Thursday.

Thursday. Haven't updated this blog for awhile, and figured I should, but I can't think of anything good to write about, except for the fact that I just spelled "write" as "wright", "Writ" and "right" before I finally got it right, so evidently my brain is malfunctioning, which would be about par for the course at three pm on a Thursday since it is almost Friday so it is almost the weekend, and I probably won't have to work on Saturday, so I'm kind of looking forward to the weekend (except for Sunday, since I probably will have to work then, unless something changes and things get pushed back or something).

Running

The wife and I, inspired by friends who ran the shamrock shuffle, have decided to run in the Run for the Zoo 5K in June. 5 kilometers is 3.1 miles. Now, 3.1 miles doesn't sound like very far, until you try to run it. Then, it is a very long way. Especially since I never have been much of a runner. I'm more of a "let-it-run-then-I'll-shoot-it-and-walk-over-and-pick-it-up" kind of guy. So this whole thing is understandably a little foreign (not to be confused with a little foreigner).

Anyway, on Monday I ran 5K on a treadmill in 29 minutes and 35 seconds. I'm pretty happy with that.

Speaking the Truth

I don't usually care for Jason Whitlock (ex-ESPN, now KC Star columnist). Still, being a black man, he was able to say what so many white commentators could not about recent events.

Here are excerpts from his column from 4/11:

Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality. . . .

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred. . . .

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud. . . .

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had. . . .

This is opportunism.

This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

Throw another shrip on the barbie

If you are from Australia, you can always say "down here" things are . . . .

Also, it is tomorrow there.

Tuesday

Ten Thoughts for Tuesday

1. I am meeting up with my law school buddies this weekend for the first time in nearly three years. Based on the e-mail traffic over the last couple of days, nobody has changed. That means there is a good chance that someone will be yelling for shots at 3 am while someone else is explaining that Revlon duties don't necessarily preclude directors on a company's board from excluding certain bidders from an otherwise open bidding process.

2. The wife and I started training to run a 5K race. The race is at the beginning of June, so we have lots of time. 5K is almost exactly 3 miles. That doesn't seem like a long way until you actually attempt to run three miles and remember that the most exercise you see during a typical day is going up a flight of stairs to get another doughnut. I ran 4 slow miles last night on the treadmill, so I have hope.

3. Time to get to the beach. Need some sun, sand, snorkling and sCorona.

4. Man, I'm only on number 4. This list thing sucks. Should have started with a smaller number.

5. Work has been interesting lately, and the hours more reasonable than usual. Recently have been on calls with Paris in the morning and Sydney in the evening, which really goes a long way to stretching out the day.

6. Reminder: the French are still cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

7. On Sunday evening while the wife and I were running along the lake, we saw a diving duck. Little fucker could stay under for a long time.

8. I want a cheeseburger. Really, really bad. Stupid eating healthy, blah blah blah.

9. I think my right contact lens may be screwed up.

10. In honor of the fact that the four lawyers I'm meeting up with this weekend are all a bunch of litigators, leaving me as the sole corporate attorney, I'll end with an appropriate quote from John Wayne:

"Out here, due process is a bullet."
- Col. Michael Kirby (The Green Berets)

What the Fuck?

What the fuck? After one season coaching at K-State, Bob Huggins is leaving to go coach a bunch of fucking hillbillies at West Virginia.

I hope he gets another DUI in the moving van on the way out there. Fucker.