May 14, 2013

Sweetie pies rotd

I'm gonna go ahead and ask the question: Has a writer ever been this dominant?

Philip Roth has won at least one each of all the major book awards, but he's literally 600 years old. He was forced to retire because everything he was writing had become weirdly sexual in nature (even more so than usual), which is what I always suspected happens to you in old age.

I've "won" Yelp Review of the Day four times now in less than two years, and I'm only (an extremely old) 32. This is like when it became clear that Tiger Woods was the best golfer of all time, of ALL TIME, and CACs tried to argue that he hadn't won as many tournaments as Jack Nicklaus.

You guys know I don't even use Yelp like that. I can't even afford to eat very good food in the "comfort" of my own home anymore, let alone in a restaurant. I've only written two reviews since 2011, and both of them have been Review of the Day: (1) Blueberry Hill, on my little brother's birthday, so my parents paid; and now (2) Sweetie Pie's. as seen on TV, when my cousin moved into an apartment nearby and my old man called me and told me to come down there, the weekend before Infinite Crab Meats came out. I was half afraid he wouldn't be treating, and I'd somehow end up in jail. I only made like $8,000 last year. I figured at the very least I wouldn't have to pay taxes on it, but apparently you can't make so little that you don't have to pay taxes. I owe $120 to the IRS. I'm saving up for something that costs $120. I'm officially an eight year-old.

But at least I figure I can safely say that I'm the greatest citizen food journalist of all time, of ALL TIME. I mean honestly, feel free to try to find someone who's been as dominant in this field as I have, and I'll be willing to concede that point. You don't get any money for it anyway. I consulted the Google just now re: greatest citizen food journalist of all time, and it didn't turn up anything other than Wikipedia entries for real food writers, who write for actual magazines, newspapers and what have you. I'm not even sure if the world's most accurate encyclopedia carries entries for citizen food journalists. This field may be too new and groundbreaking. I'd go in and figure out how to add one myself, but that wouldn't look right.

Bol @ Yelp

My latest RotD

Previously: I continue to dominate citizen food journalism

Posted by Bol at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 08, 2013

via gawker.com

The Axis of PC is pissed because the crowd at last night's Danny Brown show (fine people, I'm sure) said something mean to opener Kitty Pryde, and Danny Brown didn't emerge from the backstage area to lecture the crowd about how to treat a female rapper.

This is ridiculous for a number of reasons.

1) Either men and women should be treated equally, or men should be required to intervene when female artists are booed for putting on a bad show.

2) The next time an opening act is treated with respect will be the first time. Look out next week for the Village Voice's hard-hitting exposé on how someone shouted Free Bird at a Riff Raff show, when Riff Raff doesn't even sing Free Bird. He's not even a singer!

3) If only the Sugar Hill Gang had intervened when Kool Moe Dee dissed Busy Bee in 1982, Lil Wayne would still have his endorsement deal with Mountain Dew.

4) What if she thought that the crowd really meant for her to stop what she was doing and suck Danny Brown's dick, and she did it? (Crazier things have been known to happen at a Danny Brown show.) Would that be considered sexual assault, and if so, who would be the perp and who would be the victim/survivor?

5) Because she's white, not to mention a ginger (i.e. more white -- and more adorable -- than regular white people), Kitty Pryde doesn't have the rhythm of black rappers. It's hard enough to concentrate on what she's doing without the crowd making so much noise, let alone saying things that are sexual in nature, which makes it that much more difficult to concentrate. It took me twice as long as usual to write this post, because I had to keep stopping and starting again.

However, having said all of that, of course I can't abide any mistreatment of Kitty Pryde. If I were around when a guy started yelling for her to suck Danny Brown's dick, and I though that it would be fairly easy to do and that I wouldn't get caught doing it, I'd totally kick his ass.

That's not how you talk to a woman.

Posted by Bol at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 26, 2013

via www.ebony.com

A Rick Ross song advocated drugging women with molly and then making sweet, passionate love to them while they were incapacitated, and they didn't even know it!

The ladies at Ebony magazine didn't become aware of Rawse and Rocko's "U.O.E.N.O" until just now, six weeks after the fact, and as a result... well, I'm not aware that anyone actually heard Rawse's song and decided to use molly as a non-consensual lovemaking aid. But imagine if women really were at risk of people looking to Rawse songs for dating strategy.

*shudders at the thought*

(Several baskets of lemon pepper wings at Wing Stop, anyone? Ladies? Nullus.)

"U.O.E.N.O" was leaked to the Internets back on Valentine's Day, just in time for anyone looking for a last minute date idea. I didn't catch wind of it until late in the afternoon, after I'd already posted Action Bronson and the hilarious Hologram a/k/a Jay Steele's remake of Akinyele's classic "Put It in Your Mouth," every teenage white girl's favorite rap song (one of many, many reasons to love teenage white chick's), not to mention Donwill's ode to white chicks "All White," the video for which altered the course of the afternoon I posted it, the day before. I wasn't necessarily looking for any more Valentine's Day rap songs, and I wouldn't have bothered posting the Rawse song if he hadn't referred to both non-consensual lovemaking and lemon pepper wings in the same verse -- which was a little bit too ridiculous for me, thus leaving me with no other choice. (Bum rappers take note.)

I only became aware of the, erm, potentially offensive nature of the Rawse song because I saw people discussing it on Twitter. Because I follow people who sometimes discuss rap music. Because I'm an actual member of the hip-hop community. (Though, I can't stand rap music. And rappers. And their fans. LOL) I posted a YouTube video with audio of the Rawse + Rocko song here, a few other hip-hop bloggers posted it elsewhere, and I figured that would be the extent of the outrage having to do with "U.O.E.N.O." This was not unlike the response to the Soulja Boy song, from a few months ago, that was an even more explicit endorsement of the use of drugs as non-consensual lovemaking aids. Expect it to become an outrage with the Ebony magazine set six months from now -- or maybe never. They never did issue a statement on the sexual assault allegations against Das Racist one way or the other. Though, I guess the survivor in that case wasn't black. Nor were the alleged perps, for that matter.

Turns out the girls at Ebony probably just missed the Rawse song back when it happened. They didn't pick up on it until it was reported yesterday in AllHipHop Rumors. That alone should tell you all you need to know about both the media consumption of the people who write Ebony magazine and the state of the once-legendary AllHipHop rumors column. Since appearing in AllHipHop Rumors, "U.O.E.N.O" has been posted by literally every media outlet catering to black women. It's not a very good song, but it might become a hit just yet. At the very least, whoever had the foresight to upload pirated audio of it to their YouTube channel could be in the position to rake in the big bucks. "U.O.E.N.O" could be the new "Harlem Shake" -- but arguably even more unfortunate. In addition to the Ebony magazine article and the video response from President Doorknockers that I posted this morning, I see there's posts up at Clutch Magazine and What About Our Daughters (which once tried to lay a non-consensual lovemaking rap on me), and an open letter to Rawse from someone named Dee Dee -- presumably not one of his babies' mothers -- that's been posted on the aforementioned AllHipHop and cross-posted elsewhere. A Google blog search for "Rick Ross date rape" turns up 59,000 results. Damn.

The so-called Rape Culture is hot right now on the Internets. Yesterday, I posted this ad for Angostura single barrel rum that's been burning up Tumblr, along with a caption I added about how Angostura could be used to avoid the dreaded friend zone. (My undergrad degree is in marketing.) The Angostura ad, without my caption, could be read as endorsement of non-consensual lovemaking... if you're the kind of person who could find a sexual assault in a ham sandwich. But otherwise, it doesn't seem to be suggesting you get a girl blackout drunk on Angostura and then have your way with her. As if a newspaper would run such an ad -- even in Angostura's native Trinidad and Tobago. The dead giveaway is the term "real drink" in the ad copy, which suggests that the alternative would be to give a girl some other drink, which would lead her to be not as likely to pursue a physical relationship with you. This is the reason I suggest keeping an empty bottle of Grey Goose you bought with the money your grandmother gave you when you graduated from college, in 2003, and refilling it with the relatively inexpensive Aristocrat. Women are very brand-conscious. If you keep it in the freezer, you can't notice any difference in the taste.

My Twitter mentions have been blowing up ever since I posted the Angostura ad yesterday afternoon; the only thing I ever posted that was nearly as popular was an amazing group shot of the Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders in yoga pants that I posted Super Bowl Sunday. It was retweeted by celebrity non-consensual lovemaking opponent Zerlina "Sic" Maxwell, and that alone was retweeted over 150 times. (Click through to check out the tweet itself, as well as responses from a veritable who's who of people who live to discuss the so-called Rape Culture on Twitter.) Maxwell was the original Adria Richards, several days before there was a such thing as an Adria Richards. She went on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News to debate whether or not women should be allowed to pack heat to fend off non-consensual lovemakers. Hannity, noted defender of women that he is, was of course in favor of gun rights. Maxwell, meanwhile, argued that guns aren't a good way to prevent surprise sex, because when she was made love to non-consensually (has she mentioned that she was made love to non-consensually?) it was by someone she knew. And you can't very well shoot someone you know, can you? So our best bet would be to teach men how not to make sweet, passionate love to women without their consent. Because what if some guys just don't know that's against the law? No really, that was more or less the gist of her argument.

If you can imagine, this appearance on Hannity didn't go over well with that show's audience. Her Twitter (no Boutros), comments on articles she's written for various websites and her actual phone were inundated with rape threats as a result -- serious ones, I'm sure. This prompted an article for... you guessed it, the aforementioned Ebony in which she fleshed out the specious argument she first floated on Hannity. It's since gone more viral than the clap. Here's an article from a men's rights website pointing out some of the many, many things wrong with it. Essentially, what she did is take the fact that in some places it's technically illegal to have sex with a woman if she's drunk, even if it's your wife, and just took that to its logical conclusion, Jeff Foxworthy-style. Fail to understand why a woman wouldn't want to fight back against someone who's supposedly making sweet, passionate love to her without her consent, because she knew him beforehand? You might be part of the Rape Culture. Have you ever got it on with a chick who wasn't at least a little bit high or drunk? You might as well take yourself down to the station and turn yourself in. Reading it actually made me kinda glad I have no prospects with women (who don't charge for it). This shit is getting too risky.

The last time rap music, sexual assault, politics, the media and black romantic dysfunction all collided in such a perfect storm of Internets fuckery was the time Too Short gave middle school-age children advice on fingerbanging. This Rawse song was a non-issue for over a month, but just in the past few hours it seems to have eclipsed the Too Short Fingerbang Incident just in terms of feigned media outrage. Surely a lot of that has to do with this coming on the heels (er, having been discovered on the heels) of the hilarious Adria Richards firing and the non-Too Short-related Steubenville fingerbang incident. Non-consensual lovemaking is hot right now in the media. Everyone except my dumb ass is probably making a shedload of money from banner ads behind this shit. Careers are being built. Zerlina "Sic" Maxwell could become a perennial cable news presence in much the same way that half the people you see on cable news today cut their teeth during the OJ trial. Greta Van Susteren, for example, started out discussing the OJ trial on CNN, before getting a horrifically botched plastic surgery and transitioning over to Fox News. Roland Martin, who was recently let go from CNN, rose to ascot-clad prominence discussing Bill Cosby's pound cake speech, as did the one black guy from the Atlantic Monthly, the new best black writer of all time, as crowned by the white community. "Sic" Maxwell won't have to sweat having her face tightened up once America gets over this obsession with non-consensual lovemaking (to the extent that that's possible), because black don't crack, baby.

But I doubt much actual good will come of any of this. Even if a Rick Ross song could put women at risk of being taken advantage of, no article at Clutch Magazine could possibly help matters. No guy would ever read such an article for any reason other than to skewer it. Any guy who would actually read "Sic" Maxwell's five tips for not raping a woman won't so much as get up from his seat for the rest of this afternoon, let alone approach a woman. You can sense the resignation in the tone of the last few paragraphs of the Ebony magazine article. It's mentioned that Rawse has deals with Island Def Jam and Warner Music, as well as his own line of 4x sweat pants with Reebok (which I would own in its entirety if I had any money), but it's not suggested you actually bother firing off an angry letter. If the lonely hoodrats of the Internets, as a collective, couldn't get a white chick let go from a rap magazine, of which there should be no white chick (in a non-modeling capacity), how in the world do they expect to interrupt Rawse's crab meats consumption? No, their best bet would be to somehow get me a decent-paying job, for at least one day, and then get me fired. I'd be willing to go along with this, but only if I get to keep that first week's check, prorated for the days I was let go for being part of the so-called Rape Culture.

Posted by Bol at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 25, 2013

via www.nytimes.com

“We know that consumers don’t care if the content they are consuming is editorial driven or brand driven as long as it’s great,” said Doug Rohrer, SpinMedia’s chief revenue officer.

When Spin magazine ran out of money last year, it was sold to a sketchy Internets company called Buzzmedia. Buzzmedia promptly pulled the plug on the print version of Spin, fired half the people who still worked there at that point, and forced whoever was left to crank out knockoff versions of those tragic Complex slideshows, where you half to click through 50 or 100 pages to find out Wale's favorite Nikes or the hottest chicks on MTV's The Real World, as selected by someone who's seen maybe three episodes total, during the (OG) Las Vegas season in '02. It was hard to watch.

Buzzmedia also owns celeb blogs like Celebuzz and JustJared, and music blogs like Stereogum and Idolator. All told, they receive about 41 million visitors a month - more than Elvis and the Beatles combined. (Gawker Media, for example, gets about 32 million. BuzzFeed gets about 25 million.) But few people who visit a Buzzmedia site actually want to read whatever they find there. Visitors only spend a few seconds there on average, thus suggesting that they were duped by SEO into thinking they were clicking on worthwhile content, realized it was some ol' bullshit and decided to skedaddle. The Spin website is gaining on Pitchfork; Spin receives about 870,000 visitors a month, while Pitchfork receives about 1.1 million visitors a month. But Pitchfork readers spend 4x as much time on the site as Spin readers.

Buzzmedia has been around for 7 years and has yet to turn a profit. Just a few weeks ago, investors forced them to shitcan a full 1/5th of the 250 people who worked there, before cutting them another check so they could stay in business. They owed money all over town. Buzzmedia is the Internets equivalent of Johnny Boy -- or whatever his name was -- in Mean Streets. Cutting paychecks to fewer people is one way to boost profits -- that's how Mitt Romney can afford to have an elevator for cars in his house. Buzzmedia's other plans to finally turn a profit involve co-opting whatever brand equity Spin magazine has left at this point, and targeting elementary school-age children.

No, really. It was announced today that Buzzmedia is changing its name to SpinMedia, presumably hoping the Spin name still resonates with people at ad agencies who can recall when Spin was a great magazine -- whereas Buzzmedia, named after ancient, defunct emo social networking site Buzznet, has become synonymous with Internets Business Failure. Perhaps more importantly, they've introduced HeartsandFoxes, "a site for preteenagers," and they're developing technology to track said preteenagers' behavior across multiple websites, not unlike how Facebook is still tracking your activity even when you're logged out of Facebook, putting together a dossier on obscure pr0n chicks from circa 2006. Nothing at all creepy about that!

I'm actually more concerned with the depths the former Spin magazine will be forced to sink to in order to try to drive pageviews from eight-year-olds. As it's explained in today's New York Times, the idea here is to try to get people to click on items on this new pederast site they've started and then try to drive some of that traffic to the Spin site: "To connect the audiences of its sites, SpinMedia’s new platform can track reader behavior and recommend articles from across its network. Someone reading a Celebuzz item about Justin Timberlake, for example, can be pointed to similar articles on JustJared, Spin or Celebslam. Advertisers can also sponsor particular topics across multiple sites." This would be tragic regardless of who did it or why, but it's especially inappropriate for Spin magazine. Where is the natural point of confluence between Spin, a magazine I used to pick up when I was in elementary school to read about white guys on heroin and black guys with guns, and content that's appropriate -- or at least not illegal -- to show to "preteenagers?" (Hint: there is none.)

And I'm at a loss for how this is a good idea business-wise, if their problem is that they've already got the most pageviews in the world but they can't dupe advertisers into paying a premium, because their content is crap. I guess they figure a younger audience won't be as concerned with whether or not the content is any good. Some of them probably can't even read.

Posted by Bol at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 01, 2013

Good news, Internets: I know last week I said I finished my second book and it'd be out some time in March, but I might actually push it up some, to either the middle or the end of this month (Black History Month). Probably the end of the month. I don't wanna be too ambitious.

That'll give me a couple of weeks to shamelessly promote it and try to guilt trip people into buying it, via social media, before I have to leave the Internets for a period of time. I found out the other day that my eye surgery is scheduled for the 13th of March. I could have had it on the 4th, the big 3-2, but I didn't like the idea of my eye being cut open on my birthday. Any damage done on that day should be the result of substance abuse.

Plus, there's always the slight possibility I could drop dead. Whenever you go in for one of these procedures, they make you sign a buncha forms stating that you realize you might not make it out (so you can't complain if you drop dead), and listing who to turn over your house in a shanty town to and your signed copy of Battle of the Asses 2 with Kelly Divine and Ava Rose, my prized possession. I've been through this process five times in the past few years, at least once a year now going back to '09. I'm either very lucky or very unlucky, depending on how you look at it.

All that's left to be done, in order to have book #2 out in ebook, is to finish spellchecking it and upload it to Amazon. If I really focused hard and worked intently and stopped checking my email - which I don't even read - every five minutes, I could probably have it done this weekend. I only spent a day or two editing the first one - and that was back when I hardly knew what I was doing. (I'm an expert now.) So I should probably have that done by the end of next week. If I were a better typist, and I didn't use as many words that I just pulled out of my ass (nullus), I could just let the computer spellcheck it for me.

As part of the same procrastination in which I also added more hoo-ers to the left sidebar, I actually read the instructions for how to upload an ebook to more formats than just Amazon, and I began the process of putting together a paperback version of book #2. If I don't run into any problems like I did last time, I might be able to have book #2 out in both ebook and paperback from jump. I'm sure that would be good marketing (in which, lest we forget, I have a degree). At the very least, it would save me from fielding emails from people looking for a print version and having to answer the same questions over and over again.

Book #2 will still be exclusive to Amazon for a few months, because Amazon gives you like $20 extra if you make your book exclusive to them for a few months, and think of how many horsemeat Whoppers I can buy with $20. (36 and 1/3. I counted. And I might even be able to talk them into selling me a third of a sandwich. Hell, it's worth a shot.) But if the instructions I read weren't a crock of shit, I should be able to put together a version of book #1 in pretty much any format there ever was in just a few hours. It's just a matter of getting rid of some of the formatting from the Amazon version, and there's a way you can do it all at once. So that'll be the next thing I work on. Maybe I can figure out what's wrong with the paperback version too.

I came up with a title not too long after last week's post announcing I'd written another book. You can probably already guess what it is (it's what people tend to suggest when I tell them I'm looking for a name for a book), but I'm gonna hold off on announcing it for the time being. I think the artwork I've got Theotis Jones working on will give it a certain impact that it wouldn't have if I just wrote it here. Maybe I'll have something next week, and maybe I'll even have some information on the book's content, rather than just a buncha rambling about my inability to spellcheck it. Watch this space.

Posted by Bol at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack

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