The bathrooms inside the DMA: an allegory for the city of Dallas

From the street, the DMA looks like it would be a really cool museum. Nice water instillation, a few of those geometrical sculptures that you can find at any museum across North America. But everyone knows the DMA is totally sub-par, especially compared to the Kimball. Why does every museum in Texas have huge collections of pastoral paintings? Boring.

There was a large portion of one wing dedicated to antiques and 'decorative arts,' which I really appreciated, except I've seen much better. Black lacquered child's furniture with tiger print cushions? Some of the rooms looked like the boudoirs of tasteless Frenchwomen from the 19th Century. There was a lovely dresser with wood inlays in the shapes of geese. And while I admired the craftsmanship, I kept thinking, dude geese?

Then I visited the ladies room. And oh.my.god I couldn't believe it: it was small, it was smelly and the lighting was atrosh. It reminded me of the restroom inside the San Antonio bus station, but accompanied by that humid urine scent found only at public showers at the beach. Wall to wall white tile, white stalls and formica counter tops.

The rest of the museum is quite beautiful- stone floors through out, high ceilings, accent lighting, etc. At every other museum I've ever been at I've noticed how nice the restrooms are- the flooring and lighting is usually carried into the restroom. But no, not at the DMA.

I just can't take a museum with such a nasty bathroom that serious. Did they think no one would notice? If you want the DMA to be a world class institution, at least build a nice restroom and give it its dignity. But I mean there's nothing world class about Dallas. If money could buy taste the DMA wouldn't be so lame and Dallas wouldn't be so boring.

Blogging Gatsby

After watching D'Angelo lead a group discussion about The Great Gatsby in prison on The Wire, I decided it was time to re-read it myself. It's been six years since I read it my junior English class in high school, and at the time I was studying for the SAT. Back then I used to highlight the words I didn't know or pencil them at the top of the pages so I could look them up later.

Some words I didn't know when I was 16:

supercilious
ectoplasm
erroneous
prodigality
vehemently
spectroscopic
ascertain
corpulent
jauntiness
asunder
indignant

I didn't take notes for the first 50 pages, but I'll have more on the actual book the next few days.

On an unrelated note, is it weird that I like the way my dog's breath smells? Rocko has really bad breath, but it's Rocko breath, and I used to miss it when I was in college. I don't like the way it smells when his mouth is in my face, but every so often after he yawns I get a whiff of it mixed in with his dog smell while I'm at the computer.

Question

If a company makes false claims on its website, is it false advertising?

Websites may advertise for companies, but since they do not sponsor editorial content are they considered ads in the legal sense of the word?

Pictures for Grandma

"I'm stylin in my new collar. Red is usually my color, but all they had was blue."

Adventures in Ethnic Grocery Stores Pt. 1

Tony's (my neighborhood convenience store) was out of limes, and I simply can't drink Tecate without limes. So I went to Fiesta because it's really close to my house and if there's one thing that a grocery store that mainly serves the Hispanic community is going to sell, it's limes.

I usually avoid the shopping area Fiesta is in because every time I'm out there I have Valley flashbacks of bad drivers from Mexico. Driving in Mexico is wayy different from driving in the US so consequently driving in the Valley is way different from driving in the US. In fact, when I go back home and I'm running an errand I find myself being a good, cautious driver then I remember that I'm in McAllen, and anything goes.

Another reason why I avoid Fiesta, and stores like it, is that it reminds me of being in Globe or M. Rivas, and all three stores smell like freshly-cut cow. When I was little I couldn't figure out why everyone called it 'eme' Rivas- all the signs said M. Rivas. It wasn't until I learned the Spanish alphabet in high school that I made the connection. H-E-B has since run M. Rivas out of business, but Globe is still around, despite being across the street from an H-E-B. I think it's because it's because of the bus stop that picks up and drops off the Mexicans that cross every day to work in McAllen.

Which leads me to believe that stores like Fiesta, Sack-N-Save and Globe only appeal to immigrants and first-generation Hispanics. If it were true that all Hispanics only liked to shop in stores that resemble stores in Mexico, H-E-B wouldn't be so popular in the Valley, Austin and San Antonio. Or pretty much anywhere where an H-E-B is. I think stores like Fiesta are so big in Dallas is because a majority of the Hispanics here immigrant and first generation. I know people in the Valley who can't even trace their family back to Mexico because their families have been living in Edinburg for so long. And all these people love H-E-B.

Anyway, I was pricing the produce when it came to me- dude, they must sell tamarindo here. When my dad and I would go to H-E-B after school I always used to take one from the produce bin and eat it in the store. After I didn't find it next to the hikama I began to get a little worried. But I did eventually find it- in individually wrapped quarter and half-pound bunches. And the bundles nearest to the ground, the ones most easily accessible to children, had little holes in the plastic where little fingers could take one out and eat it while their parents grocery shopped.
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Note: It occurred to me after I wrote this that not everyone who reads this may know what tamarindo is. Most Mexican candy (the good kind anyway) is tamarindo based. It's sweet but mostly sour, but not in the way a lemon is.

Dogs as Dogs vs. Dogs as People

I'm having a hard time trying to decide which is cuter- when dogs do cute things because that's what dogs do, or when they do cute things that make them more like people. For example, Rocko's schnauzer trot (sooo cute) is a cuteness that comes from him being a dog and walking on all fours. But when he opens a door with his paws it's super cute too because he's trying to be like people.

A Re-Post From My BF's Blog

This blog was posted in response to a blackface video that some aging hipsters made. Like, you're too old to be living off your parents, and everyone in my family had two degrees by the time they were your age, and my youngest brother is still younger than you. And he has health insurance and is about to buy a house. Racism is never cool, and anyone who thinks blackface is acceptable is unaware that this is 2008, not 1888. Or never went to college. How embarrassing, the people that made this video went to the same college I went to.

why i parted ways with the scoop.....

after thinking about it long and hard for a few weeks i have decided to no longer be a part of, and no longer associate myself with the scoop ( a dj night i found and started with a couple of guys as a weekly at the fall out lounge).

as some of you may recall i was pretty torn up over a black face incident involving Taresa Nasty and Dan Paul. At first i was trying to spare them the embarrassment of mentioning their names but they dont really care, and i think its because all the people around them share their view.

the balck face thing was never really resolved and i never really got an apology. i mean... to be honest i dont even know if i would believe it because that shit is in their hearts and i have no love for people like that..... well i shall say no toleration. i should love everyone. its hard sometimes. but man it is obvious that those people could give a fuck about me so i have opted to remove myself from contact. its just weird how people can be sometimes. and whats even worse is imagining what they are like when people like me arent around.

its weird how two minorities can be so culturally insensitive, so much so that they have continued to distribute the video even though i have voiced my opinion. As expected, this whole thing got around a bit... a friend of mine was saying how they are talking about it at work and some people were led to believe that the whole thing was blown out of proportion. i hate to make this even more about race, but of course they were white people who couldnt possibly understand...and i am sorry but i am not shocked. i mean people who do that type of shit surround themselves with like minded people. i wish you could have seen the video. actually no i dont. i am glad you havent.

when i confronted the girl about it, who mind you is 30+ yrs of age, she brought up the whole dave chappell in white face thing..... but as few may know, he stopped doing his show because of what it was doing to society and out of fear that white people were enjoying it for the wrong reasons. i will admit. i found the show funny but i could see how it was quit detrimental to black society.

i fucking hat more than anything to make this shit about race. its a topic i try to avoid at all cost but the world keeps throwing it in my face. and sometimes i think it may be a sub conscious mind thing, but i dont live in fear of it, it just happens a lot in texas.

well, long story short. someone who i figured to be a good friend of mine was the one who brought me into this whole mess and he made a big deal about it how horrible it was and when he confronted teresa and dan they didnt think it was a big deal because of just how unaware they are... she broke up with him saying he was being too sensitive or whatever. i figure she did this because she figures herself to be forward thinking or progressive and cant take criticism well or something. who knows what those people think...well out side of their image of black people.

long story short.... a week or two went by and they are back together and all friends like the shit never took place. i have no tolerance for that shit. First, it is extremely hypocritical to bring me into this shit and then back out like shit is all dandy. it proves to me that i am a joke to you and that this shit is not serious to you. well it is to me and the damage has been done and the scroll has been written.

and i am at fault too in this for bitting my tongue for over a month and trying to act like it was all ok and like i havent lost a little respect for everyone associated, but the truth is i have. and i can stoop to that shit.

i cant be apart of anything that involves luke warm people, who more importantly cant identify with me or understand my position in this mess.

this shit has fucked me up bad. watching people who you thought were cool.. fucking belittle something so serious and so deeply impressed here in america and in the mindsets of a lot of people.

i cant be a part of these... and i feel like i have lost a good friend or two over this whole thing but i have to do what i feel and i cant be ran over like this. i didnt deserve this, and it sucks that when i have already felt numerous times like i have so much shit working against me already, that these people i have around me are a part of it too.

man this sucks so bad. man i actually cried when i saw the video and honestly... i have cried since then too and it takes a lot for me to cry but the fact that they cant understand something so powerful kills me...


i cant have any part in this shit. at all. i am done. and i hope they can understand where i am coming from. i hope they read this and realize that i am not doing this out of anger and spite. i am writing this because i am standing up for what i believe in and this is the way it has to be.

shit will never be the same between you and i and sometimes i cant allow myself to believe it is your fault. it is where we live and what people make of this whole thing. we are all influenced but at the same time.... some things are just flat out wrong.

i am no longer a member of the scoop crew because i cant be in anyway associated with those type of thinkers and people in general.


thanks for your time.

I <3 The Wire, and Other Television Shows of Note

I love television. In fact, in recent years I've come to love television much more than I love film, primarily because story lines and character development in film is no where near as deep as it is on television shows.

Some of my favorites: The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, The Sopranos, Girlfriends, Sex and the City and the Bad Girls Club. I'm not sure if reality television gets italics.

But the past few weeks I've been watching The Wire- in fact, I got Netflix just to watch it. And even after hearing from my parents how good it is, and reading about how it's the best show on television for the past couple years, I really wasn't prepared for just how awesome it was going to be.

The thing about The Wire is that every character, from the cops to the drug dealers in the pit, are dignified. I love that they show Stringer Bell in an economics class at a community college. Throughout the rest of the season he tries to explain things like saturated markets to hood kids, and they look it him like whatever. Love Stringer Bell, but Omar is my favorite.

A lot has been written about Omar Little's character- he's even Obama's favorite. He's unlike any character I've ever come across in literature, film, or television- but at the same time like all my favorite characters. It's hard to explain but I think anyone who's seen the show can identify with what I mean. He's a lot like Robin Hood- he only steals from people who are stealing from others. He never curses. He goes to church with his grandmother once a month. He also carries a shot gun and whistles 'The Farmer in the Dell' when he's about to steal someone's stash. And he's homosexual- but that's beside the point. Everything about this dude is intriguing- his braids, his trench coat, that scar on his face. There's something about him that makes you root for him, even though he kills people and sells drugs.

But that's the thing about The Wire- you find yourself rooting for the most unlikely characters. The show is cop drama, yeah. But it's more about institutions and how these institutions affect the people whom they serve and the people who work for them. Each season is a different institution- the drug trade, the docks, the school system, the political system and the media. The last season is about the media, and I've read it's the most realistic account of the media works, and I'm pretty pissed that I have to wait until August to see it.

It's also the little things about the show that make it awesome. Like Wee-Bay's fish, the kids Wallace takes care of, the economics class Stringer takes and the large button calculators that the money counters in the Barksdale crew use to count money. There's also the Pimp Roll that Tom Wolfe talked about in Bonfire of the Vanities, on display in every episode that takes place in a court room. Movies just can't move me in the same way because they last three hours tops. The Wire has 55 episodes, roughly 55 hours.

Are Nike and Adidas Hurting Soccer in America?

I recently turned AdBlock Plus off on my browser and as a result I've been bombarded with Nike ads for US Soccer on Myspace asking me to Join the Revolution. This is part of the Don't Tread on Me campaign they've been running with for quite a while.



Problems with this campaign: the soccer ball that the Don't Tread on Me snake is clutching looks like a volleyball. Yes, people in other countries would know better, and people who play in this country would know better too. But the last time I checked, soccer is struggling in this country- so why make something that is completely alien to most of the population even more confusing? My boyfriend, who played in the Classic League (for those of you who don't know about youth soccer, the Classic League is one of two leagues in this country where competitive soccer is played at the highest level), had a Don't Tread on Me Nike poster in his old apartment. I had been working in Major League Soccer for over four months before I finally asked what the ad was for. To me, and most Americans, soccer balls have those black hexagons all over them- they don't resemble volleyballs.

Another problem: Join the Revolution? You mean the New England Revolution, Boston's MLS team (who, like every other MLS team, are sponsored by Adidas)? Nike has gone after Adidas in previous ads as an attempt to make inroads in the world soccer market, a market that Adidas dominates in. This ad may or may not be a shot at Adidas, but I think Nike's use of the term 'Revolution' is a bit insulting to Major League Soccer, and counter productive to the league's efforts, albeit piss poor efforts, to popularize soccer in this country.

Before I go on, I should clarify Nike and Adidas' roles in soccer in the US. From MLS.com:

In November of 2004, adidas, Major League Soccer and Soccer United Marketing signed an exclusive 10 year partnership agreement making adidas the official athletic sponsor and licensed product supplier for MLS. Under the agreement, which is the largest in the league's history, adidas holds the exclusive rights to outfit all of the league's teams, and provide the League with the Official Match Ball, +Teamgeist MLS. adidas also has exclusive rights to sales of all MLS League and team-branded product, including apparel and equipment.

adidas, an MLS partner since the league's inception, currently sponsors the MLS Player Combine, Generation adidas, MLS Futbolito, and the annual MLS SuperDraft. adidas was a charter supplier of three MLS teams - D.C. United (Washington, D.C.), Columbus Crew (Columbus, OH), and the Kansas City Wizards (Kansas City, MO).

As the worldwide leader in the sport, adidas has developed a near 50 percent market share in the U.S. soccer industry. Building on adidas' longstanding relationship with U.S. Youth Soccer, adidas and Major League Soccer will develop marketing initiatives over the next several years to connect even more deeply with soccer fans in the United States in an effort to create and inspire an American Soccer Nation.

Nike, on the other hand, sponsors US Soccer. You may be asking yourself, what's the difference? Soccer is unique from every other major sport played in this country in that it is played all over the world, and not in a half-assed manner the way basketball is. Most developed countries have their own leagues, but they also have a national team that plays in FIFA 'friendlies' and competes in the World Cup. So Nike sponsors the US National team.

Marketing communications for both US Soccer and the MLS are handled by Soccer United Marketing (SUM). Did you catch those 'MLS Futbol. Football. Soccer.' ads? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Nike and Adidas have substantial advertising budgets, SUM, not so much. So while both of these brands are competing for market share in the US, it's sort of like they're pitting MLS and US Soccer against each other. Such a thing would never happen in Europe or South America because soccer-excuse me, football fans have been cheering for both their national team and league teams for generations. No sport in America has this tradition, and it's one of the problems that the sport faces in this country. The Olympics don't count- the most watched Olympic sporting events in this country are swimming and ice skating, neither of which have a substantial following in non-Olympic years.

So back to problems with the ads. As I said, the use of the term Revolution is what bothers me the most. After watching a commercial here the sub-text of this campaign gets clearer: it's aimed at people who watch soccer, just not US soccer because the level of play is sub-par compared to just about every other nation. "Wake up America, you have your own team." Not league- team. Most of the players shown in the commercial play in Europe (except Landon Donovan, but he couldn't cut it Europe so he came back to play for the Galaxy). So don't bother watching MLS, you know they suck, but hey the American national team isn't so bad, lots of these guys play in Europe.

So is nationalism the answer to popularizing soccer in this country, even though there's no tradition of support for a national team sport in the US? Or will Major League Soccer raise the level of play by actually paying people decent money to play for them (the salary cap system in MLS is very complicated, and the average salary is around $40,000 a year)? My guess is neither. But pitting the two against each other in order to gain market share wont help either brand in the long run.

Upside: these ads look really good. In fact they look better than anything else I've ever seen US Soccer/MLS related, whether it was created by a league team or SUM. But that's what happens when you hire advertising professionals (Wieden+Kennedy) instead of creating ads in-house. However, I think the people who created these ads don't fully understand the complexities of soccer in the United States, or particularly care about establishing it as a major sport that could eventually compete with the NBA, NFL and MLB. If they did, they wouldn't have used the phrase 'Join the Revolution' or recognize the putrid level of American play vs. all other nations. But then that gets into the defeatist attitude that pervades all American soccer marketing communications. I'll save that for another blog.

The Thing About Dallas

A few weeks ago I figured out why Dallas is so lame to me- there aren't enough people my age living here.

Most of the people my age that do live here either go to or went to SMU for undergrad or didn't go to college at all- and in both cases, I'm sad to say, I don't have enough in common with them to want to be friends with them.

And that's the thing about Dallas- only two universities within the city limits, both of them private. No public universities. So if you want to go to college in Dallas you basically have to be upper-middle class, unless you got a scholarship.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being upper-middle class, but I do definitely think there's something wrong with surrounding yourself with people that grew up the exact same way you did your entire life. This sort of thing happens at schools like Harvard, but lets be real- SMU is no Harvard.

Time For a Lifestyle Chage

I've (thankfully) always been one of those people who never exercises, eats junk and still manages to stay thin. After my freshman year of college when I turned 20 my metabolism slowed down, and there were a few months there when no one would have considered me to be skinny, but I have since managed to never put that weight back on (despite the Honey BBQ Chicken Strip Sandwich).

However I woke up today at 1:30pm for no good reason- I haven't stayed out drinking all night for well over a year now- and I can't really deny the fact that something needs to change anymore. After reading this, I've come to the conclusion that the reason my hair takes so long to grow is because I don't exercise or eat enough protein.

Now that Kevin wont be working nights anymore- he got a job as a music therapist at a school for autistic children- I can actually go back to cooking real food instead of Rice-a-Roni rice pilaf and hummus. A friend of mine also mentioned that if you stick to the outside of the grocery store and don't go down the isles you cut out all processed food from your diet.

I really miss my long hair, and I'm tired of being tired.

The Rise of the Environmentle Movement By Way of Consumption

When I read, back in 2004, that Leonard DiCaprio and several other celebrities started buying hybrid cars I thought, that's perfect: the only way hybrids are going to take off in this country is if they're made into status symbols. Hybrid technology, still unfordable to most people today, was even less affordable four years ago. Driving one in 2004 signaled environmental consciousness, but more importantly, it signaled wealth. As the costs of 'green' living become affordable to the middle class, a different behavior is driving the environmental movement: moral superiority.

What better way to market bamboo floors, fluorescent light bulbs, and recycled glass backsplashes than emphasizing the added value of being able to say to your friends, "This is a green kitchen." Dude you're still bulldozing a perfectly good kitchen and you would save more of our nature's resources by using what you have instead of shipping these green materials half way across the country.

However, all of this is a great thing for the environmental movement, and for the world. American consumers, for whatever reason, are driving demand for eco-friendly products. And in a free-market economy, what better way to get companies to change their practices by demanding products that will force them to?

There is one problem with the green revolution: it's consumption, not behavior, driven. Americans aren't consuming any less. Fossil fuels and energy, yes, but we're still wasteful as hell. To-go bags at restaurants may be made with recycled material, but they're still offered to every customer for even the smallest purchase. For example, I was picking up my replacement piece of Sacher Tort from La Madeleine yesterday (I complained about the dryness of the last one I bought on the company's website and was offered a free, moist piece) after a lunch rush. They were out of small bags, and were going to pack my tiny piece of cake in this giant bag. No thanks, I said. If I don't need a bag, I never ask for one or tell the clerk before she wraps it up. I just wish they wouldn't assume everyone needs one. Bags should be given only on request.

Another example is the HGTV green slogan, Change the World, Start at Home. Change the world by buying eco-friendly products for your home. A few energy saving tips are peppered in through out the day, but it's mostly green kitchen redesigns.

The consumer-driven green movement is a start, but by no means is it an end to our countries obsession with convenience and wasteful habits. And I must admit, watching Lauren Lake transform hideous kitchens into fabulous new green spaces is more entertaining than being lectured about wastefulness.

Happy birthday to Megan and my bff Martha, who share their special days with our planet.

Novels and Planning/Consumer Insight

I'm currently trying to get through Middlemarch, and 800 page Victorian period novel about a provincial English town. So far it's really good, very wordy though. It's also considered to be one of the greatest books written in English of all time, though I think it's fallen out of favor recently.

Anyway, what's struck me the most about the novel is how relevant most of it is for modern society, and how little has changed. I mean we're men aren't wearing those funny clothes anymore and women are allowed to inherit property now. But human relationships haven't changed much and people still react with the same facial expressions. I often forget this book was written over 130 years ago.

Part of what makes the book so long is the author's attention to detail. Not necessarily the detail of how each estate is laid out, but all the details that go into the character's train of thought. Every sentence is usually followed by a very long explanation of how the character came to that conclusion, and how their pasts, station in life, religious views, number of siblings, morals, etc. shape their present situation.

Though Middlemarch is a work of fiction, I think novels like this have a lot of implications for planners (and aspiring planners like me). Though these characters are not real, they are based off of the writer's real experiences with people. A good writer makes characters come to life by giving all sorts of details into their train of thought, and good planners make assumptions about people based off of research. Except novelists aren't trying to solve modern marketing problems, they're just tying to tell a story.

Do I think that planners should read novels to learn about consumer insight instead of doing research, no. But I think planners can learn a lot from the way novelists observe people in real life and turn them into characters. I mean, how often do we see ourselves in books? Everybody is different, but there certainly are patterns to human behavior and the way that people think, and a great writer can take all these patterns that we don't normally think about and create very real characters. A good writer will shape a character in our minds based off their past experiences, income level (or in Middlemarch, class), number of children, married or single, interests, political dispositions and so on and base a character's actions on them. Isn't that what planners are trying to do too?

Online videos- thanks, but no thanks.

Don't get me wrong, I can spend hours watching videos of Rafael Nadal and puppies on YouTube, but I'm really just not that into online video streaming.

First, the quality is always terrible. Videos are pretty much always grainy and four inches big. The only time I watch videos is if I really want to see something- like a baby panda sneezing or Roger Federer saying 'fuck' after missing a backhand.

I usually refuse to watch videos that people send me, mostly because I can't stand being bored and I usually feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm also tired of being disappointed in my friends sense of humor, because 95% of the time the videos people send me really aren't that funny.

I can't stand when websites automatically play a video, whether it's a commercial or not. I'm actually more annoyed if it's not a commercial. What if I'm visiting the site from an inappropriate place, like work or a computer lab?

What gets me the most are news stories that are only in video format. I'd much rather read the story in half the time it takes to watch the video. Do news sites think people are too lazy to read and would rather watch video? I think if you're the type of person who uses the internet to read the news you're probably not that lazy anyway. The Yahoo.com AP news feed is the worst offender. I've been addicted to the news stories on Yahoo for like six years (explanation deserves its own post) and last year they started offering headlines only in video format. Drives me crazy because I have to Google the story to find a written version. Slate started doing this too, and it really upsets me because Dear Prudence now has a video feature every Thursday that takes the place of what would be a written response.

I can understand why companies would want to use video, for obvious reasons, but I don't think news outlets should offer content exclusively as videos- a written alternative should always be given as well. If you're the type of person who bores so easily reading about current events, you're probably not spending your internet time looking for news videos, you're probably on MySpace. And you're also probably the type of person who gets all your news from the Daily Show or worse, Headline News.

Triple Cheese?

Totino's Three Cheese Party Pizza is now being sold under the name 'Triple Cheese.' I've been buying these for a while now because they're 99 cents (have never been able to remember how to type the cents symbol) and they really don't taste that bad. Does Triple Cheese mean more cheese? Doubt it, but def. more appealing than three cheese.

I like pizza, but not really that much. I actually prefer frozen to most fresh varieties (unless it's Luca Pizza) because the dressed up fancy ones don't taste much better to me, and they're usually way too salty. I think pizza generally tastes the same, it doesn't matter how high-end the cheese or the sauce is. At some point between Papa Johns and California Pizza Kitchen, the subtleties die down, and you're really just paying $18 for bread, sauce and cheese.

Little Caesar's is my favorite non-frozen variety, and it's $5 for a large.

Funny

This picture goes along with this article. I was a bit confused when got to the page because I couldn't figure out what the war in Afghanistan had to do with iPhones.....

After I went through the slide show I figured it out... that's not a tank, and some foolish graphic designer just didn't realize that Afghan hounds look a lot like Osama Bin Laden.

Juno

I refused to see this movie for a number of reasons, but after reading this piece in The Atlantic I've finally figured out what bothers me about it the most: it's not white middle class America's place to make a comedy out of teen pregnancy because it hasn't destroyed their community the way it has the black and Hispanic communities.

If you think I'm wrong, consider this: the preview shows the movie's title character walking down the hallway about to pop, and everyone is staring at her like it's a super big deal that she's pregnant. At Skyline High School in Dallas, they have a daycare center so that teen mothers don't drop out of school.

Boxed Wine

I'm guessing someone figured out that if you made the box/quantity smaller, people will think it's more classy (or less tacky?) than the standard Franzia sized box of wine (Mountain Burgandy is my favorite). All the new brands hold four bottles of wine instead of six.

I've been seeing commercials for that new brand of boxed wine, and they're not very good. I don't even remember what the name of the brand is, and I know for a fact they only make white wine (gag). The cartoon woman pushing it in the commercial keeps it in the fridge, and the only food in sight is a bag of green apples in the crisper. I guess apples go well with white wine.

Still can't find Pinot Evil at any of the liquor stores here, perhaps I'll try Central Market.

The State of Hip-Hop

I never really thought I'd say this, but I can't stand hip-hop right now. People have been complaining about mainstream hip-hop for years, but I've never been one of those people. I loved Cash Money Records and dudes like Young Jeezy and Lil' Wayne. I actually liked listening to the radio. But now I find myself listening to This American Life instead of the new Lil' Wayne single, which totally sucks by the way.

And it's not like my tastes have changed. I still listen to the songs that were popular two years ago that were playing on the radio. And people are still making music like that (The Fixxers out of LA), it's just making its way to the radio.

It all started last June, maybe last May. This was around the time T-Pain was getting really popular. I started liking the songs that were on the radio less and less. I thought, surely this is just a phase, some new joints will come out soon and they'll stop playing this crap. Even a friend of mine, who isn't particularly into rap, said the radio was going through a major drought. Then Soulja Boy came out and things managed to get worse.

The first time I heard that song I thought it was a joke. What pisses me off the most about that song is that the beat was completely ripped off a J-Money song that had come out the previous summer called "Peanut Butter Jelly." I consider that song to be a classic and it enjoyed a full three months as my Myspace song. Juicy J gives it a shout-out on the Three 6 Mafia song "Doe Boy Fresh" (that song never made to the radio). I thought that the similarities between Soulja Boy and Peanut Butter Jelly may have been a coincidence until I found out that Soulja Boy is from Mississippi. J-Money is also from Mississippi, and there's not enough hip-hop coming out of that state for it to be a coincidence.

Soulja Boy has always baffled me. His song wasn't an instant hit, either. It was on the radio a full two months before it really took off (the ultimate sign of a rap song going mainstream is when it gets played on 106.1 alongside the likes of Kelly Clarkson). Then all of a sudden it's everywhere and getting played every 15 minutes. And I never saw it coming. I thought, surely, people are not this stupid.

And I don't think people are that stupid- I think kids are though. The music that's being played now is so ignorant and the kids are eating up. Once, at an FC Dallas game, Soulja Boy was played on the stadium speakers an hour or so before the game started. There were a lot of kids around that day because we had given a bunch of youth teams discounts on tickets. Within half a second of the first note being played, these kids next to me started doing the dance from the video (the soulja boy was actually a dance long before Soulja Boy appropriated the name). Then I look around the stadium and every kid is doing it (mind you these are affluent sub-urban kids from Frisco and Southlake). Every last one of them. There was this one kid in one of the groups who was a little heavier, wearing glasses and some DC skate shoes I remember. He was looking right into his friends eyes while they were doing the dance, in that way that kids do when they want to make sure they're getting it right. It was so weird.

So why are radio stations, BET, MTV and the rest of the music industry catering to kids? Because kids buy records, young adults don't.

The state of hip-hop is the sort of thing people who listen to "real" hip-hop complain about all the time. But those people don't buy music, they steal it. So why should the industry cater to them? Complain all you want, but maybe next time you should put down that American Apparel hoodie that all your friends are wearing and pick up a Mad-Lib record instead.

Because everyone needs a little Rocko in their life

"I miss my grandma."

"Can I pleeeaassee try your rice pilaf, I promise I wont get sick."