It's black history month!

I love how my sister sends me her pictures from Christmas... JUST IN TIME FOR FEBRUARY.
But, gee, pictures of her at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, mere inches from Harrison Ford, well, golly-gee, those pictures end up in my inbox the next day. Priorities, I guess.
Anyways, I won't inflict more holiday snaps on you, except for this one:



... Just because they look as crazy as they are in reality.

So, with the ticking over of the clock in a mere five hours, it becomes Black History month once again. I won't spin tales of Kwaanza or extol the virtues of having more chicken and watermelon in your diet, but I will pass on this story coming out of the states. It's pretty good.

Oh, and for you football fans, don't forget to read all about this.. Just because I'm acknickulous like that.


THE GANGTSA SYNDROME: Recent spate of college parties mocking black stereotypes sparks outrage

By Bruce Smith
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — White students at Tarleton State University in Texas hold a party in which they dress in gang gear and drink malt liquor from paper bags. A white Clemson University student attends a bash in black face over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. A fraternity at Johns Hopkins University invites partygoers to wear “bling bling” grills, or shiny metal caps on their teeth.
From Connecticut to Colorado, “gangsta” theme parties thrown by whites are drawing the ire of college officials and heated complaints from black and white students who say the antics conjure the worst racial stereotypes.
At the same time, some black academics say they aren’t surprised, given the popularity of rap music among inner-city blacks and well-to-do suburban whites alike.
The white students, they say, were mimicking the kind of outlaw posturing that blacks themselves engage in in rap videos. They suggest the white students ended up crossing the same line that says it is OK for blacks to call each other “nigger,” but not all right for whites to do it.
Whites often don’t realize their actions are offensive because they are imitating behaviour celebrated in music and seen on television, said Venise Berry, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa who has researched rap music and popular culture.
“The segment of rap music that is glamorized and popularized by the media is gangsta rap,” said Berry, who is black. “It has become an image that is normalized in our society. That to me explains clearly why they don’t see it as wrong.”
At an off-campus “Bullets and Bubbly” party thrown by University of Connecticut School of Law students in January, pictures showed students wearing baggy jeans, puffy jackets and holding fake machine guns.
The University of Colorado’s Ski and Snowboard Club advertised a “gangsta party” in September, with fliers featuring rappers and fake bullet holes. The theme was dropped after complaints, but some students, who didn’t get the message, showed up in gangsta garb, hoping to win prizes.
Often such parties go unnoticed outside campuses until students post pictures on Facebook.com and other websites. That’s how images of the Clemson party surfaced this week. One student wore blackface; another white student put padding in her pants to make her rear end look bigger.
Harold Hughes, a black fraternity member at Clemson whose frat brothers attended the party, said white students “see this on MTV and BET they think it’s cool to portray hip hop culture.” Hughes said he found it especially offensive that the party was held over a holiday created to honour the slain civil rights leader.
Many white Clemson students said they did not believe the party was held to intentionally offend blacks, and after news of the party reached beyond the campus, organizers issued an unsigned letter of apology.
Still, school officials are investigating, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said the party was not harmless fun.
“We once lynched African-Americans as good fun and humour,” said Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP.
One hip-hop insider, Chris Conners, programing director at Columbia radio station WHXT HOT 103.9, said he has no problem with whites imitating certain aspects of black culture — driving cars with flashy rims, for example. But he said students who put on blackface or padded their rear ends crossed the line.
“They weren’t really celebrating hip-hop culture. They were making fun of African-Americans, and that’s what really concerns me,” he said.
James Johnson, a black psychology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington who has researched racial attitudes and teaches a seminar on race and prejudice, said he is more discouraged by the rap performers who perpetuate stereotypes than by the “clueless kids” who imitate them.
“In the civil rights movement, you didn’t have blacks who called themselves `niggers’ and who called their women `bitches’ and `whores’ and who glorified being violent and being thugs,” he said. “Now these white kids are kind of confused.”
These incidents come at a time racial tolerance on college campuses is perceived to be steadily improving. But the truth may be more complicated.
A University of Dayton sociologist who analyzed journals kept by 626 white college students found the students behaved substantially differently when they were in the company of other whites than when they were with other races.
When the students, who were asked to record their interactions with other people, were alone with other white students, racial stereotypes and racist language were surprisingly common, researcher Leslie Picca found. One student reported hearing the “n-word” among white students 27 times in a single day.
The results suggest white students have little sense of shame about racial insults and stereotyping and treat them as simply a part of the culture.
“This is a new generation who grew up watching `The Cosby Show,”’ Picca said. “They have the belief that racism isn’t a problem anymore so the words they use and the jokes they tell aren’t racist.”
Picca said she found it “heartbreaking” to see so many well-educated students perpetuating the stereotypes.


Here's my stance on this. And yes, you get my two cents whether you want to or not. This is my blog after all, dammit.
It seems to me that there's a double-standard at work here. It's OK for black people - like Dave Chappelle, for instance - to openly mock white people (the majority), but it's not OK for the reverse to happen. Picking on the minority is like rooting against the underdog - it's just not Kosher.
Take the current "smear campaign" against the Conservative head of the Commons native affairs committee.
The Liberals want him to resign after he responded with "good joke" to an email he got last summer. Here's the joke:

An Indian walks into a Tim Hortons with a shotgun in one hand and a buffalo in the other.
"What can I get you, Chief?" the server asks.
The India drinks his coffee, blasts the buffalo with the shotgun, causing parts of the animal to splatter everywhere, then walks out.
The next day, the he comes back.
“Whoa, Tonto!” says the server. “We’re still cleaning up your mess from yesterday. What was all that about, anyway?
“The Indian smiles and proudly says, 'Training for an upper management position in Canadian Government: Come in, drink coffee, shoot the bull, leave mess for others to clean up, and disappear for rest of day.’”

He's right: it is a good joke.
Now Mayes, whose wife is Japanese, and whose daughter has two adopted sons are from Haiti, is being labeled as a racist. But if you were to substitute a "Newfie" or "Polack" — both common caucasian stereotypes in there — it would be seen as harmless and inoffensive. But then again, you're listening to the opinion of someone who dressed up as a sheep-humping Chilliwack Redneck one Halloween. So what the hell do I know?

Yeah, that's right... MORE DOG PICTURES

So, OK, ya, my life is pretty boring these days. Nothing much is going on in any facet - love, life, social, nor career. A dog is all I got.
Two, now that Steph is back from Phoenix with Felix the Dog, her rescue greyhound. He's a big loveable lump that lies in front of the fireplace all day. I didn't know how greyhounds actually were. Sure, he's a bony mutt, but he's got pretty muscular legs and stands about three feet high.

Most of my free time these days is spent on the hill at Big White. Even when it's not my free time. I was up there covering a couple different events, including the half-pipe competition and the BX yesterday. Here's some pics, because a picture says a thousand words, and I'm too lazy to write.











Some of those troublesome two-plankers even got in on the action...



And this is when I learned the meaning of "Danger Pay."
I was shooting with a wide-angle lens, meaning you have to get really close to something if you want it to appear big in the picture. So this one dude takes off about 30 feet up the pipe from me, starts flying through the air, flipping, twisting... and BAM! He lands — no lie — about six inches from me. He wiped out, too. It think the idea of hitting a black guy scared him.
I mean, a black guy? At a ski hill? He MUST be trouble...

Anyways, here's the sequence of pics - you can see exactly what I was seeing through the lens as he was flying "ohmygodhe'sgoingtohitme" through the air ...

FRAME ONE...



FRAME TWO...



FRAME THREE...



FRAME FOUR...



FRAME FIVE...



FRAME SIX...



FRAME SEVEN...



FRAME EIGHT... At this point, I pulled the old "duck and roll." Not that I was worried about the company's $15,000 camera getting wrecked. I'd already wiped out a bunch of times on the hill with the camera in my backpack.... No, it was more my own personal well-being I was concerned with. If I hadn't moved, I would have been impaled - an ironic death for a snowboarder.

From the depths of Dad's camera

At my Dad's house, Christmas Eve means two traditions: A) Eating trout with the head still attached so the cloudy, baked eyes of said fish can look at you accusingly, questioning your soul as to how you could snuff out its little fishy life for a mere meal ...
And B) Putting up the Christmas Tree.
It always seemed kind of tardy to me, putting up the tree the night before Christmas. It should be up weeks before, so you can look at all of the presents under the tree, then surreptitiously open a couple and re-wrap them before anyone noticed. I mean, putting up the tree on Xmas eve means that Christmas is OVER the next day. It's not a New Years' Eve tree, is it?
Anyways, you'll notice that our tree is what you would call a "Charlie Brown" tree. It's kind of small, somewhat tilted, and generally pathetic. It's another tradition that harkens back to my younger teenage years. I had planted a couple seedlings as part of a course I was in (herbology, science, bio, I can't remember), and they thrived and grew tall. Then one year I returned home for the holidays, and noticed one of them was conspicuously missing.
And then I saw it - hacked down, brutalized, and practically crucified in the living room; our Christmas Tree for that year.
It was terribly traumatizing, to see something you nurtured from a mere seedling get senselessly killed like that. It was a bit sparse, true, but it was MY tree. The next year, despite my picketing and demonstrating on a soapbox, my other child suffered the same fate.
But we've had small trees ever since then. I think my dad does it just to rub it in.
So here's some pics: me, my sis and pops....

The decorating begins...


The annual mounting of the Santa-In-A-Plane decoration. Note my sister's loving expression...


This is how we do ...


Note my pops' eyes. The crazy eyes. This is called the "Holiday Spirit."


Pops n' sis


The crowning touch: Our decades-old, handmade, barbie-doll angel.


I had to add this last photo, or I'm sure every one of my family members would have called me on it. My pops n stepmom have created their own little Christmas tradition. It's called "I'm buying Jake some ugly-ass underwear." This year, it was a Canadian Beaver underwear. In the past, I've gotten glow-in-the-dark golf-ball boxers, fishy boxers and lady-bug boxers. And they wonder why they don't have any grand-kids? Women run outta the house as fast as they can once the jeans get dropped... So it's your fault, D+M. Don't blame me....



And I just had to add this. I'm sweating profusely right now...