Spotted on Plastic and Tongue Tied: The Detroit City Council voted to go forward with a controversial $30 million annual economic development plan that would fund the creation of a business district called African Town.
Whenever race, ethnicity, politics and money are swirled together in a sentence, it's a good recipe for controversy. In the metro Detroit area, that's a given. I've already recycled my plastic opinion about this topic. Twice.
You'll just have to read those comments to know why I think the whole thing is a matter of perspective. Whites are editorializing the idea as being racist or illegal. Besides the Freep link in profwhat's Plastic write up, the Detroit News carps, Council Embraces Racism as a Development Strategy and Laura Berman predicts doom and doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
These clueless crackers must have been too busy putting Dubya bumper stickers on their mini-vans and suburban terrain vehicles that they missed the sea change in Black Politics this year. It's not like they missed reading a Loius Farakhan communiqué -- Bill Cosby was speaking very plainly about it this summer in a language even a dumbass white bricklayer, like me, could understand.
Is it just that the News and Freep writers can't stop whining long enough to friggin' google up a few phrases and people from their own damn stories to look into this from a different perspective -- or is it more likely that these people wouldn't have much to write about -- if they didn't continually play the race card in the Detroit media like they were getting drunk and playing Texas Hold 'Em on Celebrity Poker with George W. Bush's recently approved election-year tax-cut fun bucks?
[Headphones] :: Black Sunshine - White Zombie and KMFDM
According to Reuters News Service, Ellis Marsalis Sr. died Sunday at the age 96 in New Orleans:
"Marsalis was a poultry farmer who converted a barn into a motel in 1943 along the Mississippi River. The 40-room motel catered to blacks, who were not allowed to stay in New Orleans hotels because of racial discrimination.
The Marsalis Motel quickly became famous for its well-appointed rooms, fancy restaurant and shaded gardens. Its clients included civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
The motel saw its fortunes turn for the worse in the 1960s when civil rights legislation allowed blacks to stay at New Orleans hotels that formerly catered only to whites.
In 1986 the facility closed and was later demolished. But the motel also attracted some of the best musicians in the United States, who helped foster a love of jazz among the members of the Marsalis family, including his son Ellis Marsalis Jr., another jazz great."
Shown above is The Marsalis Family CD, released just last year. Ellis Marsalis Sr's son, Ellis Marsalis Jr, recorded this great music upon his retirement from teaching at the University of New Orleans. Not only do jazz superstars Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis play on this jazz celebration, but also another Marsalis protege, Harry Connick Jr.
The funeral for Ellis Marsalis Sr. is scheduled to take place tomorrow in New Orleans.
What song do you want the band to play to herald the arrival of your own dirt nap?
Photographer Alan Pogue took this striking photograph of an injured Iraqi child in March of 2000. He had traveled to Iraq to participate in a Veterans for Peace and Voices in the Wilderness project to rebuild a water treatment plant in Basra. In December of 2002 he returned to Iraq and found her in the remote southern village of Abu Floos, where she lives with her family.
Her name is Israa Abdul Amir. Israa was severely injured in a missile attack conducted by the US military on the morning of January 25, 1999. She had just finished a test at the Al Najed primary school and was walking home from school when the missile struck. A large piece of shrapnel severed her right arm below the shoulder and she suffered chest and abdominal wounds. A metal fragment remains lodged in her skull, a souvenir of the American Empire; doctors could not remove it for fear of killing her. Israa was nine years old.
Cole Miller and Alan Poque went to the Middle East in March of last year in an attempt to bring Israa to the United States for medical care and a prosthetic arm. They stayed in Amman and went to the Iraqi embassy each morning in the hope that visas to enter Iraq would be made available to them. However, the visas did not come through before the invasion began and Israa was left behind.
On August 9, 2004, Cole Miller and Alan Pogue began a Journey to Basra, Iraq to bring Israa, the girl in the No More Victims poster, to Shriners Hospital in Houston, Texas. Read their daily posts from the Middle East in the Journey to Iraq Journal. You can help support this project by making a tax-deductible contribution.
I'm posting this because Alan Poque and Cole Miller have just returned. Their trip blog is an interesting and compelling thing to read.
Thanks for taking an interest in linking Thunderstorms in the Imajica.
Below are the various graphic images I use for Thunderstorms. Since I prefer a black background color (#000000) and sometimes design the images with that in mind, I've also displayed how they might look on a medium tone or color (#999999) and a white (#FFFFFF) background color. Some of the images are animated, some are not. Some shown are one of two similar static images that are animated, or made dynamic in some way, by using mouseover html code.
In order to create a link to Thunderstorms using any of these images, you must first save the image on you PC. Click your right mouse button over the image you want and select save as. Put it in your own file space for the images you display on your web site.
Don't hotlink. I have a habit of moving my images from one server to another and that would cause you to have a file/image missing error message appear on your web pages, if you hotlink the images here. You don't want that. It's annoying and lame. After you have the image displayed on your own web page where you like it, simply wrap the image in the normal A HREF html code to link to a web address (URL) here. An example:
I suggest linking to the main page. But, I also have a few menu style pages. You can honestly link to any web address (URL) on this site. Simply click on the [Permalink] on any blog entry here and the permanent web address (URL) will be displayed in your browser's address line near the top of your browser's window, when that individual page is displayed. The permanent web address will end in a URL like this page: /archive/231.html.
If you have any questions, you can TAG or Contact Me on the left side panel for help. Also, if you're a regular contributor to the comments around here, I will consider making some images for you, if you're totally clueless about how to create images or add them to your web site. I'm actually a more generous person than I like to let people think I am. Most people read the blog and think I'm grouchy -- which I am, don't forget -- but I have made web graphics for people in the past. Ask me on a good day.
I must be clairvoyant. (couMEMO-GATEgh) During my hurricane hiatus at the beginning of September, I worked on a number of things on the PC offline. In between the days when the weather was nice enough and my strength was good enough for me to go outside and literally hack away at the tree on the house with my handy-fucking-dandy machete, there were some predictably stormy days when I spent time inside on the PC offline. I wrote a few things. I played a few games of Quake 3 Arena. I worked in the FL Studio and created a few MP3s. I did some digital doodling.
I have an almost perfect collection of all the various text and image files I have already put online. I even burned some back up archives just in case of various imaginable emergencies. I thought it might be a good opportunity to do something new or different on the Thunderstorms, too.
If you follow the Conspiracy Theory Menu links above, you should get an idea of what the new section is all about. I already posted those four entries: Intro, Contents, Submissions, and Resources. I'll leave you to read those entries rather than bore you by repeating what's in them. So, if you hate the idea, [Make some thunder!] here, now, and get it out of your system. You'll be seeing the conspiracy theory blog entry header from time to time anyway, once I start digging into it and doing my own research on conspiracy theory topics that interest me.
I'll eventually put a link for Conspiracy Theory on the left side panel. That should make it easier for visitors interested in this section to find it faster in the future.
But, since it's just you and me talking right now, and they aren't listening, I'll tell you a secret ...
I created a theme song for our Conspiracy Theory in the Imajica. It's called Psycho Sarah. Snarf it up now, because I don't know how long I'm going to leave it on Hygelic's server space to suck down bandwidth faster than a fat pastor slurping hot sauce off a plateful of chicken wings at Hooters watching a college football game and authoring the Sunday sermon.
Right-Click and Save As on Psycho Sarah to get the MP3 or do whatever you want to do. After a time, it'll only be available on the P2P nets.
