Kanye @ the Epicensor

Back in pre-'Late Registration' 2005, Kanye West almost-apologized for using "the n-word" — henceforth "neighbor,"[1] because I feel stupid typing "the n-word" — in his music by arguing that not using it when dialect so demands just distracts from his message. Yet, judging from the video for (ironically enough) "Can't Tell Me Nothin'," he's capitulated to the current angst over the word "ho." Specifically his third verse has the lines:

How he move in room full of nos
How he stay faithful in a room full of hoes?

Except you won't hear the "hoes" in the official video@≈-1:46[2].

What's really interesting to me is, @≈-0:27 you can hear "neighbor" said very clearly by Young Jeezy.[3] So, basically, Kanye was willing to put the 'neighbor' on the internet and on iTunes (for Free Ninety Nine), but balked at "ho"? I'm too shocked to really evaluate this decision, and what it says about the apparently zero-sum game that is Women v Black People.

What's really meta-interesting to me is: I was going to mention this last week but I couldn't find time, and had sort of assumed somebody else would. I actually came to the ol' blogspot to write something on the pomp-pomo-sity of Kanye sampling a Daft Punk song that was sampling Edward Birdsong, but I was beaten by over a week and nevertheless still felt the urge to write. Luckily, it turns out that nobody else seems as obsessed with music self-censorship as I.[4] No doubt this is derived from my adolescent affection for DMX's ad libs, but that's a story for another time. A proper grad student would actually want to expound[5] on any of these points, but that's because proper grad students write theses.

[1] How did I manage to never write a paper on Lisa Lampanelli?
[2] The mixtape version proves "hos" is indeed the censored word. Also, when will Google add its link-within-a-video feature to YouTube?
[3] Jeezy/T.I./DJ Toomp's "I Got Money" may or may not be the sample upon which "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" is based, which would open the shortest song-to-sample window I've seen since Kanye sampled Alicia Keys's "If Ain't Got You" in order to remix it. How I love recursive loops.
[4] See, again, my Foucauldian analysis of 'I Wanna [Fsck] You.'
[5] To think, had I written this when the blog-iron was hot, I could have beaten Breihan (chronologically, of course — never content-wise)

LeBron James ♥s Unicorns

Thanks to my supposedly-professional interest in pictures, I've taken to scouring delimages, a site that indexes graphics based on del.icio.us[1] tags. It's not the first time I developed an affinity for an image-aggregator; I've spent far too many hours of my life playing around on decontextualized LiveJournal image generators. What makes delimages different is[2] two things:

α) Since del.icio.us is already a link-list — albeit one created by people and not robots — and is automatically integrated with fellow-Yahoo! Brand Flickr[3], delimages is a third-order-aggregation. Pump them all through some Pipes and you'll have constructed one fancy echo-chamber. As is, I'm solidly a part of the Google Ecosystem, so I'm fine with just delimages, but the recursive possibilities certainly amuse me.

β) "venilla_pdy" has a Russel's Teapot comic that mentions unicorns being in Numbers 22:23. I checked the King James Bible and, apparently, unicorns get mentioned nine times. Near as I can tell this is one translation of the Hebrew "re'em"/"rimu" which might refer to an ox, or something. Frankly, I'm a fan of cryptozoological bestiaries, so, sure, maybe most unicorns are sideways oryxes, maybe mermaids are manatees, maybe dragons are just rationalizations of dinosaur bones, but wouldn't life be grander if they were real? They don't have to have magical powers or anything; I may be silly but I'm not crazy.

[1] I can't decide if not knowing what del.icio.us is makes this entry more interesting or more opaque.
[2] "are"? Can "what" be plural?
[3] There's some question whether Flickr is the biggest photo site or not. Comscore says it has the biggest unique audience. Hitwise says it's 3rd in hits. Yahoo! Photos says Yahoo! Photos is "the largest," but can we really trust them? Okay, I'm giving myself a Oh-Wait-I'm-Not-a-Real-N3RD headache with all this website-traffic-metric talk. @_@

Biting the Onion

Let the record show that I am not a 'Family Guy' hater. At the very least, it has the most interestingly named creative staff of any American TV show. Case in point: tonight's episode, written by "a.bo." That's my favorite non-nom de plume since "Jennifer 8 Lee"[1].

Unfortunately a.bo also seems to be kinda a copycat. The following joke about women being unable to serve as politicians because they'll be too busy visiting their Aunt Flo is a lot like "Rich Durban"'s quote in this Onion article.

It's possible that:
1) a.bo has never read the article
2) In shades of 'Studio 60'[2], a.bo actually wrote the original article. A similar thing happened when Mike Henry got his "Kicked in the Nuts" character on an episode in 2005.[3]
3) There are a gajillion other bloggers making the exact same connection right now (my housemate might be one of them, since we both caught the similarity).

Maybe one of them can make sense of all of this, because I would rather finish my game of imaginary baseball. Go fake RedSox!

[1]Link chosen solely for irony
[2]Whoever made this graph is inspiring me to make more charts. p_^
[3]That doesn't explain away these, though...

Wii Users Smell Nice

It turns out I was wrong: most Wii-voters (51.5%) wear perfume or cologne. For women this rate is 64.4% and for men it is 46.6%. What this shows is that the vast majority of Wii-voters (≈72.5) are men[1] and a little under half of these men are emasculated dandies. Nice job proving the haters wrong, guys.

Honestly, I'm just bitter that I've guessed incorrectly on 5 of the last 7 polls. Apparently buses, doppelgängers, coffee shops (as places to read) and — global poll alert! — heat aren't nearly as popular as I thought. With the global poll, generally hot countries didn't like heat and cold countries didn't like the cold[3]. The grass is always greener...

As a check, I looked at the global Wiilectorate's sex ratio, and men are once again the vast majority (≈70.8%[2]). Learning this mitigates my prognosticatory pessimism, as does the hilariously low prediction success rate of my fellow amateur statisticians (40.3%).

The current crop of questions includes: "Have you weighed yourself in the last month?" and "Is there such a thing as a soul mate?" on which I am predicting "No" for the former and "Yes" for the latter. Presumably Wii-men are just romantic enough to believe in an ineffable and inimitable connection to another human being, but still don't care about their health because, after all, they're spending their time voting through Wiis. Although, considering their 2:1 preference for trees over coffee shops, maybe Wiivoters are both Romantic AND romantic[5] enough to head outdoors.

Let's not forget: Wii is its own workout. @ Brian: I feel your pain (literally[6]).

[1] If ♂% of all Wii-voters are men then .466♂+.644(1-♂)=.515 —> -.178♂+.644=.515 —> .129=.178♂ —> 72.5≈♂
[2] If ♂% of all global Wii-voters are men then .530♂+.465(1-♂)=.511 —> .065♂+.465=.511 —> .065♂=.046 —> 70.8≈♂
[3][4] See: The amazing desultory YouTube clip I've embedded, which is scored with a sped-up version of the 'Dynasty' theme for no real reason
[4] How badly did the out-of-order footnotes mess with your head?
[5] Who thought Vin Diesel and Wesley Snipes were "ugly" enough to get on that list‽ Preposterous. p_^
[6] In the past, at least; I'm in a deep enough MLB withdrawal to play the GCN 2k6 >_<

Making Meta-Meta on Metahumans

The forthcoming Aishwariy...Ashwary...Naveen Andrews movie serves as a good excuse to deconstruct another Kal Penn performance, since one Desi dude deserves another. While waiting for Epic Movie to "arrive from Netflix" I fought my TiNo inclinations and caught up on some 'Smallville.'[1] I started with 'Noir,' which sets itself up as an homage to films like The Big Sleep, which made me want to review The Big Sleep.[2]

First I had to make sure nobody else had tried this, because I hate being one of those people who attempts to be insightful but really retreads commonly held pop-cultural sentiments.[3] I fired up the ol Technorati, and I didn't find a straightforward Sleep v 'Smallville' comparison, but I found enough other entries to make me not want to try:
A running commentary (and an ironical use of the word "irregardless")
Screencaps galore (and an Erica Durance/Rita Hayworth comparison)
Iceman References (and different text from the TwoP site)
Pointing out that Philip Marlowe isn't Sam Spade (and the least text taken to spoil a plot ever)
Hair hangups (and synergy)

My favorite, however, has to be Smallville Guide's dueling reviews + transcript. That's love.


[1]You would hard pressed to find a sadder sentence in the English language.
[2]Si le haces una fiesta a una cerdita...
[3] Reason #[limit n—>∞((1+1/n)^n)] that I should never get a PhD

Geek Culture and Jock Culture Collide

[1]http://www.43folders.com/izero/

[2]http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html
[3]http://www.marvel.com/universe/Agent_Zero
[4]http://www.readingquest.org/pdf/venn3.pdf