The Big Update

Several days compressed into one post:

-Watched Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star on Saturday. It’s a funny movie. I loved seeing the former child and TV stars playing themselves (as well as Rob Reiner and a brief cameo by Brendan Fraser). The ending song performed by a calvacade of former TV/child stars, from the Brady brothers to the late Fred Berry (Rerun of What’s Happening), is the funniest thing in the movie.

-I visited Evanston on Monday. I gave Frank back his DVDs, got some burned CDs of anime from Cliff (actually, I made the CDs on his computer while he was gone since I showed up later than planned), and got my DVDs back.

I went to Burger King for lunch, and saw a kind of disheartening sight. I’ve heard that you can judge the quality of a restaurant based on the quality of its restroom. Well, the Men’s restroom in this particular Burger King had no working soap dispensers. Two things I’m thankful for...first, that I used the washroom after I ate and second, that I didn’t think about how the male employees could wash their hands until after I ate. Damn shame too...BK’s new TenderCrisp Chicken sandwich is good.

-While in Evanston, I went to Borders and found one of the elusive CDs I was looking for, "Atlas", the second album by a Mexican group named Kinky. Yes, they sing in Spanish but the music is a fusion of latin rock and electronic. Anyway, Borders had it for...$17.99. Now what makes this wrong isn’t the high price itself (since Borders has exorbitant prices on CDs when they’re not on sale). What makes this wrong is that the actual retail price of the CD is only $9.99 according to most of the Internet sites I’ve gone to. Which means that the poor person who buys that copy will be paying about double what he/she should.

I also picked up a couple of manga: Kare Kano volume 8 and Ragnarok volume 9. The anime version of Kare Kano ended with a cliffhanger. So, if you like the show and want to find out what happens next, start off with this volume. Kare Kano is probably one of my favorite manga so I encourage people to get it and see the anime as well. As for Ragnarok, it’s a good series with lots of characters and lots of action. It sucks that volume 9 is technically the next-to-last volume of the series, especially since it’s nowhere close to finishing up the story. The author of the manhwa (Ragnarok is Korean) put the series on hiatus to work on the Ragnarok Online game. He only finished 10 volumes and as far as I know, he hasn’t restarted it yet. I really hope he gets back to doing it, as it’s a fun (and quick) read that will definitely appeal to those who like fantasy novels or RPGs.

-Tuesday, I voted in the Democratic primary. Barack Obama won! I’m happy that an intelligent, qualified person won the nomination for the Democratic party...and I’m also happy that he’s black. If he wins the general election, he would become only the fifth African-American to become a senator...ever. I have to give us citizens of IL credit...we’re the only state that seems to be able to actually elect African-Americans to the Senate. What’s more amazing is that only 9% of Illinois’ population is African-American. We actually see people based on their actual qualifications and not just on skin color. Take that California, New York, the South, and most everywhere else.

-In my continuing attack on the way minorities are represented in advertising (see my post about Morton’s Hot Salt), I recently saw a commercial for UPS that itself wasn’t so bad. In fact, I kind of forgot what actually happened in the commercial but one thing stuck with me. They showed an African-American delivery person and his boss calls for him: “Come on, Sam!” Now, what’s the problem with this? Well, calling a random black person “Sam” comes from the character “Lil’ Sambo.” The character appeared in a book in the 1800s and became a negative stereotype for African-Americans as childlike, shiftless, lazy, and so on. So, it’s not a compliment for a black person to be called Sambo. Sambo has been abbreviated to Sam at times. Hence, my problem with the black male in the commercial being called that. Of course, I doubt that the people who made this commercial had any idea of the history behind that name. People should know a little more about history, particularly about the history of offensive images and words. Lord help me if I see a commercial with a drooling, happy black boy eating a piece of watermelon.

-Kool-Aid has two new flavors out now: Arctic Green Apple and Lemon Ice. Both flavors are good, but Arctic Green Apple is the best. My sister described the taste as taking apple-flavored Jolly Ranchers and melting them to make a drink. Lemon Ice kind of tastes like melted Italian Ice to me.