Good Morning New York

50 shots fired. Let's really think about that for a minute. 50 SHOTS. I'm stunned right now. Our flawless justice system prevails again.


link via Gothamist

This is what he gets for slave-like devotion...

Kind of following this Harry Potter plagiarism case for two reasons:

1. I love the books and like my dog, my ears perk up whenever anything Potter is mentioned in the news.
2. I am torn between J.K. Rowling keeping the integrity of her name and her work, but I also don't get why a billionaire feels the need to trample the people who made her so rich in the first place.

And after reading about the guy she's suing I feel even worse for him than I did before. After testimony in court yesterday, he got the derivation of the charm "alohomora" wrong (yes, dork flag is rising as I type) and Rowling, with a cold icy British glare I imagine, corrected him. Instead of slumping in the stands dejected, he gets very excited that he found another Potter fact to store in his huge brain, despite the fact that the woman is suing his ass. And this was after he cried in court.
Awww...nerds are sweet, have a heart J.K.

link via Gothamist

At the end of the day, it's just music

Alicia Keys apparently has given some kind of an interview where she says gangsta rap doesn't exist and that it was made up to get Black people to kill each other. I kind of get what she is saying but it seems kind of hypocritical to comment on violence in our communities when she was in the extremely violent (and god awfully bad) movie, Smokin Aces. Young impressionable black kids are just as likely to emulate her bounty hunter character as they are NWA or Tupac or Biggie. It's not about a vast government conspiracy, it's about idol worship.

Rappers like Tupac fed off of their own hype as gangsta rappers and that is why they are no longer with us. As far as them being Black leaders...eh, that might be stretching it a bit. Icons certainly, I don't know about leaders. Keys should know better than anyone that music is a business and when something is hot, record execs will take it and run with it.That's not just the government's fault, it's the entertainment industry. Violence and the way our country perpetuates it is the root of the problem, not music. Case in point, this unfortunate occurrence back in the early nineties: (don't act like you don't remember when MC Hammer went gangsta for like a week...)











link via AP
image via tbn networks

Together Forever

4:18 on the B train...my Ipod on shuffle, got all A.I. on me and totally rickrolled me today. Still don't know what the whole Rick Astley as object of comic entertainment thing is about but hey, I can roll (no pun intended) with some things. Anyway, I have had an intense nostalgic love for his two best known songs for years...when my sister was about 8 or 9 she got a Casio keyboard for Christmas. The demo song was not "Never gonna give you up" but "Together Forever", which is basically the same song with some minor adjustments but I still love it. Wait a minute, does that mean we were the first ever to be in on the joke, when Rick Astley was actually still famous? And how should I feel right now admitting that I consciously downloaded two Rick Astley songs to my ipod two years ago? Damn Proud, that's how.

It's better now

Some might think this to be blasphemy in its most perverse form:

I watched The Way We Were last night...for the first time.

I have to say...can I please be put in a time machine and transported into Robert Redford's arms circa 1973? I'm just saying. Barbra is fabulous and everything but god-damn Hubble!

And her nails bothered me...you don't really see nails like that unless you're hanging outside a Korean nail shop Sat. before church or down south before an outdoor crunk concert.

Some other movies that I have only recently seen for the first time for whatever reason:

Pretty Woman- about 2 years ago
When Harry Met Sally- last year
Love Story- a few months ago (I was sick, it was on Starz)

Only sensing a little bit of a pattern here....my only regret is that watching it the second and third times will not be nearly as satisfying...ok, twenty-ninth and thirtieth times.

A Strange and Interesting Phenomenon

Snagged the title of this post from one of my all time favorite movies...just pondering why is it that engaging in one form of intense activity seemingly cancels out the other one? In my case it's writing. In less than a month, I have turned out two finished short screenplays and am down and dirty in the middle of a feature length. It's fairly intense, as I will find myself writing for hours but physically, no time has gone by. Kind of like being drunk. Anyway, the point is, aside from being ravaged with illness earlier this month, this is the first thing I have posted in a long time because while I think nothing of flipping open the Macbook and powering up Movie Magic (I can be a shameless little plugger sometimes) I find myself actually having to force myself to blog, which up until a month ago, I have been fairly dedicated to. I hate the word "blog" by the way. Why do we have to dumb ourselves down by abbreviating everything? I was kind of inexplicably mad when McDonald's decided to change their name to Mickey D's (little things get me fired up) but was incensed when the National Geographic Channel went for the catchy: "Nat Geo" No. It is not clever, it is not hip. It's actually pretty stupid and unnecessary, ruining great memories I had of watching National Geographic on TBS as a kid before I went to bed...oh well. Yeah, so what was I talking about? Oh yeah. writing...