The search for RELLevance

I don't have a long drawn out tribute prepared for Michael Jackson. I'm not going to psychoanalyze his every move or point out why you should or shouldn't like him.

I'd rather focus on the music and leave the sociology, psychology and other disciplines in regards to Mike for the experts.

My first Jackson memory was, surprisingly, Off The Wall. Even though it came out three years before I was born, OTW really resonated with me a lot more than some of his other records.

In fact, it wasn't until middle school (after Dangerous came out) that I really listened to Thriller intently. I knew I was supposed to like, just didn't know why.

I loved most of Bad and really liked Dangerous (that was the first time I was old enough to really understand music).

Despite their lack of commercial "success" — even though both sold at least 10 million records worldwide — Invisible and HIStory were two really good albums to my hears.

In death, I'm glad that people will fully recognize his musical achievements. Jackson changed music forever, several different times.

We should thank him for that and leave the other stuff to people who actually know about it.

My top MJ songs (80 minutes worth, in no particular order):

Will You Be There
Off The Wall
Human Nature
Billie Jean
Bad (Video version)
Smooth Criminal
The Way You Make Me Feel
Leave Me Alone
Who is it?
Thriller
Rock With You
PYT
Butterflies
Remember The Time
Dirty Diana

I'm pretty sure "Remember The Time" is my favorite MJ track though.


Heal The World

Labels: Entertainment, Michael Jackson, Music

What a sick individual.

Excerpt:

A Duke University official is accused of offering his 5-year-old adopted son for sex on the Internet, according to the FBI and court documents in the case.
Frank M. Lombard is the associate director of Duke University's Center for Health Policy.

Frank M. Lombard, 42, was arrested last week at his home in Durham, North Carolina. During an Internet chat, Lombard allegedly offered the child to the person he was chatting with, who was a task force officer from Washington's Metropolitan Police, the FBI said in a statement.

The chat was initiated after a confidential source facing child pornography charges told authorities they had witnessed a man, allegedly Lombard, performing sex acts on a child over the Internet.

During the chat, according to the complaint filed against Lombard, he told the officer that he had performed multiple sex acts on the boy and that the officer could do the same if he came to Durham.

According to a transcript of the chat, reprinted in the complaint, Lombard allegedly told the officer that he had to hide the abuse from his partner and that he drugged the child with allergy medication.

Lombard was arrested June 24, and two children at the home, including the 5-year-old, were removed from the home by the North Carolina Department of Social Services, the FBI said.

Labels: Child Molestation, Child Pornography, Duke

President urges country's authorities to identify those responsible for it


Excerpt:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday called the death of Neda Agha-Soltan "suspicious" and urged the country's authorities to identify those responsible for it, Iran's semi-official Fars news agency reported Monday.

The 26-year-old's death has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to the government's official election results since it was captured on amateur video. Within hours of its being posted online June 20, she had become the iconic victim of the Iranian government crackdown.

But Iran has been pushing back against eyewitness reports that she was shot by pro-government Basij militiamen perched on a rooftop near a demonstration.

Ahmadinejad told the head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, to probe the incident and make the results of his investigations public, Fars reported Monday, nine days after Agha-Soltan was killed. Photo See gallery of Neda and the affect of her life.

"The massive propaganda of the foreign media, as well as other evidence, proves the interference of the enemies of the Iranian nation who want to take political advantage and darken the pure face of the Islamic republic," he said in a letter to Shahroudi, according to the news agency.

Labels: Iran, Media, Politics, President Obama

from the same person — Bomani Jones.

The first thing we need to say about Michael Jackson

Why you like Mike more than I do

Labels: Entertainment, Michael Jackson, Music, Pop Culture, Twitter

Ladies and Gentlemen, our Uncle Clarence Thomas!

Labels: Politics, Self-Esteem, The Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

Labels: Kim Jong-il, North Korea, Twitter

Okay, so Iran is corrupt. We get it. But the latest leap in “acceptable” journalistic practices scares me – and this is coming from a guy that made his name studying Facebook.
As one of the strongest advocates for assimilating “new media” into the holistic approach to reporting on real-time news events (naturally, given my research thus far) I am always the most skeptical when it comes to critically evaluating each source to identify whether it is in concert with verifiable reports and to denote which elements I derive from sources veiled in Internet anonymity. Otherwise, a slip-up – especially on this scale, would discredit the value of my work and undermine any of my future efforts extolling the value of social media for research and reporting purposes. Even as a new media enthusiast, I disapprove with the methods employed thus far – and on the fence about the remedy. Whether it should be coordinated in a manner laden with disclaimers, or reported as conjecture in commentary sections, I’m not sure, but the current discourse skates ethical lines that I would not utilize.

One interesting thing to consider: If the social networking sources are indeed blocked (as the stories deriving information from them suggest), then such a reality would preclude internal Iranian information from “leaking out” of the country’s confines. The concept of deriving information about social networking sites being blocked from social networking sites discredits the information being reported (or extremely discredits the source). There are always anomalies, like proxy-dodging sites for example, which allow individuals to skirt blocked content – but the individuals web savvy enough to pursue this mode of censorship evasion are neither representative of the Iranian populous as a whole, nor are they common skills for the average field journalist (lest they are complete internet nerds such as myself – in which case they would fare poorly in hostile environments in the first place).

It is certainly possible the answer for how these reports manage to reach our media sources, if they are indeed internal - is the fact that most of the protesters are allegedly of the recent-university-graduate age, based upon the demographic data we have been given on our end. If Iranian cubicle culture is anything like ours (see also: Dilbert), then it has honed their skills in avoiding workplace restrictions on web usage. If that is, in fact, the case – then they certainly do not represent the voters of Iran, and are far more likely to represent Mousavi supporters embedded in their own cause.

The other interesting caveat of that same technology is that proxy evasion allows anonymous sources from other nations to pose as internal Iranian correspondents. If we were to take the extremely paranoid approach to viewing the dynamic (by “extreme,” I mean the one that involves wearing aluminum foil hats to keep the “aliens” from reading our thoughts), one could go so far as to say that CIA or another western covert organizations are fueling the anti-Ahmadinejad press in order to force the hand of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to depose the leader for foreign interests. Whatever the case may be, it needs to be approached less recklessly, if for no other purpose than to reduce the number of future retractions.

Labels: Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran, Mousavi, Twitter

Got of lets him have it in this interview. I'm not a Tyler Perry fan and I know they are talking about something else, but someone should rip Spike for "Kobe Doin' Work."

Spike Lee Rips Tyler Perry

Excerpt:

Spike Lee had an interview with Ed Gordon on Our World with Black Enterprise scheduled to air this weekend. In the interview he complained about “coonery and buffoonery” and both of Tyler Perry’s shows “Meet the Browns” and “House of Payne,” comparing them to characters from minstrel shows.

“We’ve had this discussion back and forth. When John Singleton [made 'Boyz in the Hood'], people came out to see it. But when he did ‘Rosewood,’ nobody showed up. So a lot of this is on us! You vote with your pocketbook, your wallet. You vote with your time sitting in front of the idiot box, and [Tyler Perry] has a huge audience. We shouldn’t think that Tyler Perry is going to make the same film that I am going to make, or that John Singleton or my cousin Malcolm Lee [would make]. As African-Americans, we’re not one monolithic group, so there is room for all of that. But at the same time, for me, the imaging is troubling and it harkens back to ‘Amos n’ Andy.’”

Labels: Amos and Andy, Coonerriffic, Spike Lee, Tyler Perry

ABC hoping 'Flash Forward' is new 'LOST'

Excerpt:

ABC's new drama "FlashForward" could be fixing to unseat "Lost" in the hearts of viewers looking for character-driven stories with an overarching mystery.

The network took the unusual step of screening the show Wednesday for media types in New York and Los Angeles, in part because it doesn't want too many copies floating around, raising the risk of spoilers.

"For us, it's much more exciting for the audience to not know everything in the show," said executive producer Jessika Goyer.

"FlashForward," which will launch Sept. 24, revolves around a mysterious event that causes everyone on Earth to black out for just over two minutes - and which gives each person a glimpse into his or her future.

The show unfolds as the characters deal with what has been revealed about their lives - and the central mystery of what happened.

It stars Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Sonya Walger, Courtney B. Vance, Brian O'Byrne, Christine Woods, Zachary Knighton and Peyton List.

Goyer said the show was based on a novel she and her husband read eight years ago.

When they sold the series to ABC, they provided the network with a bible of where it goes after the pilot.

"We know beyond the first season what the broad-stroke arcs of the mysteries are, and broad stokes where the characters go, which is the important part," she said. "We know what caused it, we know who's involved ... there's very little we went in not having a game plan for."

Labels: ABC, Fall 2009 television, Lost

If we're going to get hit by an Asteroid, Armaggedon/Deep Impact-style, we won't know about it until the military decides we can.

Military hush-up: Space rocks now classified

Excerpt:

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere — but no longer.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

"It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy ... a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn't be done any other way. It's a regrettable change in policy."

Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.

Labels: Government, Military, NASA, Politics, Space

I've mentioned her before, but if you missed it -- reacquaint yourself with Janelle Monae.

Janelle Monae has said she uses her imagination as an escape from a rough childhood

Labels: Entertainment, Good Female Singers, Janelle Monae, Music

If you know me well, then you'll understand that I really like Colin Cowherd. Along with Bomani Jones (twitter.com/bomani_jones), he's my favorite sports talk radio personality.
He's a smart dude and I can just respect and understand the angles from which he comes.

Now, he's going to co-host a daily hour show on ESPN called Sportsnation. It's first day is July 6.

I think it'll be good. Better than ATH.

LINK

Excerpt:

ESPN and ABC Sports president George Bodenheimer also welcomed Robert Iger, CEO of parent company Walt Disney, and Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president, Disney/ABC Television Group, at the event at Times Square's Nokia Theater.

"The fans will have unprecedented input in the show's daily rundown," said SportsNation coordinating producer Jamie Horowitz about the new show. "Our goal is to bring the fans into our production meetings. The fans choose the topics, provide the angles and decide how much Brett Favre talk is really needed."

Labels: Colin Cowherd, Entertainment, ESPN, Sports, Sportsnation, Television

These Kobe/Lebron commercials are just great. I know they've used puppets before, they styled this one a lot differently. The agency made one of the country's biggest sports debate into a comedy/parody and it's really funny.

Here are two good ones.

Labels: Advertising, Great Marketing, Kobe, Lebron James, Nike