Michael Jackson, Xbox 360, Pacman Jones, Michael Vick

I guess in the last 5 years or so, I've fallen into the social sway of opinions on Michael Jackson. I don't really remember much of his music as I was growing up because it wasn't really my thing. I knew about Fleetwood Mac, Mariah Carey, and Gloria Estefan. That was about the limit of my musical knowledge, thanks to my mother playing the hell out of it on the den speakers. So, the cultural impact of his music doesn't really impact me the way it probably should. Sure, some of the artists I listen to probably cite MJ as an inspiration, so I guess in some roundabout way, it affects me one way or another. Anyway, I find it hard to believe everyone who dumped on MJ for the past 10 years suddenly had an awakening when he bit the big bazooka. What happened to all the jokes? What happened to him touching little boys and disfiguring his face being the topics of choice when casually chatting about the man? I didn't expect so many people to just give him a free pass, especially considering how the American Culture had treated him for an extensive period of time. Sure, it's courtesy to the dead... but whatever happened to courtesy to the living? Do people have to die nowadays to garner any sort of lasting respect at all? You can't have it both ways, America. You can't ridicule a man for the duration of his latter years for crimes he didn't even commit and then all of the sudden forgive all perceived wrongdoing and rant and rave about his cultural impact. It bothers me that it took his death for people to shut the fuck up.

I've been gaming since 1989. If you were able to go back and figure out how much wattage I've used over the course of my lifetime while console gaming, I'm sure the figures would be astronomical. Perhaps with the energy I used to game all these years, you could power a small town for several weeks. We'll never really know. What I do know, however, is from 1989 to 2009, no console I ever owned just upped and died. The days of the super nintendo, sega genesis, playstation 1, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Gamecube... All of them played from the day I started running them to probably today, if I dared dig them up. You may notice that I left out 2 notables that I've owned in the past few years. The first is the original Xbox. This big, ugly fucking pile of plastic was made I guess to melt things. I never could play on it longer then a few hours, just to avoid it melting my entertainment center and all the things around it. Xbox360 is here now. I picked mine up last April and enjoyed playing on it until about a month ago. Apparently, it's so cheaply and poorly designed that about 6/10 ever made will suffer a hardware failure at some point in the unit's lifetime. Basically, you continue playing until you get yourself the Red Rings of Death, indicating a hardware failure. Now get this; This hardware problem was/is so prevalent, Microsoft was basically forced to extend every Xbox 360's warranty by 3 years to avoid massive litigation. You still have your basic 90-day Warranty and all on top of the 3 year addition. I find it funny. What I don't find funny is the incredible amount of neglect that must've went into production of the system. Microsoft was in such a hurry to launch before Wii/Ps3 (to saturate the market and get a good base from which to compete with) that they forgot to build a console that was actually worth a fuck. So, now I get to feel like a jackass when I'm doing the "towel trick" to temporarily fix and major hardware flaw. Funny, I don't ever remember wrapping towels around my SNES.

"You can take the man out of the hood, but you can never take the hood out of the man."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4333957

All I really have to say is there are so many more out there just like him. I will never understand Black "Gangster" Culture and the insane emphasis it places on material objects. I know some well educated black men, and they say this is exactly why Black America will never amount to anything. It's not really fair to these kids to be brought into a lifestyle where they have no future. It will continue, however, regretfully.

Michael Vick is another polarizing figure caught up in the whole "trapped by culture" phenomenon. From a fan standpoint, sure he's entertaining to watch on the field. If you've never watched him play, there's simply no way to describe the electricity he brings to every play on offense. I remember when a young Michael Vick went into Lambeau Field and single handedly defeated the Packers in a playoff game from about 5 or 6 years back. Then he got paid. Hung around the wrong crowd, blah blah. We've heard it a thousand times with a thousand other success to failure stories. To me, as a sports enthusiast, it helps me respect all the hundreds of other players who KNOW right from wrong. Will Vick play in the NFL again? Probably. It just seems a shame to be talking about all of this now, when his career was so promising from the outset.