West Side Story and 'When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's going to know who's the one?'

I finally watched the video for the New Orleans duo the Knux ... "Bang! Bang!" ... which is a lot 'cleaner' than the version of the song I'm used to, but worth watching all the same, especially if you're a fan of West Side Story.

Here's the video.

I remember buying this album a couple of years ago and thinking "Bang, Bang!" the one song I was familiar with, was the only song I really enjoyed, but I have to give the album a better listen. This song, in my humble opinion, is spectacular, even though I can only make sense of every third sentence or so.

The gist of it, from what I can tell, is that this rock-rap duo are remembering their mispent youth, as every rapper from JayZ to Pit Bull to Fifty Cent tends to do, and kind of poking fun at all the tough-guy bullshit they had to put up with in the 'hood, and some of the shenanigans they dealt out themselves, like "jackin' them cars."

They go on to say they "flipped the script" on the gangster lifestyle and found a higher calling, despite their poverty:

"I don't wan' sound like a hypocrite, but momma raised me for greatness,
but we broke as fuck and hope is stuck and New Orleans defines the cage"

Here's another one of my favorite lines:

"Where they mommas at, where they mommas at? Nobody knows, nobody cares. To claim your hard, come go through the ward,come fuck with them,when nobody dares."

Given the subject matter, West Side Story was an inspired choice for the video, and the execution was spot on.

Here's the fully lyrics courtesy of Metro Lyrics, though I doubt whoever transcribed this understood each and every word verbatim:

When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know who's the one? No, nobody knows.When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know who's the one? No, nobody knows.

Takin' it back to 94, when niggas was dealin' the finest soul,
Crack the hit then fucked it up, and baby gangstas was full of they cluck.
Pluck the feathers up off the duck, you stuck like chuck if carried the banter

Pistol player knuckled up, then better to telling the children to scatter
Everyone knows don't fuck with them ho's drinking with keisha from out they yo
Full of that clearly pop a silly when niggas first heard the choppers city
And I was a dancin' b-boy who resorted to slinging them heat boys

And jackin' them cars, mackin' them broads, sadistic shit, then flipped the script.
I don't wan' sound like a hypocrite, but momma raised me for greatness,
but we broke as fuck and hope is stuck and New Orleans defines the cage hits

The animal house like getting out like takin' food from a animals mouth,roar roar like the dungeon dragon, takin' it back to the cannibals house

When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know who's the one? No, no nobody knows. When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know who's the one?

No, no nobody knows.

I'm from a place you couldn't imagine, beautiful women some Creole with ass

Them niggas are hazards, we bitchin' they crabbin', and changin lanes like benjamin massing
From 10 to 12 they thinkin' it's cool, something awful when they aint in the mood.

Don't get 'em bent, fuck that innocence, cause in a sense they film as you.
Where they mommas at, where they mommas at? Nobody knows, nobody cares. To claim your hard, come go through the ward,come fuck with them,when nobody dares

Your job, yes, ya ho-jocker, put that pop on you like Redenbacher
The things they say, the slang they use, catching kung fu while they bangin' the tools.

When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know the one? No, nobody knows.When the gun goes bang bang bang, who's gonna know the one? No, nobody knows.

Even when it's cold outside 'round here. It's a 100 degrees, I keep the heat around here.It's when you least expect it, people creep up from the rear,it's racking my brain cannot contain my fear.

'Cause even when it's cold outside 'round here. It's a 100 degrees, I keep the heat around here.It's when you least expect it, people creep up from the rear,it's racking my brain cannot contain my fear.

Copied from MetroLyrics.com

Actresses I could do without / Demi Moore's half-brother beats woman in head with telephone book

This just in from the U.K.'s Daily Mail: Demi Moore's half-brother is a Texas lunatic who once used a telephone book to beat his fiancee in the head for an hour.

Don't take my word for it. The story is here.

He's serving a 10 year jail sentence. Yikes.

The article says it's unclear how close he is to Demi Moore, even though they share the same father. It's not difficult to drop your seed left and right, so "half-brother" can mean anything ... a product of a one-night stand, for instance. But part of me isn't surprised that her blood relative is a yucky yuckster.

Demi Moore is toward the top of the list of celebrity females I could do without. You know you have your own list going -- people who are famous and celebrated for their beauty that just leave you cold. Like, "She's famous?? Why??"

She's all skeleton bones and angular jaw and her characters are always pissy and manly and conniving and bitchy. Demi Moore as G.I. Jane, a female Marine, tougher than the tough guys... Demi Moore as a corporate executive, tougher than the tough guys... That's not attractive to me, sorry.

My list would include Demi Moore, Kirsten Dunst, and Snoop Dogg. Snoop is not an actress but I dislike him so much I'm going to put him on my list anyway. The guy looks like something sleazy that just crawled out of jail. When people say, "Our young men have no rolemodels except the negative ones they find in rap music," I envision Snoop as the person they are talking about. And I kinda like rap (not all of it, but some of it.).

What actresses would be on your list of celebrity women who really shouldn't be celebrities? My girlfriend just said "Jennifer Aniston." I think Aniston is severely over-rated (sexiest woman alive? no way) but still kind of cute and well-meaning while being boring. She plays the same character over and over but so do most celebrities, so I forgive her. She is not on my list. I'm sure she's relieved.

I should revive this thing

I should revive this blog, though it's been a good 10 months or so since I've updated it. I think I was always self-conscious that something I wrote here would be traced back to me, held against me, considering the work I do. Maybe that's over-rating my importaance in the world, but whatever. I've seen "objective" reporters and media types challenged for political stances attributed to them based on little things in their work or personal lives ... a bumper sticker left on an editor's desk becomes supposed proof in a rival community newspaper's column that the editor is a supporter of that candidate in a close election, etc. etc. People will use anything to get you off a certain beat or a certain avenue of investigation when they feel you're upsetting their apple cart and undermining their agenda.

It's late, I am watching a film before bed, but a few tidbits before I nod off. There was a column in Time Magazine about race and happiness... they've been polling people of different races for decades to see who is happiest. Whites are still happier than blacks, but the distance between the two has never been so small. Black women showed the greatest gains in happiness, I guess because of economic and social independence, no longer needing a man to move ahead in the world, something like that. White women showed the biggest drop, I do believe. I'm not surprised. They can be a pretty miserable, petty bunch, all those white female perfectionists out there hovering like helicopters over their children and bursting into tears if dinner isn't perfect. Control freak Type A = Type Bitch in my book. But I'm supposedly an asshole by some standards, so whatever.

Young black men stayed flat. The column said one in three young black men faced incarceration, or something like that, so no wonder happiness doesn't improve for said group. That's sad. Pathetic, too. But mostly sad.

Okay, I'm done criticizing white women and black men. Here's my other rant so I can offend everyone equally.

Ok, I was of the "support the troops -- bring 'em home!" camp for a long time. These wars haven't accomplished much and everyone knows, as soon as we exit IrAQ and Afghanistan, both countries are going to go five ways to hell in a damn handbasket. But lookee here... why would someone sign up for the military now, knowing full well based on media coverage that if you deploy today you're probably going to shoot up some jeep full of a family of civilians, women, kids, maybe infants, as it's desperately trying to pass your Humvee?

I keep reading the same story over and over. "We ordered the jeep to stop. They wouldn't stop. We fired a warning shot. They kept coming. We opened fire. The jeep flipped. When we went to investigate, we found a dead man and wife, their two dead kids, and a dead baby."

It's like clockwork. I've read the same account from so many different soldiers - the one that appeared today was in City Pages, some guy returning from war traumatized. His marriage fell apart, he flipped out at a convenience store, yadda yadda...

I'm sympathetic... to a point. But I'm growing less so. I mean, look here: Knowing that you will quite likely end up shooting innocent people, why would you still sign up for that job? It makes no sense. Absolutely no sense.

I know I haven't fought overseas (I'm too ADHD to go over there, even as a reporter, I fear). But I did lose a friend in Afghanistan. His take on the wars was: this sucks. And it does.

Free write stuff on tiger woods and stuff. Yeah.

I've been dreaming of refining my opinion-style writing since college, an embarrassingly long time ago. But I suck at it. It's clunky and boring and doesn't say much. Sigh.

Anyhoo, you gotta ejaculate on paper and then refine, refine, refine. Here's my ejaculate, oh yeah:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

America, like Hollywood, needs a hero-athlete to answer its celebrity villains, and maybe vice versa. You got a Mike Tyson, a Carl Everett, a bad boy Denis Rodman? Then it's time for a well-scrubbed Tiger Woods, a shiny Oscar de la Hoya, a made-for-television Alex Rodriguez, a perservering Nancy Kerrigan. Say hello to the White Knights in the briar patch of anti-heroes. Group hug, everybody.

This is what the Buddhists call the auspicious and the inauspicious, the ying and the yang. Darth Vader without Luke? Unthinkable. Now it's time for the media to give Luke a flattering story to tell. Throw in a back-story of adversity and humility. Make 'em an underdog back in the day. That way they can be truly self-made, truly American. The underdog is, afterall, always right.

But here's the rub, and no, it ain't pretty. Captain America was, even in the comic books, the manufactured byproduct of a "super soldier" serum -- a steroidal freak. Superman had daddy issues. You think he's up all night fighting volcanoes the world over for his health? C'mon, Clark was desperate for acceptance.

The Buddhists will tell you the auspicious and the inauspicious aren't so separate. There's a big black chunk of ying in the yang, of yang in the ying. Sure, I'm surprised by Wood's infidelity. But that not surprised.

Look, I won't waste my breath defending a guy who has the gall to cheat on his wife while she's home nursing their 10-month-old (son?). Woods doesn't look so well-flossed anymore. But who are we to have dared to dream that the hero of the golf course was a moral power off the links?

Few of our other heroes have lived up to the hype. Rodriguez didn't just abuse steroids; he guzzled them, all while earning hundreds of millions of dollars that left his teammates cold. Kerrigan? An Olympic ingrate who couldn't stop complaining while headlining a parade at Disneyland. De La Hoya? #$$%%^.

Here's an equation for you. Crime is just a motive that's met an opportunity, expressed like this: Crime = (motive) + (opportunity). What's infidelity but a crime of the heart, a moral mistep against your family? And what law of the universe prevents a celebrity from acting on his or her carnal desires and need for public acceptance?

In other words: Celebrity infidelity = (sex / acceptance) + (infinite opportunity, with untold beautiful women, at any time of day, anywhere in the world).

(And so on...)

Next evolution of porn?

Been thinking about writing this piece for a long while now... but I don't really have the inside view. Nor do I tune into mainstream porn. hmmm...

PIECE:

Sa Phoen is pushing herself to get back into animation. Mitss Varl gets migraines. XXX suffers from depression. XXX once miscarried a child. And XXX could really, really use an orgasm, a backrub and a chocolate milk.

TRANSITION HERE...

These are tough times for the porn industry, what with so much being given away on the Internet for free. But the women of the sex industry haven't buckled; they've evolved, marketing themselves through their own interactive Web sites, selling their own short sex clips, and broadcasting their every waking thought into the sometimes hazardous world of the social Web.

Despite anything ever imagined by Woody Allen or Russ Meyer or (robot love author), the next evolution for adult film actresses isn't mechanized or holographic or 3-D or laid out in the bizarre contours of virtual reality. In the information age, it's utterly fitting that women who love and have been consumed by sex and exhibitionism marry their neurosis to technology, self-promotion and over-sharing. Whatever the future of the porn industry, the future for porn stars looks a lot like Twitter.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Weight loss = weight loss

Wow, I'm down to 165 lbs on two different scales, two days in a row, at different times of day. My October entry a month ago had me at 172 lbs.

That's a seven lb. difference. I'll take it!

Personal goals: Running 5 miles at an 8:30-pace

Well, I think I have a new running goal. I completed the Medtronic 10-mile in early October running a 9:32 pace (i.e. 9:32-minutes per mile). I hadn't slept much nor eaten breakfast nor eaten much at all the entire day before, and I ran 6 miles the night before the race just to make sure I was up to it, so I basically was as far off my peak performance as you can get, haha.

That said, assuming that a 9:30 is a "comfortable" pace for me, I think my new goal should be running 5 miles at 8:30.

That would be a wonderful birthday present to myself in January, though achieving that pace by January might be a little ambitious.

Here's where I'm at: I hit the treadmill for about 45 - 50 painful minutes tonight (5+ miles) averaging a 9:05 pace, with mucho variation between 10 minute miles and 8 minute miles. Those 8-minute miles are killer. I had to take a minute break from the treadmill twice and I almost threw up once, I guess from swallowing my own spit and counting down the minutes outloud to encourage myself. I was dry heaving and running for the bathroom, where I coughed up some saliva while making puke noises. Haha.

I think my next workout will be a fartlek, doing 30 minutes in 90-second intervals of 11, 9:00 and 7:00 pace. If I do 7 rounds of those, I'd be averaging 9-minute miles for 30 minutes. (i.e. running 3 1/3 miles).

For the workout after that, I'd like to run 5 miles without stopping at a pace of 8:57 - 9:10. That'd be a 45-minute workout, even. Not sure if my lungs are up to yet. The backs of my legs (hamstrings?) are tight tonight but otherwise I'm fine after my workout. It's the lungs that always fail me. The cramping feeling in the abs and the muscle aches in my back or neck -- neither of which hit me tonight -- go away, but the lungs always do me in; sometimes even for hours after a run I feel tightness in my chest.

Speaking of pain, I put my training with the personal trainer on hold. I kinda wish I'd never signed up for it. It's $300 I can't afford and the workouts are too intense. I don't want to be a muscle man or a top athlete; I just want to be faster and drop 16 lbs. Sigh. I was like hyperventilating at the end of my first workout, but I went back for another. Silly me.

Well, I stopped going entirely after about four or five workouts because I've been working late but mostly because I've been getting these terrible headaches. They tend to start when I'm doing anything more strenuous than running, especially when I'm changing levels as in a sit-up or push-up. One lasted more than 12 hours and woke me up at night from the pain, so I stayed home from work because I hadn't slept at all. I called my doctor and got referred to a nurse who told me to take more Ibuprofen. Sheesh, thanks. Jerk-ette.

It might have to do with my outdated glasses prescription. I'm wearing an old pair because my existing ones broke months ago, and even those were ready to be replaced.

It could also be my couch-sleeping. I don't sleep on my bed because I prefer the openess of my livingroom and the easy access to my computer, the television and the kitchen. As a result, I've worn down my couch and the cushions don't really give me head and back support. I suspect that my torso weighs more than my legs so I'm basically at an angle when I sleep, with the tips of my toes a centimeter higher than my head. That's not good for blood circulation, I betcha!

Or, I could just have a popped blood vessel in my head. Or all three. Dunno.

Anyway, I resume with the personal trainer on Nov. 30, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

The good news is I'm 168 lbs. tonight, down from 172 whenever my last entry was. But I never trust one weighing, as your weight changes day to day and moment to moment. I ate very lightly today, just a yogurt and granola bar for breakfast and a grilled chicken salad from Wendy's with a cup of coffee for dinner, though I drank a rum drink at SAUCE and later drank some O.J. just before weighing myself. It probably cancels out.

My goal continues to be 153 lbs., but I think focusing on speed and frequency of workouts, rather than weight, is smarter, healthier and more sustainable in the long-term.

Okay, this must be the most boring blog post ever. I sure hope no one is reading this!

Weight loss = weight gain

Listening to "Modest Mouse" and their album "Good News for People Who Like Bad News"... they rock. I heart music.

So, two different scales tell me I'm at 172 lbs. I guess I've actually gained weight over the summer. Oh, man, that was the opposite of what I've intended. I'm kind of amazed. I was sure I was below 167. I don't feel 172.

I do feel a little more solid than I have been before, even though I haven't been doing virtually any upper body work. I kind of think this 172 lbs. suits me in this cold, hearty Minnesotan environment. That said, what I see when I look in the mirror is so different from what I see when I look at myself in pictures. I'm sometimes pretty round-faced in pics, which I dislike.

Plus, people tease me about my weight (including my recent ex-girlfriend, who really pissed me off bringing it up a lot one weekend in particular) and that's just annoying.

I've tried to eat healthier lunches but night time is tough. I catch up on missing calories, and when I'm having a late-night beer, I automatically reach for pizza or quesadillas, and a fair amount of them.

Sigh. I know the answer: run 5 miles every other day. Nobody who runs 5 miles every other day is overweight, I don't think.

I'm just disappointed because I've been running a bit, though to be fair, not much more than once a week. I guess no one loses weight working out once a week. I did a 10-mile road race and a little hiking this summer, and I think my lower body looks more muscular as a result, but my tummy is sizable when I slouch or touch my toes. Sigh.

Things that shouldn't be done but are done

Everyone is entitled to at least one strange fetish but it has to be consensual, folks! And when it goes so far as to involve children and poop, makes me wanna call the cops!

I just got back from climbing in the White Mountains, so I'm especially sensitive to this little bit of fecal tom-foolery. Sigh.

From the Associated Press:
Man admits crawling into outhouse pit _ again
(AP) – 23 minutes ago
PORTLAND, Maine — A Maine man caught peering up at a girl from below an outhouse toilet seat four years ago stands accused of crawling into another pit toilet on White Mountain National Forest property in New Hampshire. A federal affidavit indicates a 49-year-old man confessed to repeating his previous act on Memorial Day.
Federal agents sought the man out after a 9-year-old boy saw him climbing out of a toilet at the Hastings Campground. Two witnesses saw him walk away from the outhouse.
Forest Service special agent William Fors wrote that the man initially said he climbed into the waste-filled pit to retrieve a T-shirt. Four years ago, he said he was retrieving his wedding ring.
Fors wrote the man eventually confessed climbing into outhouse pits on more than two occasions.

MGMT, "KIDS"

Damn, this video is so wrong to this poor little baby! And I think that's his mother in the video. But the song plays on 89.3 FM, and it's a great song!

For some reason, I can't copy and paste the code (only half of it pastes), so here's the link. The band is called Management and the song is called "KIDS":

Video of MGMT with "KIDS"



If you can make any sense of the lyrics, you're a better man (or woman) than me...

Lyrics courtesy of MetroLyrics.com

You were a child,
crawlin' on your knees toward it.
Makin' mama so proud,
but your voice was too loud.

We like to watch you laughing.
You pick the insects off plants.
No time to think of consequences.

Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.

Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.

The water is warm,
but its sending me shivers.
A baby is born,
crying out for attention.
Memories fade,
like looking through a fogged mirror
Decisions to decisions are made and not fought
But I thought,
this wouldn't hurt a lot.
I guess not.

Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.

Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.


Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.


Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.


Control yourself.
Take only what you need from it.
A family of trees wantin',
To be haunted.