I actually can’t believe it, but I am about to miss Obama’s speech on healthcare and my economics class to see the talentless trainwreck American pop music icon, Miss Britney Spears. The ticket was free and I figure I can sell it on Ebay in a few years like everyone did with their Michael Jackson crap memorabilia.
And honestly, IT’S BRITNEY BITCH!
President Barack Obama meets with former President Bill Clinton in the Situation Room of the White House. (via The Official White House Photostream)
Bill Clinton: Wait. There are two young, attractive Korean girls in need of some “diplomacy?” I’m on that shit.
![noraleah:
Covering 1968 is a blog that looks at iconic covers published in that world-changing year, including The French Chef Cookbook and the July issue of Esquire. Brian Horrigan writes of the magazine:
“The long, hot summer.” Americans heard a lot about that as the summer months approached in 1968, and it filled them with dread. By 1968, just the word “summer” was conjuring not just beaches and vacations and re-runs on TV, but also what were almost universally known as “race riots,” events that today, with more circumspection, we call “urban rebellions.” Large swaths of Los Angeles were devastated in summer 1965; much of Newark and Detroit (and Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis) went up in flames in summer 1967. Experts who might be called meteorological criminologists were coming forth with pronouncements about the “temperature-humidity crime index,” a bogus predictor of violence and lawlessness that added a layer of “science” to the accumulating lists of causes of civil disturbance. […]
Seven young black men–anonymous, black-jacketed, smoking, staring at the camera–are assembled in an ice warehouse. George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer pressed these men (actors? models? guys pulled in off the street?) into a single role, one with a long history in American popular culture–the Black Man who Terrifies White People. Cool. Insolent. Arrogant. Tightly wound. ”Powderkegs,” each of them. Still, the photograph manages to control them: they are inside; trapped, in a way, in a space that could pass for a prison; like animals or carcasses in a meat locker; isolated from each other, not part of a larger group. Not part of a community at all: no women, no children. Just black male-ness, an immense threat to white American males, overwhelmingly the readership of Esquire, “The Magazine for Men,” as it says just above the head of the black guy on the far right. […]
Baldwin had famously said a few years earlier, when asked in general terms about “the Negro problem,” that: “It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.” His long interview here bears up extremely well, even 40+ years on. Calming the waters, cooling the heated situation? No, neither. Baldwin’s eloquent, two-fisted answers probably left few people reassured about the summer of ‘68: ”When you, in the person of your President, assure me that you will not tolerate any more violence, you may think that frightens me. People don’t get frightened when they hear that, they get mad. And whereas you’re afraid to die, I’m not.”](http://15.media.tumblr.com/zkfIIODV5qp4obltxTc1jDFjo1_400.jpg)
Covering 1968 is a blog that looks at iconic covers published in that world-changing year, including The French Chef Cookbook and the July issue of Esquire. Brian Horrigan writes of the magazine:
“The long, hot summer.” Americans heard a lot about that as the summer months approached in 1968, and it filled them with dread. By 1968, just the word “summer” was conjuring not just beaches and vacations and re-runs on TV, but also what were almost universally known as “race riots,” events that today, with more circumspection, we call “urban rebellions.” Large swaths of Los Angeles were devastated in summer 1965; much of Newark and Detroit (and Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis) went up in flames in summer 1967. Experts who might be called meteorological criminologists were coming forth with pronouncements about the “temperature-humidity crime index,” a bogus predictor of violence and lawlessness that added a layer of “science” to the accumulating lists of causes of civil disturbance. […]
Seven young black men–anonymous, black-jacketed, smoking, staring at the camera–are assembled in an ice warehouse. George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer pressed these men (actors? models? guys pulled in off the street?) into a single role, one with a long history in American popular culture–the Black Man who Terrifies White People. Cool. Insolent. Arrogant. Tightly wound. ”Powderkegs,” each of them. Still, the photograph manages to control them: they are inside; trapped, in a way, in a space that could pass for a prison; like animals or carcasses in a meat locker; isolated from each other, not part of a larger group. Not part of a community at all: no women, no children. Just black male-ness, an immense threat to white American males, overwhelmingly the readership of Esquire, “The Magazine for Men,” as it says just above the head of the black guy on the far right. […]
Baldwin had famously said a few years earlier, when asked in general terms about “the Negro problem,” that: “It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.” His long interview here bears up extremely well, even 40+ years on. Calming the waters, cooling the heated situation? No, neither. Baldwin’s eloquent, two-fisted answers probably left few people reassured about the summer of ‘68: ”When you, in the person of your President, assure me that you will not tolerate any more violence, you may think that frightens me. People don’t get frightened when they hear that, they get mad. And whereas you’re afraid to die, I’m not.”
