2:54 p.m. PT: What will the state of your soul be on the glorious day of Christ’s return? Listen to Crystal Lewis sing, “People Get Ready.”
She warns: “There’s a day that comes when we will be divided right and left. For those who know Him and those who do not know. And those who know Him well, will meet Him in the air. Hallelujah! God is with us. And those who do not know, they will hear ‘Depart I knew you not.’ For my friends you see, there will be a day when we’ll be counted. So know Him well, know Him well.”
There will be a day of reckoning, my friends, and all will be counted.
Headed back to the right coast. See you there, God willing. Thanks for reading LBC.
Friday, November 30: The play will go on. Gary Hines will have to find a different idiotic cause. Will somebody give that man a real job? Or a hobby?
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When I was a teen, my grandmother used to watch “Murder, She Wrote.” I thought the hour-long mystery drama was exceedingly boring. Years later, after the show went into syndication, I watched a few episodes to see if the show lived up to its 80s hype. Indeed. I was hooked. I’ve probably seen every episode from all 12 seasons.
I’d heard the main character, a teacher-turned-mystery-novelist named Jessica Fletcher, was modeled after British mystery author Agatha Christie, who wrote such books as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (my favorite), Murder on the Orient Express, and Death on the Nile. I don’t know whether it’s true, but I started reading Christie’s novels. I was hooked.
I especially enjoyed the novel And Then There Were None. It was originally published in 1939 under the title Ten Little Niggers, which came from a nursery rhyme of the same name. The title eventually was changed to Ten Little Indians, then to And Then There Were None.
By now you’ve probably heard the latest NAACP uproar. With no important work left to do, a local NAACP branch president in Ohio pitched a fit complaining about an upcoming high school performance of a play based on the book.
***Scroll down for music-related book recommendations***
12:14 p.m. PT: Southern California has been unusually overcast the past few days, and it’s got me feeling a bit glum. I needed some cheering up, so I pulled this out of the closet:
It’s “Come On Get Happy,” the theme song from “The Partridge Family.” I know you old heads remember that show: a band of five kids and a mom touring in a psychedelic school bus playing gigs. The song cheers me up every time I hear it. Yeah, it’s kind of corny, but it works.
Which song(s) cheers you up when you’re feeling blue? Goodness knows we could all use a lift sometimes.
Later…FL Mom says Hanson’s “MMMBop,” anything from the Mary Poppins movie soundrack, and Veggie Tales songs cheer her up.
Music, music, music, any kind of music…
Book Recommendations
I’m three-quarters of the way through a book called This Is Your Brain on Music. Good overview of how the brain processes what we call “music,” why we like certain chords and rhythm, how musicians lure us in with “deceptive cadence” and pleasure our senses with syncopation, and much more.
The author, a former music producer, believes in Darwinian evolution, but don’t hold that against him. It doesn’t detract from the book’s core theme. I recommend it.
I like reading “resistance is futile” and making-money stories. Check out this one at Wired.com about 68-year-old Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group, which owns Island/Def Jam Records (see reference), among other labels. The dinosaur once reviled the digital file format (MP3 players are “repositories for stolen music”!) until he realized how much money he could make and how futile it was to resist changes in the marketplace.
According to the story, Universal sued YouTube and MySpace, then made a licensing deal with YouTube and Yahoo (which nets Universal over $20 million a year). Morris also worked out a deal with Microsoft that pays his company $1 for every Zune player sold, plus licensing fees for Universal’s music in Zune’s online music store. Sweet.
Tip of the hat to Dawn Eden for blogging about Donna Joy Vance, a 16-year-old whose mother refused to have her murdered in the womb, despite a chilling prenatal diagnosis. See the story and video.
Donna Joy’s mother said even if her baby lived only a few minutes, she wanted to “give her some dignity, wrap her up in a pretty blanket. Say ‘I love you’ and let her go.”
I imagine it’s pretty frightening to be told your unborn baby might be born blind, deaf, and faceless, but it comes down to this for Christian parents: Do you trust God? Whether the baby is born healthy or with deformities, Christian parents faced with a grim diagnosis must set boundaries. How far will you go? Murder is not justifiable because a baby will be born with serious problems.
9:59 p.m. PT: Although I’m sick of politics, I decided to participate in TV One’s Presidential Forum project. The network will link to black political bloggers starting today, leading up to a presidential forum webcast on Saturday, December 1 (yes, it’s almost December).
TV One is a “a new cable/satellite television network, programming primarily to African American [Cringe!] adults.” The network recently aired “Roots: The Next Generations,” which I thoroughly enjoyed. Hadn’t seen it in years.
My sister think it’s unwise to stop blogging about politics altogether. She says there’s a lot at stake in presidential races, and who is in the White House makes a difference in our lives, even though it may seem pointless to care. I suppose she’s right.
I haven’t been following political news, so I’d like to know the who, what, where, when, and how of the presidential race. Can you catch me up? What’s the latest Clinton and Obama news? What do you consider blog-worthy?
Update: Shelby Steele has written a book titled A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. I haven’t read the book, but according to a review (forgot where I read it), Steele says that because Obama grew up somewhat privileged, he was to exaggerate black America’s “oppression” to appeal to black voters, or something like that. Most Democratic politicians do that, don’t they?
6:53 a.m. PT: While no human being can be colorblind, government policy must be.
Given this country’s sordid racial history, the promise of equal treatment without regard to race, and the inherent unfairness of being judged as a member of a group instead of as an individual, it’s imperative that our government is forced, if necessary, to get out and stay out of the skin color business.
In response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and strong resistance to race-neutral school assigning, courts across the country ordered school districts to desegregate. They were required to dismantle official and unofficial race-based school assignment policies. But in a strange Alice-in-Wonderland interpretation of the case, school districts continued to use race to assign students (to achieve a racial “balance”), despite the wording of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (emphases added):
10:38 a.m. PT: LBC’s source code disappeared for a while. My host restored backup from the wee hours of Thursday morning, which means all the cool comments from Thursday morning through Friday are gone.
I’ve reposted the California pictures. Nice comments about those. Gone. Oh, well.
Hanging out in Hollywood today. Have a good one!
Sunday, November 25: I snapped a couple of photos of the billowing smoke from the Malibu fire, but you can’t see it very well:
7:25 a.m. PT: The digital music player has enhanced the listening experience for consumers. We can download our favorite tunes for free in some cases, legally or illegally, and we can carry them everywhere in small, compact gadgets. We no longer have to trek to brick-and-mortar stores to buy music on compact disks. We don’t have to wait several days or weeks for CDs we ordered to arrive at our doorsteps.
The music: We want it how we want it, and we want it now. Instantaneous. And no shipping fees.
We’re modern-day hunters and gatherers, foraging through an abundant mass of products set loose by the Internet and rapidly changing technology. The abundance is almost decadent. As long as you have Internet access, you can find almost anything anywhere. And if you know where to look, you don’t even have to pay for it.
But how does this abundance look from the artist’s point of view? Every time someone downloads a copyright-protected song without permission, an artist’s and/or record label’s rights are violated. Every time someone opts to buy a single song instead of an entire album, the artist’s intended message may be lost in the process. That’s what rapper and producer Jermaine Dupri thinks.
An Album: A story with a beginning, middle, and end
I don’t know anything about Jermaine Dupri or his music. I probably wouldn’t like it if I listened to it. But he has a point.
10:49 a.m. PT: Back in 1976, the Council of the District of Columbia thought it would be a good idea to ban the sale of handguns and require shotgun and rifle owners to keep these firearms disassembled. The council thought the ban would cut violent crime rates.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In fact, violent crime, particularly murder, went up. The ban deprived law-abiding citizens of the constitutional right to bear arms and to protect themselves, while thugs ran free and killed without conscience.
Last March, a three-judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declared DC’s ban on handguns unconstitutional and refused to rehear the case in May. The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and today the court has decided to hear the cases.
I am hopeful that sometime in 2008, I will be the owner of several (legal) firearms.
Does owning a gun go far enough? How about concealed carry? I dig that.
3:31 p.m. PT: Intelligent Design (ID), an evidence-based, scientific theory of the origin of life, is one of many topics I intended to blog about but never got around to covering. Perhaps now that I’m off politics…
One doesn’t have to believe in the God of the Bible to hold the view that life’s complexity is evidence of an intelligent agent. The idea that an undirected, random series of events caused something as wonderfully complex, specifically magnificent, and infinitely beautiful as life is, to put it mildly, ludicrous. Living things look designed because they were designed.
Contrary to common belief, ID is not a negative argument against naturalistic evolution. It’s a positive argument for an intelligent designer based on observing the same informational properties in nature that are found in human-designed structures.
Darwinian evolution proponents twist themselves in knots trying to explain how something as complex and information-rich as a DNA molecule, for example, was the result of random processes. Utterly ridiculous. Information implies intelligence.
10:29 a.m. PT: The key to success in any business is tapping into an untapped or under-served market. Hip hop “mogul” Russell Simmons, reportedly worth $340 million, is trying to capitalize on a growing segment of rap-loving, broadband-equipped black and hispanic web surfers. (Source)
As broadband Internet (now the standard in the digital age) becomes less expensive, more people of lesser means can afford it. In order to produce clear, high quality images and sounds, content-rich audio and video files require wider and faster bandwidth. The wider the bandwidth signal, the more information the signal can carry.
According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the digital divide between blacks and whites is narrowing as more blacks acquire high speed Internet connections. From Businessweek:
En route to the left coast for an early Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll send myself off with a blast from the distant past, a song called “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds, circa 1985.
I know my fellow 40-ish friends remember that one. It was the theme song for “The Breakfast Club,” a movie that defined “coming-of-age” for me.
The music industry is in trouble. Technology news sites and the tech blogosphere are buzzing about a new music blog/business model that might save it.
Somebody Has to Pay
A company called RCRD LBL (pronounced record label) launched today. Peter Rojas, who founded popular gadget blogs Gizmodo and Engadget, created RCRD LBL to satisfy users’ appetites for free music and to make money from this something-for-nothing propensity. (I’m guilty, too!)
RCRD LBL will pay artists an advance for the use of a limited number of songs and generate revenue through advertisements on the blog. Users will get to download free, legal, and DRM-free (digital rights management) MP3s. Sounds good, if the company can keep a steady supply of both advertising clients to pay the advances and artists willing to offer music.
Will this business model work? If artists and labels keep up the pressure on illegal peer-to-peer file sharing networks and users grow weary of DRM-burdened music files on legal and illegal download sites, probably. Advertising on the web is growing, and RCRD LBL may have hit on something potentially big.
Tip of the hat to 
Dawn links to two sources that help parents care for and cope with “abnormal” babies, 
9:59 p.m. PT: Although I’m sick of politics, I decided to participate in TV One’s 
6:53 a.m. PT: While no human being can be colorblind, government policy must be. 
7:25 a.m. PT: The digital music player has enhanced the listening experience for consumers. We can download our favorite tunes for free in some cases, legally or illegally, and we can carry them everywhere in small, compact gadgets. We no longer have to trek to brick-and-mortar stores to buy music on compact disks. We don’t have to wait several days or weeks for CDs we ordered to arrive at our doorsteps. 
10:49 a.m. PT: Back in 1976, the 
3:31 p.m. PT: Intelligent Design (ID), an evidence-based, 
10:29 a.m. PT: The key to success in any business is tapping into an untapped or under-served market. Hip hop “mogul” Russell Simmons, reportedly worth $340 million, is trying to capitalize on a growing segment of rap-loving, broadband-equipped black and hispanic web surfers. (
The music industry is in trouble. 