Cobb

The 'Bachmann' Papers

"They take one little word out of what you say, ignore all the rest, and then begin to magnify it all over the world to make you look like what you actually aren't. And I'm very used to that."
-- Malcolm X

I certify these are the documents as I know them. In the interest of nuance. 

Download Consequences_of_marriage

MD5 (consequences_of_marriage.pdf) = 91ec270b619e7aec0b4ce26ea5066224

 

Download Family_Leader_MarriageVow

MD5 (Family_Leader_MarriageVow.pdf) = 26e3acfbbbf9fadd4883e5b27a31375d

 

The Birthers' Hail Mary

I wanted to put up the final, now that I've gotten my hands on it, document in evidence against the long from brith certificate. Download BirtherObama_LFBC_Report_final_draft

I skimmed a tiny bit of it. There is nothing that I would trust as a high security matter, precisely because I am not aware that there was a digital signature made for the document as it was put into the public domain. So as far as I know, the whole matter is hearsay. If you know something to the contrary and can point out THE document published in a way as secure as software you would put on your machine..

BTW, The signature for this file is:

MD5 (BirtherObama_LFBC_Report_final_draft.pdf) = e3a6e6c0005058133ef1e4c7e0b79d32

The Mammoth Car

This takes me straight back to boyhood. Wow.

Starting Salaries

The Farm Metaphor

Having been raised in the depths of the most urban of urbanities, in a single family, front-yard, backyard neighborhood on the edge of light industry, I know nothing of living chickens or roosters for that matter. KFC, Jim Dandy, Pioneer, Church's I know. Hens and pullets are a mystery. So will somebody explain to me what is exactly up with chickens coming home to roost?

Are chickens not supposed to come home, or when they do come home are they not supposed to roost? Do chickens who come home, not come home until the cows come home? That is to say, when you send them away are they expected not to return or are they returning too early?  Is it OK for a rooster to roost? And why is a rooster not a chicken? What is roosting anyway?

Somebody throw me a bone here.

Cobbler Meets

So now there are at least two semi-official Cobbler meets this year. The first is going to be at the Long Beach Grand Prix on the weekend of April 18-20. Me and some crusty old gamers, especially the guys who like driving games, are going to hang out, drink beer, smoke cigars, curse and tell dirty jokes, and try to get close to the fast cars and greasy pits. If this sounds like your idea of fun, hookup here and on Facebook.

The second is going to be at the Gibson (nee Universal) Amphitheatre on June 14. That's going to be the Return to Forever concert for which I'm probably going to have to fork up some dough ahead of time to buy a block of a dozen or so seats. I imagine it will be a less raucus affair and we'll probably do shrimp and wine coolers beforehands.

Altogether it would be my extraordinary good fortune to meet some of you fine folks face to face. So mark the dates. I will be there for sure.

100 Greatest Funk Songs of All Time

Now taking nominations. To be published Saturday June 16.

Click Here to take the Funky Survey

UPDATE:
The survey ended in June 2007.

Well it's all here. The results are in. Our little corner of the world within earshot of this blog has spoken and we have finally compiled the 100 greatest funk songs of all time. Without further ado, here are the results.

Download FunkyFinalResults_06152007.pdf

Open Thread

Now is the time for all good readers to spew forth on their own.

HNIC

Until a few moments ago, there was no Wikipedia article for HNIC. Take a moment and give my preliminary entry some depth and academic-speak if you would be so kind.

Cobblers Alert: Gimme a Pound

The current Wikipedia entry on Dap is completely lacking. All they have is this:

Dap is a form of handshake that originated in the 1960s among African Americans. The term dap may have originated as an acronym for Dignity and Pride, and was first used by African American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Though it can refer to many kinds of greeting involving hand contact, dap is best known as a complicated routine of shakes, slaps, snaps, and other contact that must be known completely by both parties involved. Some forms or other names for these greetings include "slapping five," "Black Power Handshake," "high five," "Five on the Black Hand Side," and "the pound."

This needs some serious detail and upgrade. Surely there must be one of you out there who is associated with a black studies program that can have a grad student handle this business. This is pathetically weak.

First of all., and you can use my text, this definition completely ignores the Grip, the class of greetings given by black frats.  Secondly  it ignores the current hug, which basically originated after the LA Riot.  At the very least, you can video that and YouTube it then reference the video.

Now when you get into the Grip, there's a tangent that needs to be covered which is all about Stepping. Speaking of which Stomp The Yard looks interesting in the vein of School Daze, Love & Basketball and  Drumline (if not Higher Learning). C'mon HBCUs. Man up and do some Wiki.

All About You

Patterico has a post asking commenters to tell a little about themselves, including:

City, country, age, gender, educational background, profession, hobbies, how they define themselves politically, favorite sites, etc. sort of thing.

To this I would add: tell us something interesting about yourself — especially something most people don’t know.

It has proved an interesting thread, and I’d like to try it here.  I’ll start:

Redondo Beach, California; USA; 45; male; Undergrad at USC & Cal State in Computer Science; Business Intelligence Project Mgr. I'm married with three kids, two in middle school and one in elementary school.

I enjoy gaming, cycling, volleyball, music (I play bass guitar a little and have composed a little funk and ambient music), reading (especially spy novels & historical fiction like Neal Stephenson), and geeky science stuff. And action movies.

I am a moderate conservative meaning I'm more authoritarian than libertarians (there's no such thing as a libertarian army) but don't believe in a vengeful God or the politics of prudery.

My favorite blogs are the Belmont Club, Counterterrorism Blog, Patterico, Emergent Chaos, Jimi Izrael, Booker Rising, American Digest and TechCrunch. I think I don't read nearly enough.

When I was a kid I once poured a gallon of gasoline on a BBQ grill which exploded in a fireball that was visible for blocks. I once had a shoulder length jheri curl and I once danced on top of a speaker in a disco with Rosie Perez. On the other hand I never had a drink of alcohol until I was 26 and one of my proudest moments was my Confirmation into the Episcopal Church at the age of 16. I made Who's Who of Outstanding High School Students. I'm extraordinarily self-centered and completely adrift about how exactly to present myself. And so I write.

How about you?

       

Cobblers Wikimapia

The coolest thing on the web is Wikimapia. It needs your attention. I have put in a few entries, such as the first Magic Johnson Theater.

Two Mind Splinters

When I was on hiatus, I found that my creative urge kept popping up and I also kept reading a lot of online material. So during that time, since I wasn't blogging, I kept track of things by using delicious, which I previously had no use for. Now I find it somewhat invaluable for the oddments that creep up from time to time. But there are some things I still cannot find, and it burns me up.

Don't you hate it when somebody asks you a question that you know that you used to know? You walk around all day fixated on this stupid bit of information that you can't get your mind to remember. OK, it's just me. I obsess over such things. Part of my personality is that I get off my butt to answer questions, but not generally to volunteer information. I think I'll be a wonderful grandfather rather than a tedious one for that reason.

So to initiate this, I have two particularly nasty splinters in my mind that I just cannot get rid of. And so far, Google and the Internet Archive have been singularly unable to come up with the answers I seek.

Baby Bin Laden Animation
The first is one I've mentioned several times before. I especially want to find this because it was such an annoying meme when it surfaced sometime after September 11th but before Bush started the invasion of Iraq. You probably remember it too, and now the git who published it is probably rightly too embarrassed to keep it on the web. It had a cartoon map of the Middle East, with little British (imperialist) soldiers in pith helmets. It predicted Armageddon as all the Arab states rushed across the borders into a (quagmire) Iraq and basically illustrated this scenario where the whole region erupted with a mass of baby Bin Ladens. The Left distributed it like it was the Qaran and we all suffered through the madness of this 'wisdom'. So now that it was clearly disproven, where did it go? Somebody knows what it was called, where it came from and where it is now. Just not me, and it's killing me. Hopefully it's killing you to and you won't rest until we all have a delicious tag.

Multicultural Last Name Survey
Some university or research institution came up with a very cool way to determine if someone was truly worldly by giving them a list of 100 (or so) last names. If you knew somebody with the name 'Patel' for example, it proves that you have had contact with Indians, and so on and so forth. They had done enough research on this matter so that it was very difficult for you to score 100. It was directed at Americans and could be a barometer on how often you get out. I can't find it anywhere, can you?

Cobblers Alert: Dap & Kwanzaa

It looks like I'm coming back around to some cultural work that needs doing in the fabric of cyberspace. These days I'm focusing on three reference sites that I think are fairly important. They are the Wikipedia, Flickr and LastFM. Black culture is what it is, but a lot of what it is hasn't been translated well into cybermedia. So I'm doing my share, and I ask Cobblers to pull a little weight too.

It turns out that nobody has really got a good definition of Dap. Now that's a damned shame. Most everybody knows what dap is, but it's kind of hard to express in writing. I mean little babies learn how to slap five before they can even talk, so dap is deep. My understanding is that dap originated among the black troops in Vietnam and made a big splash in the US when they returned. Of course there was the black power handshake as well as the black power salute that originated back then. Today everybody gives a pound and men all over give love.

It's interesting that the embrace and handshake is just a thing I call 'giving love', and until this moment, I never really thought about another name for it. I know that after the LA Riots in Los Angeles it was considered very offensive if black men didn't recognize each other with the head up or didn't give love when greeting. (excuse me, I'm tearing up, seriously). I was in Brooklyn at the time but I got the word clearly from my brothers, Deet and Doc. So there's no question that dap is deeply embedded in contemporary African American culture.

Of course dap also has verbal components. I'll only comment on one, which is the offense of 'leaving me hanging'. If I offer you five by raising my right hand to slap you and you don't offer your upturned palm, then you are leaving me hanging, which is similar to not offering a hand to shake, except sometimes with Tom connotations - a greater insult.

As for Kwanzaa, I see that Wikipedia is cleaning up its game, but on Flickr there are only 50 photos tagged with Kwanzaa. Damn. I know we can do better than that. You'll see me in both places for the week. I'm on a mission. Join me.

Cobblers Hiphop In Da House!

For the next generation of Cobb we're expanding into multiple dimensions. The first, as promised is the creation of a hiphop group for the folks at Last.fm. They already have several, but I suspect that they are all made up of kids that listen to nothing but hiphop and hate everybody who doesn't like their favorite artists. I'm being presumptuous of course, no disrespect to those to whom it doesn't apply. But for the moment, it's all about us. So when you look at the description of the Cobblers - Hiphop group, you'll see that it's a group for people with tastes beyond hiphop. Join up and we'll take it to the next level.

While we're at it, here's a string of hiphop that I'm interested in these days which is out of the mainstream:
{Tackhead, Laswell, Paul Schwartz, Singers & Players, Freestyle Fellowship, some ROIR stuff}. I haven't had much time for new discoveries but I expect to next week or the week after if I get some time to actually start coding and put my head down.