Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

I made a boo-boo: My NONFICTION conversation with Judith Matloff (Home Girl: Buliding a Dream House on a Lawless Block) does not air today, but will broadcast on a future date.

I’ll try and keep these to a minimum, folks.

Keepin’ it real: The late Angel Pantoja Medina, left, with family

I tend to avoid “Strange, But True” type news stories on MEDIA ASSASSIN, but let’s just say that this one made me stand up in my seat.

According to The Associated Press, Angel Pantoja Medina of Puerto Rico, had always told his brother, Carlos, that, when he died,

he wanted to be upright for his own wake: “He wanted to be happy, standing.”

So, when, sadly, the young man’s body was found last Friday under a San Juan bridge,

A funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the corpse of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina standing upright for his three-day wake.

Dressed in a Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses, Pantoja was mourned by relatives while propped upright in his mother’s living room.

Continue reading →

Long before its scheduled March 2009 release, Resident Evil 5 (RE5), the next installment in the immensely popular and influential survival-horror videogame series, started coughing up blood…and controversy: In the narrative, a white protagonist, Chris Redfield, sets down in what appears to be an African or Caribbean country decimated by a mutant “supervirus.” Suddenly, freshly dead villagers start to revive as bloodthirsty zombies, and Redfield must slaughter them in hordes to stay alive, a la this scene, below, from the game trailer.

Perhaps Newsweek‘s gaming critic, N’Gai Croal, giving pointed regard to the clip’s images, with their precedents in racist visual history, said it most succinctly in an excellent MTV Online interview: “Clearly no one Black worked on this game.”

Continue reading →

Michael Phelps, golden boy: Sports Illustrated‘s latest cover

Swimmer Michael Phelps’s devastating performances at the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics are literally the stuff of legend, now, with that sport’s meets done. As raves for his outstanding feats continue to pour in—eight gold medals in China, more than any other athlete ever at one Olympics, and fourteen golds total, when adding in his six Athens 2004 wins—the question is being raised everywhere that sports is debated: Is Michael Phelps the greatest Olympian ever?

Continue reading →

I’m not a CSI fan, but I recognize the significance of this: Laurence Fishburne is about to stuff shut the hole being left in the CBS series by departing star, William Petersen, below.

Continue reading →

Miss Dynamite: LaRhonda Petitt easily passes the
“Looks Like Her Daddy” test

As the Washington Post archly puts it, “There was no off switch on the ‘Sex Machine.'” So, rightly, upon legendary musician James Brown’s Christmas 2006 death, a lot of his far-strewn kids started coming home…with their hands out for a piece of the Hardest [Working] Man in Show Business’s estate.

Continue reading →

When inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a piece of untreated rubber on a hot stove and “discovered” vulcanization (“Mesoamericans” had mastered the process centuries earlier), he probably never dreamed that, over 140 years later, the notion of burning rubber would lead to a #1 R&B smash for the GAP Band. Yet, alas.

Merci to hyper-cool Digital Femme Cheryl Lynn for linking to the video, which I’d never seen, despite the track being fundamental as 11-dimensional strings when it came to me getting through senior year at Freeport High School. Most of all, though, Lynn argues that “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” should be cited as “Reason #525 why Rock Band needs a Funk Band Expansion Pack.” To which I say, hear, hear.

Look up “GAP Band” on Wikipedia, and you’ll see “Not to be confused with band gap,” beneath the headline.

“Band gap”?? I took the bait:

In solid state physics and related applied fields, the band gap, also called an energy gap or stop band, is a region where a particle or quasiparticle is forbidden from propagating. For insulators and semiconductors, the band gap generally refers to the energy difference between the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band.

Or:

Thank you for your time!

A super-special shout-out to the people at my favorite free daily, METRO, for their tip-of-the-hat to MEDIA ASSASSIN in the paper’s “Voices: Blogarithms: A look at the best of the blogs” section this past Thursday, right. (The piece ran in their NY, Boston, and Philadelphia editions.) I absolutely was not expecting the coverage, or the reproduction of my recent “Mackin’ On-the-Go” post. So, imagine my surprise when picking up the paper to search its nonexistent movie listings. I was hit with a sudden, “That Looks Familiar…Oh, WOW!” slightly-out-of-body experience. Wonderful, just wonderful to receive all of the support we’ve gotten. Thank you, METRO, so much for including us in your oft-wry, smartly-written publication.

I bought MAD magazine‘s hilarious Barack Obama parody on sight yesterday, only $4.99 cheap! HuffPo ran the story, but my question is the same one I had when I saw the hacked artwork documenting Obama’s illegal wiretaps vote: Who’s gonna try swingin’ a placard-sized version of this at the Democratic National Convention, next month?