Dedicated to everyone who comes from the boonies

A lot of kids I went to college with were really into French hip-hop. I liked it alright, but it never really hooked me, Until...



I just came across Kamini, a french rapper who the rest of the internet discovered like the end of last year. I'm posting him anyway, goldurnit! Because he has infectious beats, flow and a sense of humor that transcends the language barrier.

Seriously, watch the video before reading the loose translation below.
Still, he has become my current number one reason to learn French.

Dedicated to everyone who comes from the boonies
From some little one-horse town
You don't see no one there rappin aroun'
Not even a riff
A little hayseed town
Life goes on, they don't know you exist
Nobody knows your little one-horse town.
Not even that Osgood.stiff.

Kamini's my name,
From the hood--I ain't
Come from a place called Marly-Gomont
So, get with the beat, the beat, the beat that goes rum tum tum

You know in Marly-Gomont the roads ain't paved,
Average age 'round here 's about 68,
We got tennis, basketball, and that's about all,
but with just 3 guys in the village it ain't enough to play ball,
I come from the sticks, you can't get here by bus
There's 'bout 95% cows, and 5% us.

There's only one family with African roots there,
Hadda go and be mine, what a fuckin' nightmare,
Told my dad, "Might as well move to Alaska, dontcha think?"
Coulda gotten used to the cold and the folks up there.
And he said, "What the hell, you joshin' me boy? 'S gonna be all right."

Yeah right. First day at school when I was six
Bawling my eyes out, cuz o' those little pricks
You know what they called me?
Yo Africoon, yo banjo lips.
Yo, little Sambo--Outta the mouths of those kids came their parents' licks.

[Refrain x 2]
I ain't from the hood, but the beat's my own,
From the big city neither but from Marly-Gomont
The place ain't paved, the pastures are green
But you wouldn't believe the trash I've seen.

In Marly-Gomont there's no ghetto-talkin' stuff,
A little twang like this, that's good enough
Sometimes they like you,
"I don't like the Arabs, don't like no black.
but I like you fine, even though you're black."

Once in a while, they talk politics, you see
and maybe also philosophy
Anyway, what I say is, they're a rotten bunch
In their little one-horse towns, better not get sick
Or else you'll be in real deep shit, gotta go 20 towns away
30 miles or more, to find a hospital or any dman thing
Out there there's nothing but grazing fields.

Sometimes, on Sundays it's our soccer day
The stadium's a field so that's where we play
with lines scratched out, they set up goals and nets
On the local team, there's always some guy
Named Bubba: go Bubba, go", so they cry.

An' if no Bubba, then on the opposing team,
There's always some guy named Billy-Joe.
Go Billy-Joe, go, go, go!

A typical day out here: the mailman, a tractor, the mailman again, that's it.
Maybe one in a while, a cow goes by.
Moooo

[Refrain x 2]
I ain't from the hood, but the beat's my own
,From the big city neither but from Marly-Gomont
The place ain't paved, the pastures are green
But you wouldn't believe the trash I've seen.

And in nursery school, I was the only black
and in primary school, was the only black
and in middle school I was the only black
From pre-school to junior high, they were on the attack
I got beat outside or in 'most every day,
but Dad always said, "Son: no fighting, okay?".

You know I wanted to rebel, torch something to settle some scores,
But we've got one bus for school, same for the center outdoors,
No point burning your neighbor's car
They don't even have one, they all got motorized bikes
And you know, the bakery, it's 5 miles away
5 miles? Every morning? On the motorized bike? [x2]

Hey do you know where Vincent's gone?
Did he sneak off somewhere without telling anyone?
Naah, we got nothin like that 'round here, eh,
He's just off somewhere on the motorized bike, hey
Motorized bikes are the backwoods subway car
So, get with the beat, the beat that goes rum tum tum

Dedicated to everyone who comes from the boonies
From some little one-horse town
You don't see no one there rappin aroun'Not even a riff
A little hayseed town
Life goes on, they don't know you exist
Nobody knows your little one-horse town.
Not even that Osgood.stiff.

[Refrain]I ain't from the hood, but the beat's my own,
From the big city neither but from Marly-Gomont
The place ain't paved, the pastures are green
But you wouldn't believe the trash I've seen.
Yo!

(translation via Peter on Tim Worstall's blog)

The Honky-Tonk Dragon can relate, my friend.

Kamini's website
Wikipedia entry
A different translation and more info from the forum on Saul Williams' site.
A recreation of the video done in World of Warcraft.

thanks to Neatorama for the hookup, yo.

Happy Spring Friday

For those of the Hebrew faith it is Passover. It's Good Friday for the Christians, with Easter right around the corner. Some Muslims have just recently observed Mawlid an-Nabi or the birth of the Prophet. Our Wiccan friends just recently had their Ostara cakes and ale. And those crazy black-hooded anarchist kids are planning their May Day misadventures. Whatever your creed or paradigm, chances are some hints of rebirth, redemption, renewal, and/or spiritual/psychological liberation have been tickling your consciousness.

Translation:
It's SPRING Baby!!!

Symbolically many of these festivals are linked with the rebirth of the sun. It is a time for hope, fertility, inspiration, and new beginnings. Even our secularized holiday festivities recognize this with images of bunnies, lambs, chicks, and flowers.

So, the Dragon brings you this little ray of hope, and his own celebration of that burning orb to which we all owe so much. The following text refers to the graphic above.

Solar power systems installed in the areas defined by the dark disks could provide a little more than the world's current total primary energy demand (assuming a conversion efficiency of 8 %). That is, all energy currently consumed, including heat, electricity, fossil fuels, etc., would be produced in the form of electricity by solar cells. The colors in the map show the local solar irradiance averaged over three years from 1991 to 1993 (24 hours a day) taking into account the cloud coverage available from weather satellites.

Can we quit screwing up our planet, and killing each other over dinosaur juice, now? We truly have the power and ability to at last grow up and be good stewards of this glorious creation we have been gifted with.

So mote it be.

Oh, and for a little bit more on solar power advances, check this out. And this.

Art for Engineers

Heather from Cabinet of Wonders sent me a link to Max Chen's site Oily Cog. What a smorgasboard of loveliness! Take this great kinetic sculpture above, titled "Eclipse." In case you are unsure what it does...
It eclipses!

OK, I thought it was cool.

Alright, well how about this, "Astrolab"?

Front side has map of San Francisco. Only the bicycle lanes are shown (no Bay Bridge crossing). Back side has various components. Perimeter has a little prayer.

If this post seems to be very graphics heavy, and text light, well, that's because Oily Cog is that way. (Well, and I'm still fighting a head cold.) Max's stuff is one part steampunk, one part bikepunk, and one part mad tinkerer trying to physically transcend the limits between art, science, and engineering. Sheer genius, and my rantings would only diminish the simple elegance of this stuff.

OK, one more image to try and convince to check this site:

The sidecar leans with the bike, so it rides almost normally. I have carried over 200 pounds with it, and it has accompanied me on three Burningman Festivals. ... The urge to build a sidecar originated from a trip to mainland China as a boy. I saw a very young child riding inside a bamboo bicycle sidecar. Then I found and took home a really nice single sided hub from Cornell HEV. The rest is history.

***Sigh***

Apple has just announced their new 8-core MacPros. That's right, the new top of the line Mac features dual quad-core 3.0 ghz Intel Xeon processors. Expandable to 16 gigs of RAM and 3 TERAbytes of harddrive space. Since the quad-core processors haven't hit the Windows PC market, that makes this the fastest consumer workstation available... for like the next five minutes...
Still pretty impressive, if you wanna say, start the next LucasArts in your basement. Of course that maxed out system will run you over $10k.

Hmmm... someday I'm gonna max out my old dual 500 G4 to dual 1.8 G4s... that will still be more than enough for the most intensive stuff I do (mainly Photoshop.)

But still eight 3 gig cores! Yikes!

via Slashdot

Serenity Chosen as Fan Favorite SF Film

Now this is interesting.

Space thriller Serenity has beaten Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll of 3,000 fans.
The futuristic release from 2005 was based on the short-lived TV series Firefly. Both were the work of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon.

Does this increase the chances of Firefly ever getting back on the air?

via Slashdot

Note: if you are really geeky enough to care about this sort of thing, you should check out the discussion on Slashdot. Of course if you are that geeky, you probably already have...

This is the American Dream? More Health Care Nightmares.

Following up on previous posts about the bankrupting experiences non-insured individuals face in our society, there is this story from the San Francisco Chronicle. It details how a Bay Area man was charged $12,000 (almost twice his annual income) for an emergency room which turned up.... (wait for it...) a cracked rib.

It also underlines the importance of universal coverage that guarantees affordable health care to anyone, anywhere -- a goal that's become a central issue in California and in the current presidential campaign.
"We are the only developed country that doesn't cover all its people," said Stan Dorn, a senior research associate at the nonpartisan Urban Institute. "We also spend a lot more than the rest of the developed world."
The United States spent an average of $6,102 per person on health care in 2004 (the latest year for which figures are available), according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Canada spent $3,165 per person, France $3,159, Australia $3,120 and Britain a mere $2,508. At the same time, life expectancy in the United States was lower than in each of these other countries and infant mortality was higher.

The article also states that 47 million Americans have no insurance. They don't cite their source for this statistic, and it sounds a little low to me, but we'll go with it. The US census population clock estimates the current US population at 301 million, so we have what like 1 in 7 Americans with no coverage. Again that estimate sounds awefully low to me.

This is so insane, I can't even think about it. I mean, I don't have any coverage, and being over 35 now, it's time I start to watch my blood pressure.

Sweet Folding Concept Bike

Thomas Owen's prototype One Bike is sure pretty to look at, and I can easily understand how it all might collapse down, but my non-engineer brain can't quite puzzle out how the pedals are connected to the wheel. If this ever made it into production, I could see it becoming the ipod for urban bikers... easy to take on a bus or train, when you get to work, you just stuff it under your desk. When you get home, cram it under the coffee table.

via TreeHugger