www.befunky.com
Have you ever wondered what you would look like as a cartoon in a comic book. I think this is something that would intrigue anyone. I have always wanted to see myself as a crazy looking cartoon so when I discovered befunky.com I was so pumped I spent a good 2 hours turning old pictures of mine into cartoons. Befunky.com is an incredibly cool website that takes your pictures, and with a little help from you, turns them into cartoons and comics. Check it out...Turn yourself into a cartoon and make your own comic book series. There is also the option of turning full videos into cartoon videos. I have yet to try this aspect of the site because it will probably take a good amount of time but if you do have the time I can only imagine how cool a video would look like this. Enjoy!!
www.befunky.com
1.29.2009
1.28.2009
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
very cool website. People anonymously send in their secrets and they are posted. It’s a cool time killer aaaaand a great way to vent. Send em your secrets too
-IB
very cool website. People anonymously send in their secrets and they are posted. It’s a cool time killer aaaaand a great way to vent. Send em your secrets too
-IB
1.26.2009
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/
The site name is pretty self explanatory. Its all news from around the globe relating to antiwar efforts. It is updated multiple times daily and engages viewers with multiple forums, updated sources, and links to visit that lead to information on antiwar rallies and protests as well as other websites devoted to specific conflicts. One section they have is devoted to updates of US causalties since the war in Iraq began. If there's ever been any remote interest in being active in with any antiwar movement, this website is definitely a good place to start.
http://www.antiwar.com/
1.23.2009
Music Think Tank
http://www.musicthinktank.com/
Ever wonder what other people think about all the nonsense going on in the industry? We all like to think that we know exactly how everything works in the music biz, and what to do to get to the top. The fact is, none of us have it all fiigured which is why something like Music Think Tank exists. Its all about what active people in the music biz have to say about whats going on. They just put out a great article on how to strategically accomplish all the things we all say we are going to accomplish this year in 2009. Check it out, and make sure to contribute if you got anythiing worthwhile. I know we all have something to say.
http://www.musicthinktank.com/
1.22.2009
Book Review: Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Thomas Wolfe
Keeping on the topic of require reading from middle school, who remembers One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest, by Ken Keesey? Well, for those unfamiliar, it was Keesey's best and most notable work before he got involved with the Merry Pranksters and and journied "Furrther" across America. The Electric KoolAid Acid Test attempts to chronicle the events leading to his creation of that book which involves Keesey experimenting with LSD in a mental clinic which he worked. He eventually was responsible for the Grateful Dead's popularity and became a counter-culture icon even before his own faked suicide in Southern California. The book is a great insider's view of the 60's we all know from the movies. Thomas Wolffe writes about the Merry Pranksters and plenty of their escapades throughout the country and provides an array of humorous anecdotes about the gang, at the same time paints a great picture of the general attitude of the psychedelic movement of that time period.
-Tekst
1.21.2009
Book Review: Fabric of the Cosmos by Dr. Brian Greene
This is probably the most concise, layman-friendly explanations of the mysterious world of physics and quantum theory that I have ever seen, read, or heard about. AUTHOR explains the ins and outs of topics such as Einstein’s relativity, superstring theory, and Newton’s laws, among many others. An added bonus is that he uses The Simpsons characters to explain and apply the theories to real world (or cartoon world) situations. I think it just helps it stick better when you can remember, “ok, so bart is traveling on his skateboard at light speed, and Lisa is playing her sax…” when trying to comprehend the timespace continuum.
If you are interested in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend this one.
1.20.2009
A 'Thank You' to GW Bush
This was an article in Truthout, reprinted here for ease of reading.
check out the full article, here.
To: George W. Bush
From: Your biggest fan
Re: Your imminent unemployment
Greetings, Mr. Bush.
I was sorry to hear about the passing of your cat, India. Eighteen years is a long time for a cat - my mother has one that's 20 and still going strong, if you can believe it - and I'm sure India had a comfortable, caring life with your family.
I got to spend part of last weekend with an old friend of mine. He's a bit older than 18, and he's also a troop who recently rotated back from a tour in Falluja. He just had a baby daughter, and he will be sent to Afghanistan before too much longer. He did his duty in Iraq, dealt his share of death and saw his friends die or be ripped to shreds right in front of him.
He was hollow in a lot of places that had been full before he went to Iraq. He was not the same man we'd said farewell to. But he was alive, and if he survives his upcoming Afghanistan tour, maybe he will get the chance to have a long, comfortable, caring life with his family, just like little India.
At present, my friend's life is the polar opposite of comfortable, and he still has Kabul waiting for him just over the horizon. His life is the way it is because of you, Mr. Bush. You have been the single greatest influence upon his time in this world; you put him over there and hollowed him out, and because of you, it's about to happen again. You were the single biggest influence upon the lives of every person he knew over there, every person he saw over there, and every person he killed over there.
It's funny. I was thinking the other day about when I marched in one of the first large-scale post-inauguration protests against you in Washington, DC. It was May of 2001, it was The Voter's Rights March to Restore Democracy, and it was a few thousand people shouting down the unutterably ruinous Supreme Court decision which unleashed, just as we then feared, everything that has since come to pass. "Not my president!" we bellowed. "Not my president!"
It's funny because that memory seems so very quaint to me now. A stolen election? Pfff. To paraphrase a different president, Americans get scarier stuff than that free with their breakfast cereal nowadays. Thanks to you, governor.
My All-Time-Grand-Prize-Bull-Goose-Gold-Medal-Winning Top Five list of what you've done, in no particular order, and in my own humble opinion:
1. You were warned by the outgoing administration when you first took office. You were warned by the Russians. You were warned by the Israelis. You were warned by the Germans. You were warned in a memo given to you by your own National Security Adviser. You were warned by men like Richard Clarke. You were warned all those times that Osama bin Laden intended to strike the United States, and still the Towers came down.
(All those people working on that Legacy Project of yours should go back to bed, by the way; they are trying to salvage the unsalvageable. You protected us, they claim? Ha. You're 0-1 on terrorism and 0-2 on war)
2. Less than a month after those Towers came down, a reporter asked what you thought we should do. "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer," you replied, "by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." I happened to be watching television and heard you say that live into a camera. The only reason I didn't throw up on myself is because my teeth were clenched too tightly for the vomit to pass my lips. I swallowed hard, grabbed a pen, and wrote down what you said and when you said it. It was October 4, 2001, just after nine in the morning. You'd like people to remember you standing on that pile of rubble in Manhattan, you with the bullhorn and the heroic pose. I, however, will always remember you pitching tax cuts to a devastated nation while a pall of poison smoke still hung in the air over Ground Zero.
3. A few years later, you wanted hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other areas of the federal budget and into your war in Iraq. You took more than $70 billion out of the budget used by the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana to fund the repair and maintenance of the New Orleans levee system. Katrina struck not long after you took that money and poured it into the sand, and the levees failed for lack of funded upkeep. Through this, along with your disinterested disinclination to help your own countrymen in their hour of darkest need, you played the very last note for that old, sad, lost American city. Reflected in those actions are the same budgetary priorities that motivated you to turn Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the hospital where I was born, into an abattoir of suffering and neglect for the wounded soldiers you tore apart for a lie.
4. You let Dick "Crazy-Eyes" Cheney do whatever the hell he wanted to whomever he wanted whenever and wherever he wanted, and be damned to the damned old Constitution anyway. Cheney once said the vice president's office was not part of the same branch of government as the president's office, and he said it with his bare face hanging out the whole time. Why? He didn't want to give any of his official papers over to the National Archives, as mandated by at least two federal laws. Nope, he said, my office is in Congress today, sorry about that, but be sure to come on back after you drop dead. Or words to that effect. That's about one zillionth of a percent of what he did, because you let him pick himself to be your boss.
5. On July 19, 2006, you vetoed H.R. 810. On June 20, 2007, you vetoed S. 5. Both vetoes killed legislation aimed at funding and vastly enhancing the reach and scope of stem cell research in America. The father of someone I know died of bone marrow cancer just after that first veto; he was adopted, no family could be located, so no donor match for a bone marrow transplant could be found. With stem cell therapy, doctors could have taken his own marrow and grown enough healthy, matching marrow to save his life. Two other people I know have diabetes, like millions of Americans. Stem cell research could offer them a cure. Someone else I know has multiple sclerosis, and stem cell research could very well help her, too. She'd write you a thank-you note for those vetoes, but her right hand doesn't work so well anymore. She's getting better with her left hand, so maybe that note can get written next year.
Also, you defied lawfully issued subpoenas and potentially set a precedent that could shatter the separation of powers. You told the American people Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons - which is one million pounds - of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, al-Qaeda connections and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program, even though all of that was a lie. You made a joking video about not being able to find any of it. You outed a deep-cover CIA agent who was running a network designed to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and you did so because her ambassador husband told the truth about you in the public prints.
You gave away our right to privacy by sending the NSA to spy on us. You turned us all into torturers and butchers in the eyes of the world with your decision to use Abu Ghraib prison the same way Saddam Hussein once did. You tried to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead the investigation into 9/11. You turned the entire Justice Department into a carnival of political hackery. You championed the economic policies and deregulation fantasies that have left the financial stability of millions in ashes. You used the threat of terrorism against your own people in order to give yourself political cover. You killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who did you nor us no harm.
You did all this, and so much more.
From a certain perspective, one could argue that you have been the most successful president the country has ever seen. Think about it, because according to your definition of "success," it's true. You came into office looking to make your friends richer, and to fulfill as best you could your most overriding personal belief: that government is the problem, so government must be damaged and denuded to the point of impotence. Through your tax cuts and your two vastly expensive boondoggle wars, you made your friends rich. By unleashing Mr. Cheney and your other minions, you tore the Constitution to shreds and tatters. You have achieved both goals in smashing style, so from that certain perspective, you have triumphed.
Could you also, from the proper perspective, be considered our greatest president?
Perhaps, someday, if we make it so.
It will be in the best interests of many powerful people if we as a nation simply dismiss you and forget you ever happened. A lot of news media people want us to forget you, because in forgetting you, we would forget the media's vast complicity in your actions and misdeeds. A lot of rich people making new fortunes from war profiteering and defense contracts want us to forget they and you even exist, as it would make it possible for them to do it all again someday. A lot of politicians who stapled themselves to you would simply adore it if we forgot about you. The Republican Party would be forever in our debt if we forgot about you.
No. We will not forget you. We will remember.
We the people are going to save you from ignominious oblivion. We will remember. You could be the president who doomed America, the worst president of all time, but we must not, will not let that happen. You will be remembered differently, because we will hold the memory of you high, and behold you, and say, "Never, never, never again." We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.
Your greatness will be defined by how we rise to overcome and undo what you have done. Your greatness will stand forever if we never, ever forget the hard, bitter lessons you taught us. We are responsible for this republic, for our Constitution, and for each other. We are our brother's keeper. You taught us that by becoming our Cain. You nearly slew us, but here we stand, and we defy the place in history you would relegate us to. We defy you, and by doing so, we rise.
Something like you must never again be allowed to happen to this country, and if we save ourselves by preventing you from ever happening again, your greatness is assured. You are the tallest of all possible warnings, and a promise all of us must solemnly and stalwartly keep. If we can damn you to the past, we will save our own future.
May you live forever, you son of a bitch.
check out the full article, here.
To: George W. Bush
From: Your biggest fan
Re: Your imminent unemployment
Greetings, Mr. Bush.
I was sorry to hear about the passing of your cat, India. Eighteen years is a long time for a cat - my mother has one that's 20 and still going strong, if you can believe it - and I'm sure India had a comfortable, caring life with your family.
I got to spend part of last weekend with an old friend of mine. He's a bit older than 18, and he's also a troop who recently rotated back from a tour in Falluja. He just had a baby daughter, and he will be sent to Afghanistan before too much longer. He did his duty in Iraq, dealt his share of death and saw his friends die or be ripped to shreds right in front of him.
He was hollow in a lot of places that had been full before he went to Iraq. He was not the same man we'd said farewell to. But he was alive, and if he survives his upcoming Afghanistan tour, maybe he will get the chance to have a long, comfortable, caring life with his family, just like little India.
At present, my friend's life is the polar opposite of comfortable, and he still has Kabul waiting for him just over the horizon. His life is the way it is because of you, Mr. Bush. You have been the single greatest influence upon his time in this world; you put him over there and hollowed him out, and because of you, it's about to happen again. You were the single biggest influence upon the lives of every person he knew over there, every person he saw over there, and every person he killed over there.
It's funny. I was thinking the other day about when I marched in one of the first large-scale post-inauguration protests against you in Washington, DC. It was May of 2001, it was The Voter's Rights March to Restore Democracy, and it was a few thousand people shouting down the unutterably ruinous Supreme Court decision which unleashed, just as we then feared, everything that has since come to pass. "Not my president!" we bellowed. "Not my president!"
It's funny because that memory seems so very quaint to me now. A stolen election? Pfff. To paraphrase a different president, Americans get scarier stuff than that free with their breakfast cereal nowadays. Thanks to you, governor.
My All-Time-Grand-Prize-Bull-Goose-Gold-Medal-Winning Top Five list of what you've done, in no particular order, and in my own humble opinion:
1. You were warned by the outgoing administration when you first took office. You were warned by the Russians. You were warned by the Israelis. You were warned by the Germans. You were warned in a memo given to you by your own National Security Adviser. You were warned by men like Richard Clarke. You were warned all those times that Osama bin Laden intended to strike the United States, and still the Towers came down.
(All those people working on that Legacy Project of yours should go back to bed, by the way; they are trying to salvage the unsalvageable. You protected us, they claim? Ha. You're 0-1 on terrorism and 0-2 on war)
2. Less than a month after those Towers came down, a reporter asked what you thought we should do. "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer," you replied, "by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." I happened to be watching television and heard you say that live into a camera. The only reason I didn't throw up on myself is because my teeth were clenched too tightly for the vomit to pass my lips. I swallowed hard, grabbed a pen, and wrote down what you said and when you said it. It was October 4, 2001, just after nine in the morning. You'd like people to remember you standing on that pile of rubble in Manhattan, you with the bullhorn and the heroic pose. I, however, will always remember you pitching tax cuts to a devastated nation while a pall of poison smoke still hung in the air over Ground Zero.
3. A few years later, you wanted hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other areas of the federal budget and into your war in Iraq. You took more than $70 billion out of the budget used by the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana to fund the repair and maintenance of the New Orleans levee system. Katrina struck not long after you took that money and poured it into the sand, and the levees failed for lack of funded upkeep. Through this, along with your disinterested disinclination to help your own countrymen in their hour of darkest need, you played the very last note for that old, sad, lost American city. Reflected in those actions are the same budgetary priorities that motivated you to turn Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the hospital where I was born, into an abattoir of suffering and neglect for the wounded soldiers you tore apart for a lie.
4. You let Dick "Crazy-Eyes" Cheney do whatever the hell he wanted to whomever he wanted whenever and wherever he wanted, and be damned to the damned old Constitution anyway. Cheney once said the vice president's office was not part of the same branch of government as the president's office, and he said it with his bare face hanging out the whole time. Why? He didn't want to give any of his official papers over to the National Archives, as mandated by at least two federal laws. Nope, he said, my office is in Congress today, sorry about that, but be sure to come on back after you drop dead. Or words to that effect. That's about one zillionth of a percent of what he did, because you let him pick himself to be your boss.
5. On July 19, 2006, you vetoed H.R. 810. On June 20, 2007, you vetoed S. 5. Both vetoes killed legislation aimed at funding and vastly enhancing the reach and scope of stem cell research in America. The father of someone I know died of bone marrow cancer just after that first veto; he was adopted, no family could be located, so no donor match for a bone marrow transplant could be found. With stem cell therapy, doctors could have taken his own marrow and grown enough healthy, matching marrow to save his life. Two other people I know have diabetes, like millions of Americans. Stem cell research could offer them a cure. Someone else I know has multiple sclerosis, and stem cell research could very well help her, too. She'd write you a thank-you note for those vetoes, but her right hand doesn't work so well anymore. She's getting better with her left hand, so maybe that note can get written next year.
Also, you defied lawfully issued subpoenas and potentially set a precedent that could shatter the separation of powers. You told the American people Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons - which is one million pounds - of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, al-Qaeda connections and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program, even though all of that was a lie. You made a joking video about not being able to find any of it. You outed a deep-cover CIA agent who was running a network designed to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and you did so because her ambassador husband told the truth about you in the public prints.
You gave away our right to privacy by sending the NSA to spy on us. You turned us all into torturers and butchers in the eyes of the world with your decision to use Abu Ghraib prison the same way Saddam Hussein once did. You tried to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead the investigation into 9/11. You turned the entire Justice Department into a carnival of political hackery. You championed the economic policies and deregulation fantasies that have left the financial stability of millions in ashes. You used the threat of terrorism against your own people in order to give yourself political cover. You killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who did you nor us no harm.
You did all this, and so much more.
From a certain perspective, one could argue that you have been the most successful president the country has ever seen. Think about it, because according to your definition of "success," it's true. You came into office looking to make your friends richer, and to fulfill as best you could your most overriding personal belief: that government is the problem, so government must be damaged and denuded to the point of impotence. Through your tax cuts and your two vastly expensive boondoggle wars, you made your friends rich. By unleashing Mr. Cheney and your other minions, you tore the Constitution to shreds and tatters. You have achieved both goals in smashing style, so from that certain perspective, you have triumphed.
Could you also, from the proper perspective, be considered our greatest president?
Perhaps, someday, if we make it so.
It will be in the best interests of many powerful people if we as a nation simply dismiss you and forget you ever happened. A lot of news media people want us to forget you, because in forgetting you, we would forget the media's vast complicity in your actions and misdeeds. A lot of rich people making new fortunes from war profiteering and defense contracts want us to forget they and you even exist, as it would make it possible for them to do it all again someday. A lot of politicians who stapled themselves to you would simply adore it if we forgot about you. The Republican Party would be forever in our debt if we forgot about you.
No. We will not forget you. We will remember.
We the people are going to save you from ignominious oblivion. We will remember. You could be the president who doomed America, the worst president of all time, but we must not, will not let that happen. You will be remembered differently, because we will hold the memory of you high, and behold you, and say, "Never, never, never again." We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.
Your greatness will be defined by how we rise to overcome and undo what you have done. Your greatness will stand forever if we never, ever forget the hard, bitter lessons you taught us. We are responsible for this republic, for our Constitution, and for each other. We are our brother's keeper. You taught us that by becoming our Cain. You nearly slew us, but here we stand, and we defy the place in history you would relegate us to. We defy you, and by doing so, we rise.
Something like you must never again be allowed to happen to this country, and if we save ourselves by preventing you from ever happening again, your greatness is assured. You are the tallest of all possible warnings, and a promise all of us must solemnly and stalwartly keep. If we can damn you to the past, we will save our own future.
May you live forever, you son of a bitch.
1.15.2009
Book Review: Yoga of Sound by Russil Paul
This is a great book that really helps you see how sound effects our mind and our bodies. Everyone knows about noise pollution, but not everyone would consider the hum of our computers and TVs and trains and cars in this category. On the contrary, AUTHOR explains that even the sounds we can barely hear (or rather can barely recognize in our conscious mind) affects our focus, mind abilities, and even our physical body. This is also a great book that explains the overall reach of the the term “yoga” as it is really meant to be understood. It explains that yoga literally means “the path” and that there are many other forms of yoga than just the Jane Fonda-ized exercise versions we see on TV. Not all yogas pertain to the physical body, some pertain to the mind, some pertain to the senses, and some to the emotions.
1.14.2009
He's back! The one and only "abstract poetic" has returned to bring the masses a long-awaited classic. For those that haven't listen to Tribe in a while, or for those that are sadly too young to remember the vibrant sounds of A Tribe Called Quest, now is your chance to get a good solid updated dose of the perfect funky rhythms and breaks mixed with that pure hiphop flow and lyricism. He really took it back with this one. Sounds like it could have all the original members of Tribe with him, some songs very reminiscent of the Mos Def, native toungue sound that Tribe is credited to giving influence. But don't let these praise make you think Q-Tip is stuck in the 90's trying to "keep it real" Far from it! His is new album, production especially, does an amazing job of blending today's sounds with what we all want to hear, which is just that classic feel-good atmosphere that the "golden era" hip-hop created for us. I'm glad he took us back while moving himself forwards. Welcome back Q-Tip, sorry if I've been sleeping on you, I encourage everyone else to wake up and go cop it.
FLOW - 4.5
Lyrical Content 4
Production 4
Albumness 4
Overall - 4
ALBUM REVIEW INTRODUCTION
all of the ratings will be out of a 5 point system. obviously we won't be rating horrible albums, so all of the albums SHOULD be in the upper range, but who knows, one of us could be having a bad day when we do the review. BUT DON'T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT!
flow - is how the emcees ride the beat and what their cadence is. this may also include evaluation on the emcees' voice and tone.
lyrical content - is what the rappers are ACTUALLY SAYING. we know that nobody listens to anything but the beat nowadays, but bear with us.
production - is the quality of the beats and other musical content on the album. thank god for 9th!
album-ness - how all the songs are cohesively arranged on the album and the overall feel of the album.
overall - self-explanatory.
1.12.2009
Book Review: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
This is an updated and thoroughly-explained version of the classic book The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As Rinpoche explains, the TBOTD (as us cool kids call it) is meant to be used and discussed with a guru, who can expand and extrapolate on the concepts that are so beautifully written in the book. This prevents misinterpretations and confusion in regards to the esoteric topics covered, including those on the true nature of mind, what happens to the body, the soul and the mind after death, compassion, and how to truly practice faithfully in our busy and hectic world. Rinpoche uses a mix of jokes, anecdotes, and teachings of his masters and his masters’ masters to explain and convey the truth found in the TBOTD.
This book is not only for the Buddhist looking for information and inspiration, but it is also very helpful in dealing with they dying and their relatives, both before, during, and after death has occurred. This will assist anyone in hospice care, and will help you be a strong shoulder for the bereaved, or help you through troubles you yourself are having in dealing with the loss of a loved one.
This is one of those books that I know I will be rereading over and over again, each time cementing new info and thought into my head. I must quote Talib Kweli whenever anyone asks what my religion is: “Information is the newest religion.” And if that doesn’t satisfy them, I tell them it’s still under investigation as I am still collecting data.
-Matty J
1.09.2009
THANKS GDUBYA!
http://www.truthout.org/010709J
A SATIRICAL LETTER TO BUSH, THANKING HIM FOR EVERYTHING HE'S DONE FOR US.
A SATIRICAL LETTER TO BUSH, THANKING HIM FOR EVERYTHING HE'S DONE FOR US.
1.08.2009
www.brakefastrecords.com
For those that don't know, THC actually reps all over the east coast, 2/3 of us grew up in Maryland. While we never got the local buzz going there, some good friends of ours at Brake Fast Records have been holding things down for the last 2 or 3 years in Baltimore and the surrounding area. Brake Fast isn't your ordinary label just putting out music releases. While they do have a sick line up consisting of rapper A-Class (winner of numerous battles) as well as Mic Brown and producer Tom Delay, the crew has their hands in everything repping every facet of hip-hop and doing their best to bring it to the people. Among many events the Brake Fast plans and promotes for, the most notable is SpeakerBoxin', a festive night of Baltimore's finest talent throwin down in battle mode. They got b-boys, DJs, emcees, and producers all battling for real paper and chance to be Balitmore's king, as this battle is one of the biggest and fastest growing events in the city. Speakerboxin' 4 will be taking place Jan 25 at SONAR in B-more. Def come and check out all that Brake Fast has to offer, plus you can catch THC down there kickin it sellin merch and makin balloon animals.
For those that don't know, THC actually reps all over the east coast, 2/3 of us grew up in Maryland. While we never got the local buzz going there, some good friends of ours at Brake Fast Records have been holding things down for the last 2 or 3 years in Baltimore and the surrounding area. Brake Fast isn't your ordinary label just putting out music releases. While they do have a sick line up consisting of rapper A-Class (winner of numerous battles) as well as Mic Brown and producer Tom Delay, the crew has their hands in everything repping every facet of hip-hop and doing their best to bring it to the people. Among many events the Brake Fast plans and promotes for, the most notable is SpeakerBoxin', a festive night of Baltimore's finest talent throwin down in battle mode. They got b-boys, DJs, emcees, and producers all battling for real paper and chance to be Balitmore's king, as this battle is one of the biggest and fastest growing events in the city. Speakerboxin' 4 will be taking place Jan 25 at SONAR in B-more. Def come and check out all that Brake Fast has to offer, plus you can catch THC down there kickin it sellin merch and makin balloon animals.
1.07.2009
Graffiti Archeology
http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/inside.html
One of the coolest graffiti timeline projects I've ever witnessed. Combines over a decade of graffiti from over 20 different locations on an amzingly neat web layout where the viewer can click by wall and date to see the changes for that spot. Extremely well done in all aspects, the art, the photography, the design, the accessability. Artheads, go check it out.
http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/inside.html
1.06.2009
Review: Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak
OK. Deep breath, everyone. I am NOT going to hate on this album. Suprised? Let me explain.
I think that this album should not be classified as HIPHOP. I think it should be put alongside music like Chromeo, I would call it electrofunk or something of the sort. Once reclassified correctly, this album fits in nicely. Also, after his last album, GRADUATION, he had an unbelievable followup issue. So maybe, unconsciously, Kanye just decided to put out this type of album so completely make the followup issue moot. Or maybe I'm putting too much faith in Kanye's self-awareness...
Eitherway, this album can be played at a party or get together, and it will probably fit perfectly because of the beats. Furthermore, if you are a sad and lonely soul, this will also be great for you to listen to because the lyrics are all that classic Kanye melodrama.
Lov it or hate it, if things go according to how they have int he past, his next album will be great. So just wait, haters.
flow - 2 1/2 (because he doesn't actually RAP on the album much)
lyrical content - 3 1/2
production - 5
album-ness - 4 1/2
overall - just below 4
all of the ratings will be out of a 5 point system. obviously we won't be rating horrible albums, so all of the albums SHOULD be in the upper range, but who knows, one of us could be having a bad day when we do the review. BUT DON'T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT!
flow - is how the emcees ride the beat and what their cadence is. this may also include evaluation on the emcees' voice and tone.
lyrical content - is what the rappers are ACTUALLY SAYING. we know that nobody listens to anything but the beat nowadays, but bear with us.
production - is the quality of the beats and other musical content on the album. thank god for 9th!
album-ness - how all the songs are cohesively arranged on the album and the overall feel of the album.
overall - self-explanatory.
1.05.2009
Book Review: The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
This is a book that my father had around the house my entire life. It was small so i would pick it up and read a little bit from time to time. It was a fictional story about a rich merchant in the middle east circa 0 BCE who, upon getting of retirement age, tells his most trusted advisor the secret to his success. He has a chest of scrolls that show the secrets of doing good business and getting rich.
The middle part of the book are the actual scrolls, and if you go by what the book says, you are supposed to read the first scroll 2 times a day for 30 days before moving on to the next scroll. Obviously, being young i didn't have that type of commitement to growing myself into a super salesman, so i just read it how you normally would. Same diference.
I'm gonna cheat and summarize each scroll here. Holla.
I - today i begin a new life, filled with opportunities.
II - I will greet this day with love in my heart.
III - I will persisit until I succeed.
IV - I am a unique creature of nature. I am nature's greatest miracle.
V - I will live this day as if it is my last.
VI - Today I will be master of my emotions.
VII - I will laugh at the world. I will cultivate a habit of laughter.
VIII - Today i will multiply my value a hundredfold (I guess this one is the real KEY, huh? What it means is to focus on your goals all day everyday)
IX - My dreams are worthless unless they are followed by action. I will act now.
X - I will not pray for material things, I will pray for guidance.
It's a small book, only 111 pages long. Enjoy.
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