WOTD: cinnamon, according to the Urban Dictionary

I love the Urban Dictionary. I fucking love it. Type in even the most mundane word you can think of and it will produce several surprising “definitions” you never would have thought of in a million years. I typed in the word cinnamon because I was looking at the furry lump lying on the bed that’s named Cinnamon. There’s no way this word is going to be in there, I thought. Boy, was I wrong.

There are actually seven definitions for the word cinnamon. The first one is my favorite:

1. Cinnamon is something difficult to say when drunk.

These are also difficult to say when drunk:
Thanks, but I don’t want to have sex.
Good evening, officer. Isn’t it lovely out tonight?
Nope, no more beer for me….

Cinnanannomm …..Cinomon …Ciniman …uhhh!i give up, gimme another beer!

I also really love the third definition:

3. The equivalent to a ginger, just more attractive and usually has a soul. Commonly found in the North Eastern part of the United States and Western Canada. Freckles are prominent and usually in large numbers. Some cinnamons are found wearing obscene clothing, beware. Large families are usually together in one area of the country of this breed.

Differences between the two are skin tones, which are usually a shade darker than most gingers and the cinnamons are more aesthetically pleasing,

“Yo man, did you see that slamming ginger over there with her tits hanging out?!”

“Yeah I did man but that’s no ginger! It’s a cinnamon! You don’t find banging gingers anywhere these days!”

Apparently, cinnamon also means roughly same thing as cherry (not the sexual meaning):

4.excellent, very good
Dude, you’re [sic]Jedi cloak is so cinnamon. I wish I had one.

Cinnamon the cat approves of this post.

Stay tuned…

Being Happy

There are times when I’d rather be,
Anyone but plain old me.
Like, maybe a celebrity.

An actress on a TV show!

To all the private clubs I’d go.
Designer clothes from head to toe.
And everyone would love my shoes.

Just think of all the weight I’d lose!

They’d talk about me on the news.
Throwing tantrums on the set.
Flashing my girly parts on the ‘net.

Perhaps I’m not ready for that yet…

Thoughts from a café at T-Centralen in Stockholm (A reality check exercise)

Take yourself out some place. A café perhaps, on a busy downtown street, or ideally to the train station or the bus station.
Now, get yourself a magazine. Screw the articles. Get one with lots of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. This is not an intellectual exercise.

It’s a reality check that crosses all lines; culture, colour, class, IQ, language, gender, orientation, age. We’re all in this particular boat together baby.

Now, get settled in with those pics in your GQ, Vogue, Elle, Cosmo, or one of thousands of others in the same genre. Soak them in. Admire the pretty people.

Fantasize about their fabulous lives. Wish and dream about being like them, or even just knowing them, and being close to their world. Feel just a little bit smaller.

Now put the magazine down. Leave it open to a picture if you like, it doesn’t matter. It might even help. Shift your attention away from it though, and instead watch the dizzying array of people parading before you. Yeah. You know where I’m going with this don’t you?

Of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people walking past you, how many look like the models in the magazine? I’ll tell you. None. Not one. Not a single goddamned one of them. Not even the ones who are desperately trying to look like them. Hell, if one of the actual models from the magazine happened to walk by, even they wouldn’t look like their media image portrays them.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t look away just yet! You’re only half way through the exercise. Keep watching the parade. Watch until you find yourself revelling in the variety, until you realise where true beauty lies, until you realise it’s all subjective and the whole playing field constantly shifts and is only made up of our individual judgements based on our own needs and insecurities. Until you realise that what you see passing before you is an intricate and dazzling display of human beauty in all its forms and that in actual fact it is the media image in its inaccurate simplicity that generally fails to capture that depth.

Repeat the exercise as often as possible, until you really actually get the truth of it. Afterwards, continue to buy those magazines if you want, but for goodness sakes, keep them in perspective.

The Four Hour Reading Pledge

By Arvind Jain originally posted to Flickr as "Match on TV"

According to a Nielsen study, Americans spend an average of four hours a day watching television. I first thought that sounded like an awful lot, until I realized how much the television is on in my own household. I generally watch the news in the morning if my youngest one is not watching The Jungle Book for the millionth time. During my lunch hour I usually catch the news again, and in the evening my wife likes to watch The Biggest Loser or American Idol, and we both like PBS and some of the crime dramas. It seems every time we are home, our television is on. I can imagine it’s the same in every American household. Pretty soon four hours does not sound like so much.

But it is a lot. It is a lot of time that is wasted. Time that could be better utilized. Time that could be spent with your family. Time reading perhaps. I’ve got nothing against television. Like I said, we do a lot of television watching in our household. I just think it’s time for me to expand my brain and fill it with something useful. Reading stimulates the brain, it’s an active thing. It requires thinking. Watching television does not really require much thought, and it really does depend upon the program you are watching whether or not it stimulates your brain.

I propose the following, a Four Hour Reading Pledge. Instead of turning on the box with moving pictures, perhaps we should spend those four hours on reading instead? Who is with me? Let’s try this and see.

How to blog successfully

Old School blogging starts at an early age!

If I had a penny for every time somebody asked me: “Shark, how do you become a successful blogger?” I’d be a successful blogger! The truth of the matter is that there’s no real formula for success except a lot of patience and hard work. Sure, you could become an instant hit on the internet, like Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account, but those kind of success stories are few and far between.

My observation on how to become a successful blogger is as follows:

CONTENT, CONTENT AND MORE CONTENT. Like a real estate agent espousing the famous quip, “location, location, location,” so too does a blogger need content, content, and content. I should add “relevant” to the front of that. Most successful blogs on the internet have interesting content, whether that be a political pundit writing about the coming collapse of Medicare, or somebody taking pictures of famous celebrities and using Microsoft Paint to draw funny faces on them; either way, these blogs are visited because people enjoy the content.

POST EVERY DAY. There’s nothing worse than visiting an interesting blog and seeing that it hasn’t been updated since 2007 or something like that. This is a real tragedy if the blogger’s archive contains golden nuggets of wisdom and social commentary. It almost makes you mad to find a brilliant mind that stopped producing. Granted, the blogger might have died, but if he or she just stopped updating their blog, I wish they would either post something to that effect, or just delete their blog altogether. That reminds me, I have several blogs I need to delete, my bad.

HAVE MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTORS. The reason why this blog is destined for success, I hope, is the fact that we have a variety of contributors with differing thoughts, styles, and opinions. In fact, if you came to this blog and didn’t notice that we were different people, you’d think the blogger had a multiple personality disorder or at least ADD or OCD. What other person would write about Texas Tater Twisters one day and post poetry about a well the next? Having multiple contributors also ensures that the content is varied, and takes the stress off one person having to post every day. It really is hard coming up with fresh things, and with multiple contributors I can take a breather knowing that somebody will post and keep the blog rolling. It’s very comforting to know that.

VISIT OTHER BLOGS. A successful blogger is a voracious reader of other blogs. Reading what other people are writing about helps you to formulate ideas of your own. This is particularly useful if you are suffering from writer’s block. When visiting other people’s blogs it’s also important to leave commentary. It’s not only polite, but the blogger gets a real sense of accomplishment from knowing that somebody actually took the time to read what they had posted. Leaving commentary also means that some people might read your comment and click on your link back to your blog. I don’t know how many times I’ve found a great blog just by reading the excellent commentary left on somebody’s blog and following the commentator back to their blog.

BE PROACTIVE. This follows what I previously posted about commentary. Be out there in cyberspace, join forums, link clubs, chat, post and be proactive. Nobody is going to find your blog unless you make yourself heard, or you utilize excellent tag lines or eye-catching topic titles. Twitter is also a great place to get new followers fast, but be prepared for a possible spam storm or an information overload.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your blog!

America: The Greatest Show in the World

We Americans love a good show. Little do we know that we are actually part of the show now. Other people from around the world are watching our slow decline into a Third World nation. While we are busy arguing about the “big issues” like abortion, gay marriage, and evolution; our roads are being unpaved, we are becoming poorer, and more stupid. As the old Carl Sagan remarked in his book, Cosmos, we have more astrologists and psychics than astronomers. And why wouldn’t we, after all, astronomy requires serious thinking? Better to go with the gut feeling of an astrologist.

Just look at your newspaper, one-third of the newspaper is comprised of the sports pages these days! In fact, there’s more sports coverage than foreign news coverage! A whole page is devoted to a home run, while a suicide bomber in Afghanistan killing two Marines gets a paragraph. Charlie Sheen’s Truth Tour gets more exposure than a top general in Iraq discussing rebuilding efforts. The sad thing is we don’t realize that this is happening to us. And if we do, we don’t seem to care as long as the circus continues and we are “pacified” with cheap trinkets from China or entertainment in the form of Snooki. Never mind that Snooki got more money for giving a talk at Rutgers University than Nobel-Fucking-Prize-Winning-and-I-Got-A-Damned-Pulitzer-Too Toni Morrison! How the hell did that happen?

Richard Hofstadter wrote a book entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1963. If you haven’t read this book, I highly suggest you pick it up at your local public library. That’s if you still have a public library! In his book, Hofstadter laments the poor state of the American intellectual, and how he must contend with a rising tide of stupidity coming from his fellow countrymen. That’s a paraphrase of course, and a pretty dumbed down version of things, but hopefully it’s easy enough for people to understand.

Anyhow, I’m off to plan my vacation trip to the Creation Museum, and maybe I’ll swing by Dollywood as well.

…get a job

Oh The Royal Wedding™. I’m so happy that I don’t live in the UK. The amount of attention given to this hullabaloo is mind-boggling enough for us Americans. I cannot begin to fathom what it must be liked to be choked with the pomp and circumstance on my way to work, however.

The picture above is the headlining snap on MSNBC. The Royal Wedding™ must be a big deal now that people are camping out to catch a glimpse of….what, exactly? A feathery fascinator? A coat with tails? The backs of other gawkers’ heads? If you’re into this thing, how much fun can you have standing in a sea of people with no food, drink or access to a toilet? It’s like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Sure, you may be there for history but look at all the creature comforts you’re sacrificing for the cause. There is no cause significant enough for me to give up the bare necessities in life. NONE. Not an endless supply of money, eternal salvation, a bottomless cup of coffee or cigarettes that magically do not cause cancer.

Then there is that whole question of what does one actually expect to witness that cannot be witnessed in the comfort of one’s home, on the sofa, in front of the teevee? As with sporting events, if you don’t have a decent seat, maybe your ass should just stay at home and watch things you can actually see via the miracles of modern technology.

I dunno. Maybe the freak of nature (above) has some logical excuse for parking his ass on concrete for a week? I’m sure the people watching (of the crowd, not those invited) is worth the price of no admission. Alas, it’s certainly not worth not being able to move from a spot, eat or tend to Mother Nature.

New Kids On The Block

New Year’s Day – wee hours of 01 January 1989 – Philadelphia, PA

Having been relieved of our babysitting duties unusually early for the night and knowing that our parents were not expecting us until the follow morning, my galpal *Brie and I decided to go into town to see what sort of hell we could raise. Aside from sucking face in the back seat of the car with two very drunken, hot male students from Penn (drenched in the aroma of Drakkar) who were waiting for the Mummers Parade, my best memory would be the soundtrack. The soundtrack of a perfect night. Rosalita by Bruce Springsteen. Houndog by Elvis. Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi.

Also included in the mix was one of the best R & B bands of our generation. That’s right. New Kids On The Block.

The first time I heard “Right Stuff” my world was rocked. And it wasn’t rocked by the tongue of a stranger stuffed down my throat. It was rocked by the BEAT.

Oft overshadowed by the contributions from Seattle in the 1990s, Boston was cranking out some serious shit in the 1980s. Some of the unsung heroes of the time are Mission of Burma, Dinosaur Jr and The Pixies. For the R & B inclined, New Edition was the gold standard. Alas, what Beach Music did to Motown, New Kids On The Block did to New Edition. Those white boys showed Bobby Brown and company what true R & B was all about.

For those of you unaware, New Kids On The Block was formed by Maurice Starr who took George Martin’s stewardship of The Beatles to its logical conclusion. Starr had a vision of taking five talentless hoodlums destined for a life of petty crime and/or musical theater and turning them into the Greatest R & B Act of All Time.

Although their early releases were unappreciated by the connoisseurs of Top 40 radio, they served as the building blocks for a career that would make The Jackson 5 sound almost as solid as The Osmonds. Starr and company struggled with finding the perfect hit to unleash their greatness on the world but once “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” debuted on the airwaves, the world was transformed.

In early 1989, the magnum opus that is “Hangin’ Tough” became an anthem for young America. Gone were the days of listening to hip-hop and old skool rap. New Kids On The Block captivated mall and arena audiences throughout America, dethroning the Queen of the Malls, Tiffany, and raking in trillions of dollars in revenue from poster sales to the tweenage girl demographic.

The NKOTB catalogue is as solid as it is stellar. Throughout their career, NKOTB released an astonishing 19 singles from eight compact discs. Of the 19 singles, three of the songs took their rightful place at the pinnacle of the pop charts.

Musical greatness aside, NKOTB busted down doors for scores of oppressed white boys throughout America. Had it not been for the brilliance of Starr and the temerity of these rapscallions, the music industry would have ultimately been denied extraordinary acts such as Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and 98 Degrees. A world without Justin Timberlake is a world not worth living in.

I could wax philosophic about the contributions of NKOTB, the boy band era and Starr for ages. Rather than sully their collective magic with my simple prose, I shall let the music speak for itself.

Enjoy the YouTube clips and bask in the glory.

*names changed to protect the naughty