NASA starts correcting decades of white-manned spaceflight by deeming the first humans to set foot on Mars will be Black females.

Jim Bell is the guest on this encore broadcast of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, December 5, at 2 pm ET.

You can hear his lively and thoughtful 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.

I’m going to guess that at least some of you misplaced your invitations to financial mogul John Paulson’s shindig three weeks ago. (That’s the menu for the event, above.)

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You Negroes have got to stop making up holidays. In this short, author Carleen Brice (Orange Mint and Honey, right), creator of the “National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month,” half-dryly outlines her philosophy; invites white and Asian readers to try “new” Black writers in that happy corner of the bookstore where we’re typically segregated (for our own good, of course); and briefly wrestles with the presumptions of a prospective client, above. There’s even a blog.

While her YouTube’s tone is just a tad too gleefully “post-racial,” quote-unquote-unquote-unquote, for my tastes, Brice’s underlying point is eminently sensible, and, no, white people, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope don’t count.

[via BerniceMcFadden.com]

Turbo Heather is what all the kids want this Christmas, especially now that more and more girls are comfortable playing with powerful “boys'” toys.

“Radio-controlled Southern belles are loose and the RC world will never be the same!” shouts the announcer. Southern culture on the skids, indeed.

Clearly, this “collector’s edition” January 2009 cover—one of two—wasn’t much of a stretch for ESSENCE.

Now, a little somethin’ for the ladies….

[via Hip-Hop Crunch]

I’ve never been a huge Mary J. Blige fan. But I’m utterly moved by, and can’t stop watching, her new Chevy Traverse commercial, above.

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