Chris Brown And Souljah Boy, Two Palookas

It was reported by Rachael Clemmons in her gossip column "The Word"(Metro New York, January 11, 2017) via the website TMZ that rappers Chris Brown and Soulja Boy dislike each other so much that they have decided to "duke it out" in a boxing ring in Dubai. "Chris Brown is being trained by Mike Tyson," writes Clemmons,"while Soulja Boy is being trained by Floyd Mayweather."

Could it be that the two rappers--described by Clemmons as"man-children" --have record sales that are so low and have a craving for attention that is so high that they need to challenge each other in the ring in order to fill up their bank accounts?

Since both rappers like to post full-frontal nude selfies of themselves on the Internet, maybe they can boost ticket sales by boxing in their birthday suits.

"Hidden Figures," The Movie

Last night I saw Hidden Figures (twice). This excellent film focuses on three African-American women who worked at NASA in the early 1960s and whose extraordinary math skills helped launch astronaut John Glenn into space aboard Friendship 7.

I have the book by Margot Lee Shetterly on which the movie was based and I plan to read it very soon.

I hope to obtain the DVD of the movie when it becomes available. I'm sure bootleg copies are already on the street. But I'll wait for the official version with all of the features that are sure to come with it: commentary by the director, screenwriter, and actors, a documentary about African-Americans at NASA (with an on-screen interview with the book's author), etc.

No One Can Be Food-Deaf

Book and magazine editor Robert Gottlieb in his memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), described his lack of culinary skills this way: "...I can't do more in the kitchen than boil an egg, and am generally considered food-deaf."

The term "food-deaf "is an inaccurate description. A person can be tone-deaf because that refers to sound. But a person can't be food-deaf because one doesn't listen to food as its being prepared in the kitchen. The terms that are more accurate, although imperfect, would be food klutz and cooking inept.

Zsa Zsa Gabor Slapped A Cop

Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who recently died at the age of 99, several years ago slapped a police officer during a traffic stop in Beverly Hills, California. If she had been a black woman, the outcome would have been fatal.

No Black Press Quoted About August Wilson's "Fences"

In the Sunday New York Times (December 4,2016) there was a large pull out section advertising Denzel Washington's new film Fences, based on August Wilson's play, that is due for release on Christmas Day. The section carried blurbs by film critics from the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and other publications. But none from an African-American publication. This omission tells me that Paramount Pictures doesn't think that the black press matters even on a project about the black experience by a black playwright and a black director (Denzel Washington).

Re-Creating The Pearl Harbor Attack On The Radio

Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, the 75th anniversary of the Japanese air attack that pushed the United States into the second world war.

On Pearl Harbor Day in 1965 or 1966, I was in my teens and living in Southern California. I recall that a local radio station, whose call letters I don't remember, did a re-creation of the broadcast day in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

This re-creation included actual programs, news bulletins, and probably commercials, from that time. This brought the event to life for me, a person not alive when the attack happened. I remember being riveted to the radio.

I wish some enterprising radio station would do something similar during future Pearl Harbor Remembrance Days.

Gay Activist Cleve Jones's Memoir

I'm looking forward to reading (and reviewing?) When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, the San Francisco gay rights activist and founder of the AIDS quilt project. (I'm rarely on Facebook, so the last time I checked, he and I were still Facebook friends.)

 I learned about the book after hearing him being interviewed on public radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I  heard him again today on another public radio show, Here and Now.