Yirga What, Yirga Who

Jay-Z's 99 Problems video

He gets shot, like 9 times, is it? (video - enter a fake email accout. they won't send you a verificiation email)

Jesse Jackson visit

I got to meet Rev. Jesse Jackson and shake his hand today. He gave a small talk at University of Maryland as part of the commemoration the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The main focus of his talk was dedicated to the upcoming election in November. There are not enough blacks that are registered to vote. He said it is those votes that are necessary to get Bush out of the white house. He said of Bush, “He is an asset to us [minorities]. If he can be president, any one can.”

He threw out a lot of figures; mostly regarding the lack of blacks at the top of the economic pool. He said blacks count for 50 of Sprite’s drinkers but there is not one black bottler.

After his speech, he took questions, shook hands, and took pictures.

Friedgen and Williams make more than a mil a year

Their base salaries are around $200,000 but through incentives, their income nearly reaches $2 million. (diamondback)

The man who brought us CSS

In 1994, Hakon Lie of Conseil Europeen pour la Rcherche Nucleaire (CERN), the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, released a proposal for the Cascading Style Sheet Language. A few days later, the first beta version of Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, was released and the rest was history.

All I Ate Yesterday

For breakfast, lunch and dinner, I ate Oreos with milk. Nothing else.

The Clipse Concert

I came out of the clipse concert about an hour and a half ago. They played a copule of tracks from their upcoming CD, Hell Hath No Fury. Of course, they played a few of their older hits, When The Last Time and Cot Damn. I just did not like the fact the made us wait two hours to see The Clipse while they let no-name bands on the stage. They were really horrible. They got booed but they would not stop.

T.I. Sentenced To Prison

From Billboard.com:

Rapper T.I. (real name: Clifford Harris) was sentenced to three years in prison yesterday (April 21) for a probation violation, according to the Cobb County, Ga., clerk's office. The artist's sentence is effective immediately, but he is eligible to apply for a work-release program after serving a year. He was also sentenced to seven years of probation.

T.I. has been in police custody since March 30, after a Dec. 29 arrest warrant ordered his probation revoked. The rapper had been on probation in the wake of a 1998 conviction on a controlled substance charge. He subsequently violated his probation on a number of occasions, including arrests on a firearms charge and possession of marijuana.

Read the rest >>

Urrsher still ruling the charts

Confessions moved 285,637 this past week to remail at the top of the album charts for the 4th week in a row. That brings his month long total to 2,296,218. He has been holding poll position on The Billboard Hot 100 with Yeah for 9 weeks now. His second single, Burn, has reached number 4 and could eventually be another #1 hit. I hope his next single is Confessions Part II because that is my favorite track from the CD. Here is a 30-second clip.

Eminem's Ex Talks Trash

Rapper's macho image is all hype? (Mirror)

First Wheresgeorge Hit

It took 82 bills entered, but someone finally found one of my wheresgeorge marked bills.

I gots a Gmail account

There have been a lot of people upset about Gmail because they feel it would be a tool to invade on people's privacy. Well I am not a criminal or anything to hide, so I am gonna try it out. Drop me a line if you feel like it: mentiso@gmail.com

Could I be homeless soon?

I picked up the school paper today and was unhappy to find out that some dude wants to demolish my neighborhood. (diamondback)

KRS-One visit

KRS-One was the keynote speaker at the University of Maryland 4th Annual Hip-Hop Conference here at College Park. He began his lecture with Afrika Bambaataa. He spoke of Bambaataa's 4 pillars of Hip Hop; peace, unity, love and having fun. He went on to say that it was Afrika Bambaataa that introduced rap on the radio. He also spoke about Kool Herc. Herc is thought to be a the father of Hip Hop but KRS-One said that it would be more correct if it was said he was father of rap music. According to KRS-One, Hip Hop has no beginning. In fact, he said Hip Hop was alive back 20,000 years ago. He said Lucy (Australopithecus) lived the Hip Hop culture. He spoke of how Australopithecus used to make drawings inside caves. As its source of paint, the Australopithecus would chew berries and spit it on the wall. All this in the dark too. He compared that to today's Hip Hop graffiti. He also said that MCing started 2000 years ago in Ghana. There were groups of people would travel and perform for others to get them pumped up. And they used poetry too.

He also spoke of the difference of being a rapper and an MC. He said a rapper is one that goes from his house to MTV. He is a product of corporate America. An MC, on the other hand, has to be an apprentice first. He must get the respect of an important person in his community. He must go where they go and learn from observation. He said an MC can be a rapper and a rapper can never be an MC.

He also touched on some other topics. He did not think much of college education. He said if you failed a class, that means you did not need it. He also said that the reason we all enrolled into college is because we are ignorant.

He was not too high on Bush. His opinion on voting: F*** voting. His opinion on the war: F*** the war.

And than he got to talking about Haiti. He said Hip Hop should be in Haiti. If Hip Hop was to go to Haiti, all the fighting would end.

He was big on Muhammad Ali. He said Ali was a God on earth.

Will Josh Towers did to the Orioles what Jay Gibbons did to the Blue Jays?

The Blue Jays let Gibbons slip from their system a few years ago and now he is a star in Baltimore. I saw Josh Towers pitch against the Orioles and he looked very good. Towers used to be with the Orioles a few years ago and they gave up on him and he was picked up by the Blue Jays. Last September, Towers went 4-0 with a 3.06 ERA for the Blue Jays. And he looked good today.

Got It Twisted by Mobb Deep

I don't know which one is better; the beat or the video.

The Only Thing Worth Watching On UPN

I don't have cable and live in College Park. Last year, no local DC station carried the Orioles so I had to always struggle with my antenna watch the O's on channel 54 or settled for listening to Jim Hunter and the crew on the radio. Channel 13 almost always never works. But this year, all of the Orioles non-cable games will be shown on Channel 20 (UPN affiliate). Now if Channel 9 would show all of the Ravens games, that would be sweet.

2004 Ravens Schedule

Pre-season
Aug. 12 Atlanta (ESPN) 8 p.m.
Aug. 20 at Philadelphia (CBS) 8 p.m.
Aug. 28 Detroit 8 p.m.
Sept. 2 at N.Y. Giants 7 p.m.

2004 Regular Season
Sept. 12 at Cleveland 1:00 p.m.
Sept. 19 Pittsburgh 1:00 p.m.
Sept. 26 at Cincinnati 1:00 p.m.
Oct. 4 Kansas City (ABC) 9:00 p.m.
Oct. 10 at Washington (ESPN) 8:30 p.m.
Oct. 17 Open Date
Oct. 24 Buffalo 1:00 p.m.
Oct. 31 at Philadelphia 1:00 p.m.
Nov. 7 Cleveland (ESPN) 8:30 p.m.
Nov. 14 at New York Jets 1:00 p.m.
Nov. 21 Dallas 1:00 p.m.
Nov. 28 at New England 1:00 p.m.
Dec. 5 Cincinnati 1:00 p.m.
Dec. 12 New York Giants 1:00 p.m.
Dec. 19 at Indianapolis (ESPN) 8:30 p.m.
Dec. 26 at Pittsburgh 1:00 p.m.
Jan. 2 Miami 1:00 p.m.

Grammatically Sound

You are a MASTER of the English language!

While your English is not exactly perfect,
you are still more grammatically correct than
just about every American. Still, there is
always room for improvement...

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The Alamo

I saw the movie on Saturday. It wasn't my idea to watch it. I went in to see it because my cousin wanted to see it. I did not like it very much. Well, the truth is I did not get as much fighting as I was expecting. It opened up at $9,124,701. It must be very disappointing because it kind of looks like a big budget movie.

By the way, what ever happened up to the second slave? The last I remember of him was he holding his bag and waiting to say, "Yo es Negro. No es despardo" or something like that during the Mexican attack. They never showed whether he survived or not. That, or I missed it.

Orioles not so miserable

That is according to the ESPN MLB Misery Index.

My Blog History

I first got introduced to blogging when parisbyair came by my Ravens Yahoo group and suggested I write up stuff on the Ravens for his blog group, fanway. He ran his group through blogger and that is when I first got my blogger accout. That was back in 2001. In late 2002, I created another weblog but it was more of a diary. I used it mostly to write down what songs I was into at the time. Sometime between late 2002 and early 2003, I decided to make it public. This is what it kind of looked like. I kept it up until about May 2003. When summer rolled around, I didn't think I was gone have enought time to update it as often, so I shut it down. But after summer was over and school reopened, I was around computers more often, so I decided to reopen my blog. It was up again in October 2003. This stint was good until April 2004. Than sometime during that month I came across baliblogs.com. I saw that they offered free weblogs powered by moveabletype. I was like, 'Hell Yeah' and signed up. I was also attracted with the association with Baltimore. I grew up in Columbia, MD. Well, that is all up to date on my blog history.

New Kid on the Bloc

Ok I just opened up this blog. I want to learn more about Moveabletype before I move my posts from blogger.com

Doom's Day

Hip-hop is like Sunday school? (New Yorker)

Happy Beginnings

The Orioles kicked off first game of the baseball season on American soil by defeating the Red Sox. Javy Lopez blasted the first pitch he saw out of the park. Look at the standings as of last night:

2004 AMERICAN LEAGUE EAST
TEAM	W	L	PCT	GB
Baltimore	1	0	1.000	-
Tampa Bay	1	1	.500	0.5
New York	1	1	.500	0.5
Toronto	0	0	.000	0.5
Boston	0	1	.000	1.0

Orioles are #1 and that is the way I like it. It was cold last night at the park but it did not snow like it did last year's opening day:

The Dukies are out

I had picked them the be in the final but it is all good. I go to Maryland so I am naturally anti-Duke. I am cheering for UConn. I don't want Georgia Tech to win it because they are in the ACC with us.

Northcutt's agent demands trade to Ravens

This same agent is the one that forgot to fill out the proper paperwork that would have made Northcutt a free agent. Why has he not fired him yet? This kind of odd after what happened with the Terrell Owens situation. But if the Ravens do actually trade for Northcutt, he would automatically become the number 1 starter.

Big Fish

Watching this movie reminded me of the story Death of a Salesman. In both a stories, the main conflict is focused on the father/son relationship. In both cases, the father does not know where reality begins and ends. The father cheats on his wife in both stories. Not to mention that they were both salesmen and they are dying.