WBGO - The best Jazz station around today. A wonderful “listen online” tool means you don’t have to live in New York to enjoy. I listened to this through many hours of cat dissection in anatomy and physiology.
I hustled over to the quad leg extension machine at Lifetime Fitness, trying to wrap (rap?) up my workout as quickly as possible. That’s when I looked in the mirror in front of me, and spotted Snoop Dogg walking on a treadmill just behind me. He wasn’t sweating. He wasn’t really dressed for working out. But I mean, if it really were Snoop Dogg, I am confident that he would be way too cool to do something like run. That’s not his style. He’s going to stroll … and look cool doing it.
Complete with sunglasses, gangster baggy-fit, moustache, long hair … this guy was channeling the spirit of Mr. Dogg, right here in Minnesota. And let me tell you, channeling the spirit of a super-star, inner city, hard core, straight up rapper is not at all an easy thing to do in the frozen tundra, predominantly Lutheran, Scandanavian-descended stereotype of Minnesota. For extra points, this man was performing his Snoop a good distance from South Minneapolis, the closest thing we even have to an inner city. Stunning!
Snapping out of my reverie, I did a quick leg set, but couldn’t help marveling that this was the closest I would ever be to experiencing Snoop’ness. I returned a short while later thinking I might discern more about this strange man, but alas, our hero had vanished in a puff of marijuana smoke to roll away on his dubs and spread gangster rap to another part of the country.
I’ve been looking for good music for the Christmas holiday. Christmas music is not always easy to find. Guess what I accidentally stumbled across? The Regis Philbin Christmas Album. Whaaaat? Given the musical careers of Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan, I should not be surprised that one only needs achievements in acting in order to record tremendously average music. Listening to the samples of this album was not a pleasant experience: imagine impeccable production mixed with the most stunningly mediocre, digitally corrected ‘singing’ you have ever heard. One review:
This album is what it is. And what it is, is Regis Philbin singing Christmas songs. REGISPHILBIN. SINGINGCHRISTMASSONGS.
Shaking that bomb of an album off, we move on to the best Christmas albums you will ever hear (well some of them fit that qualifications … how more than one is the ‘best’ I do not know … anyhow):
Those last four are the albums I grew up with at Christmas. They mean Christmas to me … finding them on CD, still in print, amazes me. I hope to buy them soon, and therefore move our aging vinyl records into the 21st century. Many memories to come.
I stepped out into the weather after a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Mykala; we had accidentally attended the lovely candle-lit, whitish tablecloth affair put on by Saint Thomas Food Service. Standing at the marble porch of Murray Herrick Center, I briefly contemplated the mix of snow and rain fighting for a majority of the precipitation. I swept loose fall slush from my handlebars and seat, stooping to unlock my bicycle. As I struggled to pop the frozen lock, I heard a heavily accented voice from behind me, “So confusing!” I turned slightly, seeing a young man from Africa walking past. I realized he had been talking to me. He added, “… just don’t know what to make of it.”
His quick wit caught me off guard, but slowly I realized what he was pointing out: this weather is confusing. I considered how cool it is to hear other people’s perspectives. I mean, it is very possible that this man had grown up in a place utterly devoid of snow, and I would imagine his conception of snow was large white movie-flakes. It must be strange to see something like rain yet feel something like snow for the first time.
I don’t think diversity is the big meetings or formal dialogue that universities stress as a selling point; diversity is the infinitesimal moment when tangents of culture cross, and people see the world from another’s perspective.
