Another Hip-Hop Quote

“Hip-hop creates nothing.”

– John McWhorter (professor of Linguistics)

Link to the article that contains the quote.

World’s Smallest Gun

This tiny gun is the world’s smallest working revolver. It’s being marketed as a collector’s item and measures just 2.16 inches long (5.5cm). It can fire real 4.53 bullets up to a range of 367ft (112m).

It’s made out of stainless steel and costs £3,000. The manufacturers also produce extravagant, made-to-order versions made out of 18-carat gold with customized diamonds that sell for up to £30,000!

Unfortunately, since the barrell is less than 3 inches it can’t be imported to the USA (3 inches is the shortest barrel size deemed fit for sporting purposes).

Geography Game

Here’s a link to a game that allows you see if you can locate the world’s countries. Pretty cool.

I’ve seen better ones in the past. If I find some, I’ll post links.

How Dirty is Your City?

 

Forbes Magazine just published a list of the top 25 dirtiest cities in the world. To see which cities in the world were dirtiest, they used Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

All cities were positioned against New York, the base city, with an index score of 100. For the Health and Sanitation Rankings, the index scores range from the worst on the list–Baku, Azerbaijan, with a score of 27.6–to the best on the list–Calgary, Canada, with a score of 131.7

Pardon my ignorance, but I’ve never heard of the city of Baku or Azerbaijan. Here’s a wikipedia entry about Baku.

Interesting Article on Prostitution

In light of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, many people from a wide range of disciplines (psychologists, economists, etc) have written articles about why Spitzer solicited sex from from a prostitute.

This article, written by Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Ventakesh, sheds some light on the high end call girl industry. It’s pretty fascinating.

 Here are some excerpts from the article:

 “What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York’s sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That’s one helluva conversation. But it’s what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day…

This doesn’t mean the elite women have a great life…high-end workers routinely experience physical abuse at the hands of their clients—on average, they report getting abused twice per year, which is better than the six times a year that street-based workers report but still, clearly, troubling. Escort services (usually owned by men) often charge…Plus, their lives are cash-based—they can’t plan for the future or make any real investments.”

Election “Video Game”

I stumbled upon this on a message board. Props to whoever made it, because it’s pretty funny.

Hip-Hop Wisdom…

“If you walked by a street and you was walking on the concrete and you saw a rose growing from the concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So why is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how I am leaning crooked to the side, you can’t even see that I’ve come up from out of that”

– Tupac Shakur

Creepy and Cool Illustrations

More is available at Rob Sheridan’s Sketch Blog and MarkRyden.com

Hip-Hop Portraits

Portraits of hip-hop heavyweights like Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Russell Simmons are featured in painter Alexander Melamid’s Holy Hip Hop! exhibition, currently on display at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit until April 20, 2008. 

Here’a link to the Museum wesbite

Link to the NY Times piece about Melamid.

They got billionaires in Africa?

Patrice Motsepe of South Africa is on the cover of this month’s Forbes Billionaires issue with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion.

Here’s a link to the article