DOTM: Sex with an Alligator

sweet and sour mix
Midori® melon liqueur
1/2 oz raspberry liqueur
1/2 oz Jagermeister® herbal liqueur

Add sweet and sour & Midori to a shaker w/ice, shake and strain. Layer in razzberry liqueur and jager. Razzberry should go to the bottom and jager should float on top. Works best in Martini glass.
sweet and sour mix

THIS FALL!!!

I LIKE THIS ARTICLE BY CLIFF'S NOTES

Choosing between a Large or Small College
You might be surprised that little Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, has a student population of only 900. On the flipside, Ohio State University's main campus in Columbus has well over 51,000 students. Whether you choose a massive university or a cozy college depends on several things, including your personality, desired major and courses of study, and learning style.

Big school benefits
Big schools unquestionably offer more degrees, more specialized fields of study, and a longer list of classes to choose from. Their school library systems are massive and well-stocked, and since the faculty at most major universities also conduct research in their fields of expertise, you can expect to find vast amounts of research material to enhance your coursework.
Large universities also offer their students new experiences; you'll broaden your horizons by meeting people from all over the world and from different backgrounds. You'll have a wide range housing opportunities, and the streets surrounding campus will probably have ethnic restaurants you've never considered.

Of course, large schools also offer more social activities. You'll find more social activities, more extracurricular clubs, and sports teams that garner national attention. Large universities also attract internationally recognized public speakers, the biggest rock concerts, and the best Broadway shows.

To be successful at a large university, you must have initiative. You will be largely left to your own devices to manage your education; to get your enrollment, class registration, and financial aid paperwork in order; to attend and stay awake in class; and to manage your homework. If you're not ready for this kind of independence, a smaller school might be better for you.
Small school success.

When students are asked why the chose a small college, usually the number-one reason they give is class size. Not only does the idea of sitting in class with hordes of other students just sound intimidating or impersonal, but having a smaller class size gives you the opportunity to really get to know your instructors. At a small school, your classes might average around 20 students, and higher-level classes might have as few as 4 or 5 students, and your professors may take on more of a mentorship role as they get to know you and can dedicate teaching time for your individual needs.

Often, small colleges also offer students a less-regimented course load. At large universities, degrees of study might be cookie-cutter (you MUST take these five courses and choose five of these nine elective courses), but some smaller schools offer you the chance to build your own major, pursuing something that's tailored to your specific areas of interest.
At smaller schools, students usually endure far less administrative red tape and competition for courses and benefit from much more individual advising. Your academic advisor is likely to become a friend rather than just a person who signs paperwork at the start of each semester, as can be the case in large school administrations.

Although smaller schools won't have the social outlets of major universities, there is almost always a stronger sense of community at a small college. You'll feel more of a connection to the campus and the community it resides in. You won't feel as likely to get lost in the crowd.

MIGHT JUST CHANGE THE WORLD!

NAS & DAMIAN "JR GONG" MARLEY DISTANT RELATIVES preview from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

RIP Michael Jackson from University Hustle...

Michael Jackson Dies of Reported Cardiac Arrest
Paramedics Reportedly Performed CPR Before Rushing Jackson to Hospital
By Miranda Hitti
WebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
June 25, 2009 -- Pop star Michael Jackson has died at age 50 after suffering a cardiac arrest, according to media reports.

Los Angeles TV station KTLA reports that Los Angeles fire officials said they responded to a 911 call at Jackson's home and that Jackson wasn't breathing when they arrived; paramedics performed CPR and rushed him to UCLA Medical Center, although the hospital, due to privacy rules, could not confirm that.

In a cardiac arrest, the heart stops working properly. A cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack, but it can happen because of a heart attack, notes Douglas Zipes, MD, MACC, distinguished professor at Indiana University School of Medicine and past president of the American College of Cardiology.

Zipes explains that "cardiac arrest is a heart rhythm disturbance when the bottom chamber of the heart, the ventricles, beat an at extremely rapid rate -- 4 to 600 times a minute."

Zipes says that heart rhythm "prevents that bottom chamber from effective contraction and pumping blood to the brain and to the rest of the body, and death results if it's not reversed within four or five minutes, generally."

According to Zipes, when that heart rhythm disturbance, which is called ventricular fibrillation, happens, the bottom chambers of the heart are "like a bag of squiggly worms without an effective squeeze, and no blood gets pumped to the rest of the body, and without the necessary oxygen in the blood vessels going to the brain, and so on, the brain then begins to die."

CPR can help keep blood flowing, but it would take an electrical shock to the heart -- either from electrical paddles called defibrillators or from an internal heart device -- to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm.

"Some sort of blood flow has to be initiated, whether it's with CPR or with the shock that terminates the fibrillation and restores an effective contraction," says Zipes.

Zipes notes that in 30% to 50% of cardiac arrests, "that event is the first manifestation of underlying heart disease. So you may not have chest pain, you may not have shortness of breath, you may not have anything" as a warning sign.

Just over a year ago, ABC News journalist Tim Russert died after a cardiac arrest. Russert was being treated for his heart disease risk factors; Jackson's previous heart health hasn't been made public.

You can post your comments about Michael Jackson on WebMD's news blog.

TWO MUST-HAVE MIXTAPES!!

KOBE DOIN WORK! (again)

Kobe’s Beautiful Game

Thursday, 21 May 2009 09:16

Like him or not, after watching Spike Lee’s mesmerizing documentary, you’ll be sucked into the hype, too.
By: Salamishah Tillet

I've never been a Kobe Bryant fan. Maybe it’s because I'm still getting over the Lakers 4-1 deafening defeat of my mainstay, the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA finals. Maybe I just don't like his particular blue-chip swagger. Of his generation of athletes, I have always appreciated Serena Williams' extroverted braininess, Donovan McNabb's self-composure, and of course, Allen Iverson’s blue–collar, rumble-in-the-jungle plays. Most certainly it’s because I never got over those sexual assault charges.

But I have to hand it to Spike Lee. For about 90 minutes last weekend, as I watched his documentary, Kobe: Doin' Work—which aired on ESPN Saturday and was released on DVD on Tuesday—I got sucked into the hype.
The conceit for the project, as described by Lee, is: “one great player, one day, on the job.” Filmed during a Lakers game against the San Antonio Spurs during the end of the 2007-2008 regular season, Lee captures all things Kobe with 30 cameras, the images mixed with real-time floor commentary and a post-game voiceover. As a result of this cinematic mixture, Lee not only gives the audience the game as Kobe sees it, but also gives us unprecedented access to the game as Kobe thinks it.

Bryant’s voiceover reveals certain unfamiliar insights about his defensive ability, his ignorance about how much talking he does on the court, his multilingual trash talking with his Slovene teammate, Sasha Vujacic; his shooting irregularities, his unabashed respect for San Antonio players Manu Ginobili and Bruce Bowen. By relying so much on Bryant’s analysis, Kobe feels like we are in the locker room with him, studying film, rather than watching greatness.

On one hand, Lee’s commitment to basketball purity is admirable. Other than one of the opening scenes in which Kobe is watching CNN ask Hillary Clinton about Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments during last year’s Democratic primaries, the game is suspended in time. That one game becomes every game. That one night becomes every night Bryant is on court.

Through the intimate nature of Bryant’s narration about why he does or does not take a particular shot, his translation of the Lakers’ silent on-court communication and his eloquence about ball rotation, we literally learn how to see the game differently. We feel the rhythmic minutiae of basketball. Pedestrian. Laborious. Repetitive. Less pomp and circumstance, more fast breaks and fatigue.

As engaging as Lee’s approach is, the documentary reveals little about how Bryant views anything other than basketball. Unlike Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the 2006 film on the soccer great which inspired Lee to make Kobe: Doin’ Work, the singular focus of Bryant’s voiceover does not allow for glimpses into the prodigy’s development, either as a player or as a person.

The film closes with Bryant, his wife, Vanessa, and their two daughters returning home after the game. The scene of domestic tranquility conjures up opposing memories of the chaos surrounding the sexual assault charges brought against Bryant in 2003. Unlike Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and James Toback’s Tyson, Lee’s documentary is uninterested in exploring the tensions between sexual violence, male privilege and fame. The film is unwilling to ask what demons haunt and yes, constitute Bryant’s genius, what past he so desperately wants to remake. By removing context and conflict, Lee’s film assumes that the only greatness that matters is Bryant’s intellectual and physical dexterity on the court.

In the real world, character, charisma and depth are considered virtuous traits. But, if you’d like to forget about those things for 90 minutes, one night of Bryant’s eloquent play and Lee’s engrossed directing redefines how you experience the beautiful game of basketball.

Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

[Source: The Root]

NEWSWEEK SPEAKS ON 20-YEAR-OLD "Do The Right Thing."

Thursday, 11 June 2009 16:28
The Fire Next Time
By Joshua Alston

Considering all the effort put into shrouding Barack Obama in swarthy otherness during the election, it's a wonder that one biographical factoid went without much scrutiny. On their first date, he took Michelle to see Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, the dystopian meditation on race relations that, a full 20 years after its release, remains the hottest firebomb in Lee's provocative filmography.

Never mind Jeremiah Wright and Michelle's Princeton thesis; if anything would have given "hardworking white Americans" pause, it's the thought of their president and first lady courting at a film that features a black mob gleefully torching a white man's business. There's even a recitation of a Louis Farrakhan quote about how the black man will one day "rise and rule the earth as we did in our glorious past," but Obama wasn't asked to reject or denounce his choice of date movie.

That the film never came up is more surprising considering that the two decades since Do the Right Thing's release haven't blunted its impact. The film takes place on a record-hot day in Brooklyn's predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Lee plays Mookie, a pizza schlepper for Sal (Danny Aiello), an Italian-American whose pizzeria is either a great place to grab lunch, or akin to a foreign military base, depending on who is asked. During the film's climax, Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) storm Sal's to demand he put a black face among his all-Italian-American wall of fame. A fight breaks out, and when the NYPD shows up, Raheem is choked to death by an officer, sparking the riot that destroys Sal's pizzeria.

Do the Right Thing demands that the viewer make an uncomfortable value judgment: what's more important, a white man's property or a black man's life? Lee was unconvinced that white America would reach the right conclusion, as the film ends with a mayor's statement on the riot, read by a radio announcer: "The city of New York will not allow property to be destroyed by anyone." (That line, Lee admits, was aimed directly at then-mayor Ed Koch.) It would be nice to write off Lee's pessimistic view of race relations, particularly as the police are concerned, but the deaths of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006 bear out the notion of police killing innocents, then dressing up racial malice in gross incompetence's clothes. If Lee made the film in 2009, it would probably be more indignant rather than less, the election of Obama notwithstanding.

The film's most controversial feature was actually in the credits, in which two quotes roll: one from Martin Luther King Jr. repudiating the use of violence, and one from Malcolm X justifying violence in self-defense. There's no bolder choice a filmmaker can make than to create an ambiguous ending, to force the audience to decide how it feels about what it's seen rather than simply agree or disagree with him. To watch Do the Right Thing now is to be reminded why Lee stands among our most original, most daring filmmakers. It's still relevant, still troubling and still more of a third-date kind of movie.

[Source: Newsweek]

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