I forgot to congratulate you David on this!!!!  my brain is 6 months behind on webby world.   "Six apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York based creative agency Apperceptive"

Come this Wednesday night to UCSD for a roundtable of local urban planners, activists and lawyers who will give presentations on the unequal treatment of immigrants during the fire and misleading explanations for the causes of the fire. All the information for this is located on the roundtable wiki.

Presenters:

Andrea Guerrero - ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
Pedro Rios - American Friends Service Committee
Rick Brady - City of Santee (UCSD Urban Studies Planning alumni)
Enrique Morones - Border Angels

Carl you rock!  Congrats to your awards, including the recent Best Documentary by London Independent Film Festival award!  If you love poetry and youth and social justice - this is the documentary to watch. 

ABOUT THE FILM:  "2nd Verse” explores urban teen life in the San Francisco Bay Area through the rising popularity of poetry and Spoken Word. Although poetry is the unifying characteristic that brings these young people together, the film does not concentrate on their poems so much as it tells the story of their lives amid the Bay Area's melting pot of ethnic and economic backgrounds. We show how these teens coexist and draw strength from each other, and how these youth poets are changed by their engagement with spoken word, exploring their identity and connection to their unique California community. From a sixteen-year-old girl who lost her father to alcohol at a young age, to an undocumented teen struggling with poverty and his sexuality, to a privileged boy in San Francisco who attends one of the country’s most elite private schools, “Second Verse” endeavors to initiate the viewer into a world rarely seen or acknowledged by the general population."      

"Spoken word in the Bay Area more than in any other place in the country is supported, is prolific, is dynamic, is political, and has more relevancy here than anywhere else in the country. I think that a large part of the catalyst for that is the amount of attention that young people are paying to themselves, to the lyricism in popular culture, in hip-hop culture and the way they are reacting to it. They are creating music but also expanding upon and creating a new form of lyricism, and I think it trickles up rather than trickling down. The youth get inspired by their mentors and by their educators but we in turn see the force with which young people are coming with their words and it just pushes the whole form forward."  Marc Bamuthi Joseph: poet, performer, educator

I love Jay's new remix of Souljah Boy on the candidate debate (video below) and what's even funnier is that FOX NEWS picked (watch video here) it up but they were so stupid they didnt' notice that the lyrics and Souljah Boy's mouth weren't in sync so they credit Souljah Boy with coming up with the lyrics. 
If they bothered to look up the lryics of Yahhhh and compared it with Jay's remix they would've notice a major difference in the theme of the lyrics. 

Here is an excerpt of the original lyrics of Yahhh:

Dawg, get out my face, Im startin to get mad
Walkin up
(Soulja Boy, Can I have your autograph?) Bitch, Yahhh, Bitch!
Leave me alone, let me get some peace
I'm sittin at the house and a nigga can't sleep
Leave me alone ho, before I have to knock your xxx out
(Hey Soulja Boy, when that new 30/30 boyz cd coming out?)
Bitch, Yahhh, Bitch!
Bitch, Yahhh, Bitch!
Bitch, Yahhh, Ya, Yah, Ya, Yahh, Ya, Bitch

 and then here is Jay's remix of Yahhh:

YAHHH! Charles Gibson you're preposterous
Acting like a toy with your bay Stephanopolous
Hosting the debate and boy you know that you were tripping
Gossiping so much they should call you Perez Gibson
Asking all these questions bout some flags on lapels
while our whole economy is getting dragged into hell?
In case you haven't guessed it yet
we're trying to pick a PRESIDENT
so why is everything you're talking bout so irrelevant?

BIG difference right for leaping from bitches to economies?  Stupid Fox  - haha  Go Jay - but I still think nothing beat if Bill O'Reilly Was A Rapper!

this is one of my favorite quotes ever. I fell in love with the person who shared this quote with me.

When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite in determinate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction.  It it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space.  No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything. 
-Lucretius 99bc-55bc  - quoted in Manuel de Landa's 1000 years of non-linear history

Check out the new blog, Beijing Youth Voices,  by 6 Chinese youth who live in Beijing--Iris, Siqi, Steven, Linda, E-mail, and Kelan.  For the next few months, they will be posting bi-weekly blogs, giving you a peek into their lives and life in China.  This blog is a project between the U.S. based-nonprofit What Kids Can Do, Inc. and Adobe Youth Voices.

Over the past few months of preparing this project, I have had the honor to work  with What Kids Can Do, Adobe Youth Voices and ChinaPax (a Beijing based Mandarin language program).   I am particularly excited about seeing this project come to life after a few months of connecting the most dynamic team of youth bloggers.    Despite the number of Chinese blogs (being sited anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million), many blog posts that are written in Chinese rarely make it beyond China.  With all the recent news surrounding China's Olympics in Beijing, we thought that in addition to the mass media reports it would be great to just hear what Beijing life is like from the perspective of 6 high school aged youth, who will be telling their stories (in English) of what Beijing means for them and what daily life is like.

Although we cannot stretch their writings to be reflective of life all over China, we can at least  gain an intimate inside into life for these particular group of youth from a specific place and background.  It is our hopes that through this aggregated blog, you will follow their writings for the next few months, give them encouragement and feedback by leaving comments on their writings. I am constantly amazed by their strength to open up their lives.

Please help spread the word about their blog by forwarding, reposting, or using their posts in your lesson plans!

Special thanks to Gloria Xu of Chinapax for being such a great facilitator!

soho, nyc
do not imitate this cut, hair dye job or style!

chinatown, nyc
despite all the new condos and touristy-tificationess of chinatown - you can still buy an used drill on lafayette and canal.   I stood on the corner through two walk lights to witness the streams of people walking up to this man.  Each potential buyer would walk straight up and grab the drill with no exchange of words.  Then he would let go of the drill and let someone else grab the drill - and after watching a few men hold the drill then if a buyer was still around he would ask the seller what kind of drill it was.  It was so obvious that the drill had been through a lot - it was filled with dry wall dust and it had white paint splattered all over the rubber handles.

The seller managed all the potential buyers while keeping an eye out for the street cops because they consider this corner activity to be  illegal.   I hope this never changes!  chinatown please don't let soho crawl all over you!