Big Sole Blog (BSB)

I am struggling through reading for classes, and procrastination is calling my name much more than any love, but still I love this song.

Sometimes when we're hit with news about protests or unrest in the world, I like to write an explanation of why the news is important. I don't have time to write much, and for the situation in Egypt, I don't need to because so many journalists and analysts have done so already. Here are some links to help you understand why we should be concerned about instability in Egypt and what could happen:

"Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are." That's one of those sayings we hear repeated and consider wise. You could probably come up with any number of similar quotes that suggest we can discern the nature and character of a person by what they say, do, wear, and even who they marry. Common sense right?But what if the person judging who you are is not looking at you in the real world

Not known for careful language, Joan Rivers (Remember her behavior on Celebrity Apprentice?) has put her foot in her mouth again. The Root.com reports:"We used to have Jackie O," and "now we have Blackie O!" Joan Rivers proclaimed on the Howard Stern radio show today in her commentary about first lady Michelle Obama's style. Rivers said she was going to tell the joke onstage, but held back

CNN reports that Gene Cooley has been "awarded $404,000 for libelous internet postings surrounding the death of his fiancee." The Chicago Sun Times says that shortly after the death of Cooley's fiancée, who was shot to death by her ex-husband, "an anonymous poster hiding behind six user names labeled Cooley, among other things, a pervert and a drug user." He lived in a small town, Blairsville, Ga

It's time for Americans and our politicians to seek unity for the sake of the nation, and "instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let's fix what needs fixing and move forward." That was the theme of President Barack Obama's second State of the Union address that he delivered to the nation tonight. More than once he used the phrase "move forward," appealing to Democratic and

By now you've heard the news that Oprah Winfrey has a half-sister named Patricia. Oprah did not learn of this news until late October of last year, and on Thanksgiving, she and Stedman Graham drove to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to meet Patricia.The talk show host has made it clear that Patricia is the daughter of her mother Vernita Lee and is not the daughter of Oprah's father, Vernon Winfrey. Also,

Adding social media drama to the Carlina White kidnapping case, ABC News reports Ann Pettway aka Agnotta Pettway used Facebook to turn herself into authorities. Pettway is the woman who raised White under the name Njedra Nance, and is expected to face federal kidnaping charges in court today in Manhattan court.White was kidnapped from a hospital in Harlem, New York, when she was only nineteen

The Associated Press reports that the FBI has apprehended in Connecticut Agnotta Pettway aka Ann Pettway. She is the woman who raised Carlina White , the young woman who solved her own kidnapping case recently to be reunited with her biological family in New York. White, who was raised under the name Nejdra Nance, was kidnapped in 1987 from a Harlem, New York, hospital when she was only 19 days

The New York Times and other news sources report that Glenn Beck's commentary has endangered the life of this 78-year-old woman who teaches political science. Fraces Fox Piven has been getting death threats since Beck has labeled her an enemy of the Constitution. As I have said before, there's strong evidence to indicate a correlation between rising hate speech and monstrous crimes against

While watching Real Time with Bill Maher last night, I learned that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and the network were finally divorcing. Rachel Maddow was on and she said Olbermann seemed pretty calm about it all. Maher said he heard the news just before he went on the air.Some media sources say Olbermann was fired; others say it was a mutual end-of-the-road decision after eight years. As you may

This is an amazing story from the New York Post, ABC News, and other sources:Carlina White, separated from her family when she was kidnapped as a baby 23 years ago, followed her instincts to reunite with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson. I remember this kidnapping being in the news after it happened in the late 80s. The woman who kidnapped Carlina was disguised as a nurse, and I

UPDATE: Fox News reports that Marrero has a criminal record and some speculate that she may have staged her fall to get money. The speculation is understandable, but nevertheless posits a less probable scenario unless Marrero's detractors are saying the security guard was also involved with the staging. If the security guard had not caught the fall on tape, laughed and put it on YouTube, and the

I have not fact-checked the information in the first video, but it does match with what I remember hearing when I was a child when adults in my community talked about John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. People perceived southern conservatives of that period to be violently angry and that white segregationists' speech reflected

Considering how much I've already written about Sarah Palin's use of rhetoric, even posting video of her infamous "blood libel" speech with transcript at my personal website, I hesitated before posting this video that I found at New Black Man (H/T GC). It's "An Apology to Sarah Palin for the Blood Libel from Her Fellow Americans" by Anthony Kelley, a composer and professor, and it's a calm piece

I discovered today that my poem "Remembering a Life" honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was read at a Hagerstown Community College celebration for MLK Day 2011. This is not the first time the poem has been recited at such an event. I started to learn of people reciting it and some of my other poems at special occasions around 2006, and I think I wrote about the recitations in 2008.However,

More than likely, any attempt to remove your personal data from Spokeo.com will only result in Spokeo having more information about you.Everytime I look around on Facebook lately, someone is posting a warning about Spokeo.com, the same website discussed in the video above. Spokeo is a personal information aggregator promoting itself as a search engine with the tagline "not your grandma's phone

This MLK day, I want to share a public radio broadcast I heard on WWNO Saturday, "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Public Imagination." Its producers at On the Media describe the show as follows:On August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. did what he’d done countless times before, he began building a sermon. And in his sermons King relied on improvisation - drawing on sources and references that

Republican David Frum's website, FrumForum.com, reports that the Republican National Committee has a new Chair: "Wisconsin State Chair Reince Priebus was elected the next Republican National Committee Chairman." The article charts the vote and a little bit of drama.So, thist the party's first African-American Chair, Michael Steele is out. But we saw that coming. Mike just wasn't getting results,

Pima Community College released the following video of Jared Lee Loughner rambling and ranting around its campus, and media enterprises are calling in more experts to decipher meaning behind his jumbled words and bizarre behavior. The school suspended Loughner last year after he showed myriad signs of being mentally disturbed and possibly a danger to himself, college staff and students. Multiple

This was my day yesterday: At 8:30 a.m., I got a call. My son, 20, had wrecked my daughter's Chevy Cobalt. He was lost, and had made a bad turn, committing a failure to yield. An SUV hit the car on the passenger's side. Thank God he was alone in it.The Cobalt then careened into a traffic light pole on Marconi and Harrison by City Park. The Other driver, one of the city's District Attorneys, was

I did not want to overload my blog with another lengthy post about Sarah Palin. However, the controversy over her use of the term "blood libel' in her "America's Enduring Strength Speech" and reports that death threats against her are increasing spurred me to write something anyway.Instead of publishing my thoughts here, I have published them at my personal website, WritingJunkie.net: "More than

Oprah Winfrey tells Piers Morgan in an interview for his new CNN show that her greatest failure was the movie Beloved based on Toni Morrison's novel that won the Nobel Prize in literature. She said that after the movie bombed at the box office, she went into a depression for the first and only time of her life, feeling that she existed under a veil and asking her chef to prepare macaroni and

With the tragedy in Arizona and challenges to vitriolic rhetoric, Obama's opponents are pulling up the relatively few examples of him speaking forcefully and Palin's defenders are pulling out an old 2004 bullseye graphic from a nonprofit Democratic action group, but the American debate challenging politicians, the media, pundits, and bloggers to dial back the ugly tone of our political rhetoric

In the video below, director David Caruso talks about the origins of John Smith, the main character of the new movie I am Number Four, a Dreamworks production.Looks like we science fiction and fantasy fans might have an adrenaline-rush movie to see next month.I am Number Four, release date February 18, stars Alex Pettyfer and Dianna Argon of Glee. I also glimpse in the trailer Timothy Olyphant,

As I said in my first post on the Arizona shootings when I posited that the shooter means "conscious dreamer" not "conscience dreamer"—I see no evidence that directly links Sarah Palin to shooter Jared Lee Loughner. Still, I add that we should be able to look at Palin's rhetoric and decide whether she is responsible and wise or callous and unfit for national public office.I think that Palin has

Photo of Gilles Marini by Fred GoudonI'm a fan of ABC's Monday night mystery series Castle staring Nathan Fillion as mystery writer Richard Castle and Stana Katic as Kate Beckett. It's sort of screwball comedy at times with lots of silly puns and improbable circumstances, but I like it. The relationship between Castle and Kate and Castle, his mother, and daughter works and entertains. Tonight's

I got this in email yesterday, video at TED of Malcolm Gladwell in his talk, filmed at TED2004, in which he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of the books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. LearnOutLoud.com has this accurate description of Gladwell's talk:... he explores how the food industry

First, let's get this out the way. The word is "conscious" not "conscience," but I don't think the shooter knows the difference between the two words. I say this later in the post as well and tell why I think he means "conscious" not "conscience". He was going for "conscious dreamer" not "conscience dreamer" in my opinion.I am including Congresswoman Giffords's comments from last spring in which

On Twitter, someone asked me had I seen CNN's Parker/Spitzer show tonight. I had not, but since I was told about it I kept my eye out, and wowsers! What a great conversation. From leaving the 18th amendment out of the reading of the Constitution to sanitizing Huckleberry Finn, the panelists were deep.Thank you to Nubia Qua on Twitter. If she hadn't told me, I might have missed it. Yesterday I

Soledad O'Brien did one of the best interviews I've seen with Jamie and Gladys Scott since their release. They talked about the kidney donation; Gladys reiterated that she wanted to donate a kidney as far back as January 2010, and Jamie said she and Gladys refuse to let bitterness consume them. They also answered questions about how race played a role in their convictions for a crime they

Mrs.Grapevine informed me that the Old School Friday meme for 2011 is kicking off, and the theme for today is Teena Marie. I posted other videos of the singer when she died in December. But thinking about OSF, I came across not a song but this great video of Teena Marie singing to Patti Labelle, "Somebody Loves You, Baby" and after she's done, Patti talks about how much she loves her, and that

Lately people have been surfing to my blog after googling for Prince comments on Michael Jackson, and I can tell from the key words they don't mean Michael's son. They probably land here because of my old post about the anniversary of 25th anniversary of Purple Rain falling on the day of Michael's death. Nevertheless, I decided the visits must be a sign that I should post something on the topic

Related: Linguist John McWhorter: Sanitizing Huckleberry Finn Insults Black PeopleI just read about the exceptional foolishness of a misguided southern publisher. At CNN, a Mark Twain biographer, Ron Powers, calls NewSouth Books' decision to strip the word "nigger" from Mark Twain's classic Huckleberry Finn, "vapid, smiley-faced effrontery ... (that) corrodes the foundations of respect for

A spokesperson for the Scott Sisters announced last night that the Scott Sisters will be released Friday to begin their new lives on parole. They go home to their mother and their five children and grandchildren. The women were convicted of armed robbery in 1994, but how that conviction came about back then is clouded with dubious court procedures. For more details on this case, as well as

My essay "Haley Barbour Will Free the Scott Sisters: Beyond Race to the Bitter Aftertaste" has just been published at BlogHer.com. I'm definitely happy that the sisters will walk freely away from a Mississippi prison; however, I don't think joy for them, their five children, their grandchildren, siblings, and their mother, Evelyn Rasco, should divert voter attention from the governor's

It's been raining ducks and alligators here, and my dog, who is afraid of thunderstorms but won't go in his dog house, has been outside going nuts. Furthermore, I postponed a trip across the lake partly because I don't like driving over the Twin Span when the rain's pouring down, but also because I'm functioning on little sleep today. Verizon Wireless called me this morning before my wake time

What would a real-life superhero be called in New Orleans, Gumbo Girl? The WhoDat Wonder? The Crawfish Crusader? Given that so many of our violent criminals here are young male teens who are foolish enough to be fearless and don't respect life, I think the superheroes would lose. The shooters here would intentionally try to hit them. The superheroes in cities like New Orleans are the people who

The Scott Sisters are free! Watch videos here.Below is a podcast of the interview, and at BlogHer.com, this opinion piece is live, "Haley Barbour to Free the Scott Sisters: Beyond Race to the Bitter Aftertaste." Powered by Podbean.comBy now many of you have heard the good news that this past Wednesday December 29, 2010, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced that he is suspending

I'm using my blog now partly as a commonplace book. Last night I came across this article or series of articles at the New York Times about why criticism matters. Since the one I read discusses in part how the Internet has changed views of audience in fiction and writing, I decided to bookmark it. Stephen Burns writes:While (Alfred) Kazin could complain in 1960 that “the audience doesn’t know

When I wrote on Wednesday about Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour suspending the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, my post's headline emphasized the kidney deal. Barbour's treatment of the Scott Sisters just did not seem right to me. Now I've learned via ABC News that that deal may not even be legal. Read the full story at ABC where bioethicists indicate, "Governor's Deal Violates 50-

I'm currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman, a book that I've been saying I will settle down and read for at least five years now. He entertains with provocative turns of phrase and vivid description as well as compelling character development. His sense of humor is worth a study all by itself. I know I'll do a lot of thinking as I read it and after I finish it.It's 2011, which will be the