I'm finding that a lot of R&B singing grates on my nerves the last, oh, 15 years or so. Some of that, I'll admit up front, is my middle-aged "these-kids-today..." sort of thing. But a lot has to do with the infuriating overuse of something that, properly used, can be a valuable part of a good singer's tool chest; melisma.
Melisma is singing more than one note during one syllable of a lyric. For example, the first word of the National Anthem ("Oh...") has two descending notes: that's Melisma. The use of melisma in much of American pop music is due to the forms of music from which it is derived, especially black Gospel music.
Reading this article in USA Today, my jaw just dropped:
More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.
43,000 disabled troops deployed to War Zones against medical advice. Awesome. The article doesn't say how many of those 43000 were subsequently killed or further injured; even one of these disabled troopers dying because he couldn't run fast enough to get to cover in time, is something so horrible I can't quite get myself to contemplate it.
Dana Goldstein muses on "helicopter" (i.e., overprotective) parents over at the Blog at The American Prospect. The particular "offense" a parent committed was to let her 9 year old ride the New York subway a few blocks from the Upper East Side to the Midtown West neighborhoods in Manhattan, for which she has received criticism for "neglecting" her child.
Firstly, I think not letting your child ride the subway between two safe neighborhoods in Manhattan could be argued to be "neglecting" to teach him to be autonomous and independent...but that argument would also be basically ridiculous, because it cheapens the meaning of "child neglect." What's lost is any sense of perspective - if whether or not your child rides the subway alone constitutes "child neglect," what would describe, say, selling your child into prostitution? Or less drastically, what would describe my own experience of going to my sixth grade class with blood in my hair from being thrown across the room by my raging father?
About 10 years ago, I used to work with a woman named Callie, who was from New Zealand. She was about as apolitical as they come - I don’t think she’d ever voted in her life, in either New Zealand or the US.
We were sitting around the office one evening with a couple of beers, shooting the breeze one evening after a long, hectic day taking care of the last of the seasonal inventory, and I asked her, "What was the first thing you noticed about America when you arrived here?"
She sort of paused, as if to judge my possible reactions to what she was about to say, and then said, "Well...everywhere you go here, you’re swimming in propaganda."
What’s missing from a lot of discussions white people have about the problems that beset black America, is any sense of the concrete, complex humanity of the people being discussed.
There are spiritual treasures heaped in our ghettos among the poverty and violence, and one of the tragic facts of our culture is that the vast majority of whites have absolutely no clue about the riches to be found there.
"Blackpeopleintheghetto" is a glib abstraction, a sort of quick mental categorization, which does not bear virtually any relationship to the people who were my neighbors in Richmond, California. For those who know the area, I grew up almost exactly between the Kennedy Manor and Easter Hill housing projects, in a solidly working-class black neighborhood, in the 1960s and into the 1970s - we were the only white family in the neighborhood. (We moved in 1976, to a town called Benicia - kind of like Mayberry RFD, only with Californian rather than Southern accents.)
Some of the most noble and Godly people I have ever been blessed to know lived in that neighborhood. Most of the parents in the ‘hood had moved in the 1940s to Richmond to get War work in the shipyard (building liberty ships mostly).
Peak Oil is a particular concern of mine, but today it occurred to me that there is an upside: car dealers will, sooner or later, be a thing of the past. I cannot adequately describe the bitterness with which I hate car dealers.
I'm in the market for a used car - I'd really like a Toyota Corolla, '03 or newer (any Bay Area Kossacks want to sell me their car?) so I go into the local Toyota dealership, motivated to buy and ready to bargain.
A sales associate named Jimmy, maybe 20 years old, shows me a Corolla I'm interested in: 2003, LE model, previously owned by a non-smoker, good condition. I say, "let's go sit and talk." and we go sit at the table in the showroom where little old ladies get fleeced. "Looks interesting. What do you want for it?" I ask.
"$11,500, but we'll entertain any reasonable offer," sales associate tells me.
I look at him like, nice try, and tell him, "Go tell your boss I'll give him $8,500 for the car, cash."
So, Young Hungry Sales Associate goes and gets his boss, who turns out to be an extremely oily guy with silver hair dressed like he's just come off the golf links at the country club.
There was a difference between the constant replaying of the Wright videos on the major cable news outlets. On Fox, they were intended not only as fodder for sensationalism (as they mostly were on MSNBC and CNN), but also to advance the Movement Conservative agenda, which is Fox News’ purpose as a network. Tear down Obama to make him more beatable in November.
Fox (and wider, movement conservatism generally) almost always uses signifiers of the cultural and political conflicts of the 1960s when they are trying to discredit the political left in general, and Democrats in particular.
Here's the thing: Hillary seems to be trying to get the nomination by attempting, through scorched-earth tactics, to destroy the reputation of a fellow Democrat, or at least so severely damage his General Election chances that the super delegates overturn the pledged delegate results at the convention.
IF she succeeds in this (a big 'if' admittedly), I will be torn in November: Do I reward her Machiavellian destruction of Obama by voting for her, thus sending the message that it's OK to use Rovian tactics as long as you're a Democrat? Or, do I sit out the election (I won't vote for McCain) and risk 4 more years of disaster?
To think I once defended the Clintons. My Nose is getting really raw from holding it while I vote.
If oil gets anywhere near $200 per barrel as predicted by Goldman Sachs, our current oil-driven lifestyle will be impossible - not inconvenienced, not "more difficult," but as a matter of practical economics, impossible.
$200-a-barrel oil means gasoline will cost around 8 bucks a gallon. Suburb dwellers with 30-mile-each-way commutes will have 20 dollar-a-day gasoline bills, and that's assuming they drive an economy car. If they drive an SUV, more like 50 bucks a day.
"Well, they can take public transit," you counter?
I think large corporations have too much power, and our government ought to be a counterbalance to this.
I think the wealthy are under-taxed, and that this goes a long way in explaining the widening disparity between the wealthiest few percent and everyone else.
I think strong unions are a good idea, as another way of balancing out the inordinate influence of "malefactors of great wealth." I think "right to work" (that is, anti-union) laws ought to be abolished, and strong card-check legislation is needed at the national level. (Side note: I’d love to see legislation that specifically forces Walmart to accept full unionization - just shove it down the Walton family’s throat...)
It's time for a nice, sensible liberal to be elected to the Presidency - and we need many more level-headed liberal Democrats to be elected to Congress to help him restore some common-sense,realisticsolutions to America's challenges. I believe the country has had enough of Right-Wing Extremism, and is ready to reject the divisive, reactionary ideologues of conservatism.
GW Bush, and his card-carrying, conservative minions, have been an absolute disaster for the country. Almost every member of his administration is a known authoritarian conservative, from Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice's war-loving foreign policy disasters, to FEMA's poor-hating neglect of New Orleans.
The following ad is, in my humble opinion, the worst campaign ad ever run by a major campaign for any office, in the history of the United States. This sets some sort of record for out-of-touch cluelessness:
Thanks to Zell Miller, there is a rule to deal with Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman's endorsement of Republican John McCain disqualifies him as a super-delegate to the Democratic National Convention under what is informally known as the Zell Miller rule, according to Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo.
Miller, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, not only endorsed Republican George Bush four years ago, but he delivered a vitriolic attack on Democrat John Kerry at the Republican National Convention.
This is great news - not that I was particularly worried about a Lieberman vote at the convention. It's more that this is hopefully the first step (assuming a Democratic gain in the senate of any size in November) towards the Democratic Party kicking Lieberman to the curb - more exactly, ratifying Lieberman's decision to kick the party to the curb. Bye Bye, committee assignments. Joe, we hardly knew ye.
There was once a rich man - let’s call him "Dives" just for fun - who feasted every night, and wore fine clothes and lived on a large estate. On an adjacent estate there lived a poor beggar - just for fun, let’s call him "Juan Lazarus" - whose master was having a rough time, due to a combination of bad luck, some bad business decisions, and the fact that his wealthy neighbor got preferential treatment at the markets where he sold his estate’s goods.
Because Juan’s family was suffering greatly, he decided to go to Dives’ estate and seek work there.
There are things you can do to persuade me to support [Candidate's Name] in the upcoming primaries, and there are things you can do that will make it less likely that I will support [Candidate's Name].
I value the opinions of my fellow Kossaks, and the things I read here will carry a great deal of weight as I go to the booth and pull the lever in the upcoming Primary.
I'll start with the things I find most persuasive.
I have very little patience for apologists for war, especially of the weak-kneed, unimaginative, "well, it's a fallen world, and so war is as inevitable as the dawn..." sort. I'm not an absolute pacifist, in the sense that I suppose that I could conjure a situation where war is necessary: I just think of pacifism as far and away the higher, more spiritually enlightened way of resolving disputes.
Pacifism, to me, does not mean passivity or quietism in the face of evil - it means resisting evil through means other than violence.
Simple: In 2000, he was riding the crest of the longest economic boom in the history of the United States. The wars that the Clinton administration had gotten the US into had all been victorious, with US casualties well under 100.
Alan Greenspan was worried about the risks to the economy of paying off the entire national debt too soon, for cryin' out loud. A looming question in the next few years was: "If we've paid off the entire national debt, what do we do with the money when there's a surplus? Because, you know, there's surpluses 'as far as the eye can see.'?"
