I was into rap and hip hop in the early 90s. Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, Ice-T, KRS-1, even some Doug E. Fresh and Me Phi Me. I dug the sound and the variety and the message. That just all changed and in the last 10 years or so it all seems to suck to me. Where are you Chuck D? Well, I came across the answer:

“The Edutainment Hip Hop Show” on WUOT on Saturday nights 9-Midnight. “The Urban Jungle” after that is damn good too…

If you lost interest in hip hop in the mid-90’s, give it a listen, if you didn’t give it a listen before. It is a great show that keeps you groovin’ all night.

I needed a new phone and my provider said I could sign a new contract and get a huge savings. I like my Motorola and got one of THOS RAZR PHONS. An MP3 playing device with no headphones. Sure. Makes sense to me. I love music with no bass…

 I am not all up in my phones business. I just require a calendar, alarm clock, phone, you know, the basics. The one bling I gots to havs is mah ringtone. Um, well, it’s the sound of a real Southern Bell Princess rotary from 1978. That’s a sound that will cut through the din of 12 people at Cancun’s drinkin’ $1.99 Margaritas and smoking like Lil Kim never will, beeyatch!

So I went to the iTubernet to find My Precious. Wow. Things have changed in the years since my last phone needed The Tone. The top 10-20 sites that came up on Google don’t sell you ringtones, they are scam sites. They want you to put in your mobile number and they send you a text message. In the small print they tell you that doing so signs you up for a subscription and probably hits you with some one time charge. Yikes!

Apparently selling ringtones is not the way to make money. Scamming idiots into subscriptions is. So, I am here to warn you. Actually, to get you to tell your kids about it. Do not use these damnable sites. Do not enter your mobile number.

My Precious still eludes me. I found the right sound, but the length of the ring and spacing between the rings is all wrong. Defintely not a SB Princess ‘78. If you have a map to My Precious, I’d love to have it. And if you know how to hack my RAZR so I can load it up with free ripped tunez, please show.

I have a sister who is a chronic email forwarder. You probably have a forwarder too. You get an email that is:

Subject: Fwd: Fw: FW: Something!

And all the text is crazy indented and screwed up and there are headers with a hundred email addresses you must work through.

Or, it is an attachment, of an attachment of an attachment of an email that is a dead link about 50% of the time.

I have blocked email from my sister. I hate that crap.

Now, I get it at my job. From the CEO no-less. I can’t decide if I should correct his emails or not. Here is the latest, with all the screwed up text fixed: 

NO GAS…On May 15th 2007
Body: Don’t pump gas on may 15th
Body: ..in April 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices.  Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.

On May 15th 2007, all internet users are to not go to a gas station inprotest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members curren tly on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up.

If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000, 000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the Middle Eastern oil industry for at least one day.

If you agree (which I cant see why you wouldn’t) resend this to all your contact list. With it saying, ”Don’t pump gas on May 15th”

And here is the easy to find website to put an end to it that no one ever seems to search for before they forward these things.

HOX0Rd

Please, before you forward another crazy ass statement or warning or other hot topic that was forwarded to you by some unknown source, go to Google and search for a bit of the text or the title and the word “hoax”.

Maybe it is an aspect of the litigious society, or maybe it is a notion that all problems are solvable. Maybe it is pansy ass hand holding and a Baby Boomer golden tit ideal of protecting children from any sort of negative anything. Whatever the motivations, let us please stop with Blaming and Fixing.

The news is geared toward trying to pin blame on all sorts of people. Not the perpetrator usually, but their parents, police, school officials, you name it. And then all sorts of Baby Boomers begin trying to prevent the incident from ever happening again. As though they could. They spend millions putting fences around Interstate overpasses so they can imagine no one can throw a rock off it any longer. They put a rent-a-cop with a gun in every school. They make us all take off our shoes and toss our banana creme pies in the trash at the airports. Worthless. The only value is for some smug Baby Boomer to feel like they “did something” and “if it saves one life, it’s worth it.” Bullshit. I’d rather let that one person die than make 350 million people take off their shoes. And I’d rather spend that $100,000 a year on education than a hall monitor with a gun. It is not worth it. Sure, if it is your kid harmed it is worth it, but it isn’t your kid. It isn’t anyone’s kid. It never happens. But that cop makes them imagine they have stopped it. They feel like they are doing something.

If only we just spent the money on Baby Boomers’ therapy bills instead. Stop with the over-protective crap! You are raising a nation of cry-babies and Momma’s-boys! Now repeat after me:

“Shit happens.”

Try fixing it with toilet paper instead of a butt plug. And keep your damn butt plug away from my asshole Senator! And stop eating different foods. It still stinks. Deal. Idiot.

I was looking around for Knoxville blogs and came across this post. It was just too damn perfect not to share. All you locals can relate:

So one of my bitches (yeah Allison I’m talking about you) moved with her hubs to Los Angeles so as to cozy a little closer to what the Pacific Coast has to offer. The first time I spoke to her after the big move, she was telling me how a vast majority of the working class in LA have no work ethic at all. Everyone is working at Starbucks until they get their big break, or working at the call center until they get their “show.” Nobody just worked anywhere because they liked it or because they liked dealing with the public or because they might learn a little something about life and happiness after putting in a day’s hard work. Thus jobs are disposable and I have to imagine that customer service and morale in general are rock bottom there. I thought about it a lot and thought about how I have been at the same job for 2 years. I hate it but can find some merit in what I do. I don’t love my job, but I like it and I love my co-workers. It is hard to imagine leaving and even harder for me to imagine how a person could go into an employment situation thinking that in one week they might quit. I simply could not understand or imagine life in LA. That all changed Sunday…  

My boyfriend and I took a trip to our local used book warehouse, McKay’s bookstore, to find some literature. We of course found the perfect books at the perfect price ($2 yo) and headed to the cashier to pay. Lo and behold, within 20 seconds I was transported from Knoxville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, California. I was faced with the whiniest, rudest bunch of wanna-be artist, writers, actors, comedians, musicians and maybe even some trapeze artists who would obviously rather sit around and seem self-important than do their job and check me and my $2 book out. Checking out at this store is like taking a much-needed crap, it starts uncomfortbly gets down-right painful but is such a relief when it is over. You take the book up to the counter, the cashier (usually wearing some variety of either leather or flannel and smelling a bit more than faintly of cigarette smoke and patcholi) looks at your selections with a critical eye and most likely makes a scoffing sound. If you’re really constipated for a bad experience, they will even make comment on your selection.For example, I once bought a Radiohead Cd and I was informed, “…understanding their music is something that so few lucky souls can do.” The cashier than asked me if I felt lucky then smirked, “ Didn’t think so…” Once I ventured to buy North by Northwest on DVD and was informed that DVD’s were the bastardization of the movie culture and this particularly surly salesperson bets that I also prefer CDs to vinyl.

All I have to say for ye employees of Mckay’s, be ye sick or weary of the working world, WE ALL HAVE TO HAVE REAL JOBS! You are in Knoxville and will probably never have a recording contract or a movie deal or an exhibit and you will probably never be able to support yourself with your art. Don’t stop trying, for goodness sake, but do stop acting like I am the bitch that is making you work at McKay’s instead of writing your best seller. And if checking me out makes you that unhappy…GET ANOTHER JOB!

Or just move to LA….they will love you there

When I pulled into the West High School parking lot to let my daughter out this morning, there was a wrecked car in front of  the door as a display for the cops’ D.A.R.E. presentation or something. To emphasize their point, the police had thoughfully filled the wrecked car with beer and cigarettes. Full cans of beer and new packs of smokes. Which, of course, were promptly stolen. Hopefully the kids were sober by the time they drove home from school that day…

In this discussion of family, I will tell about a part of mine. Not to tell about my family as much as to tell a story of what this new technology is doing to parts of America.

My sister got a call from my aunt at the law office she works for. My aunt and uncle are in a very rural farm area of Tennessee and he is the pastor of a small Baptist church. If I told you the sort of stuff that goes on in his church you’d think I was making it up. Not snake handling crazy, but, yeah, you’d be freaked out if you went there. This is the uncle who, during a wedding he was officiating, stopped to make an altar call in case anyone wanted to accept Jesus as their Savior first. So, anyway, my aunt calls my sister in a terrible panic. My uncle was in mortal fear that he was going to lose his church. So much so, that he had written a suicide note. She wanted a lawyer to do something.

What that something is, we are still not sure.

The crisis is something like this. One of the guys who plays in the church band, has a rock and roll band on the side. Nothing like Super Satanic Metal Death stuff, just a decent rock band. And they have a MySpace page. And people are posting comments on this page and using foul language, and saying crude things like “You guys &^%#& rock!” This is happening out there on the Internets.

So, my uncle is in desperation and some sort of legal action must be taken and no one knows what to do and he may just have to kill himself about it. It’s just that desperate a situation.

Really.

Knob Lick

Bone Lick Circle

Big Bone Lick State Park

Beaver Bottom

Beaver

Bong Recreation Area

Pussy

Orgy

Or just stay home…

Do you have a floppy drive? No? When was the last time you used a floppy? My daughter used floppies on occasion to get work from home to school, but now she is using a thumb drive. Most of us see a floppy disk as a leftover from the computer days of yesteryear. And in computer days, yesteryear comes pretty quick.

So, with the floppy quickly becoming as remote as the 5.25 inch floppy, or cassette loader to us, why is a floppy the icon for “Saving” on so many pieces of software? And will it continue on until the only floppies are in museums?

This is already happening in another common, but overlooked place: you car dashboard. Do you have an ashtray in your car? Lighter? No? But I bet you have a cell phone charger and it has a plug on it that is the size of a cucumber. Why? Because it fits the cigarette lighter hole that is still there even though no one uses a cigarette lighter in the car or even has an ashtray! That big ol’ hole will likely remain in your dash for decades. In 50 years, no one on Earth will smoke and we’ll have hover craft to zip around in running on cold fusion and there will still be a huge hole in the dash we plug our devices into and no one will know why.

Updating my earlier post, here is a link to the news on Live365. If you have not listened to Live365 before, you should. There is an incredible diversity there. This is what the Internet should be. A place for every type of musical interest. You can DJ for $30 a month or so and you can listen for free. If this new law goes into effect, probably 98% of these stations will disappear and the whole site will likely go with it. That’s a disgusting loss. Imagine if you only had one TV station, or one on-air radio station to listen to. That station only played Fergie and Justin and Pink. That’s what is about to happen. Please take a minute to add your voice for musical diversity.