Hillary Clinton sits down with Marsellus Wallace. From illdoctrine. h/t Jack & Jill Politics.

May 8, 2008--At about the same time my little sister was getting married three weeks ago – it was a lovely beach ceremony in the Florida Keys; she was beautiful, and I was teary, having the bittersweet privilege of subbing for our dead father on the walk up the aisle – food riots were breaking out across the picture-perfect waters at her back, on the island nation of Haiti. Putting the two together – a wedding and a riot – is more than an article-opening flourish: My sister and I were both born in Queens, N.Y., but our family is Haitian, and some of the relatives in attendance barely made it off the island in time for the nuptials.

Our cousin Leslie, a priest in a small, rural town north of Port-au-Prince, was not so lucky. He got all the way to the airport before being called home. His rectory had been broken into and looted by parishioners looking for stores of rice used by a church-administered meals program. ("A church!" some of the older ladies tut-tutted at the rehearsal dinner, as if the building's powers of sanctuary should have included the ability to bar hunger and desperation at the door.)

more over at The Root.

hat-tip that non-blog-having Jones Kid

These pieces of mine appeared on The Root and in Bidoun Magazine recently.

Dock Ellis, talks to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel about pitching a no-hitter on LSD:

We flew into San Diego and I asked the manager could I go home, because we had an off day. And he said, "Yeah."

She said, "I don't know but you better get to that airport."

from boing boing:

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it.

The first few years after he died, I would call my father's old number every 2 or 3 months, letting it ring a few times before hanging up. The number had been reassigned to new people, who I liked to imagine wondered what the quarterly prank call from Boston was about. (This was circa 2004 or so, Cambridge days.) I never left a message, don't think I ever held the line long enough for anyone to pick it up. I can't say for sure what I thought I was doing. There was no ghostly recorded voice on the other end, and I harbored no supernatural fantasies about Dad himself answering. My father was a strict materialist and good with electronics, and I figure that he'd find a way call me directly should he find himself inhabiting the phone system.

nice and lucid. [h/t that non-blog having jones kid]

I'm messing around with Drupal's news aggregator, with an eye towards using it as a blogroll. Don't get your knickers in a bunch if it seems that I have left you off. Everyone who was on the old blogroll (plus lotsa nifty new folks) will be linked to once I have the hang of the new system. That said:

http://www.ebogjonson.com/aggregator/sources

Omega Man NRA

Charlton and Rosalind

i am who be

brock and charlton

Sidney, Harry, Charlton

charlon, james, marlon

brownface touch

brownface switcheroo

the kiss

rips Charlton Heston.

Patrick Ewing is old enough to have a son who is old enough to be in dunk championships? I'm old.

A lovely pic of Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King from Harry Allen.

for some reason I find usage of "no homo" offensive and inane, but, always get a chuckle out of people using "PAUSE."

It's sad, really.

from the NYT [h/t AYG's facebook feed]:

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

I dated a woman once who went on and on over our initial dinners about how she was "studying world religions." When we finally got to the reading-in-bed stage, she pulled out a dog-eared, fat paperback copy of some kind of Penguin/Norton "Book of World Religions" and proceeded to read a page or two before intently staring out into space, seemingly listening to the ether for an answering sound before eagerly turning back to the next few pages.

hey folks,

I am swinging east for my sister's wedding, and will be making a stop in NYC on April 8th to participate in a reading for Bidoun Magazine. If you're free that night, it would be great to see you!

best,

e/g

--------------

Tuesday, April 8, 7pm
Bidoun Night @ The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St between 10th and 11th Avenues

_Bidoun: Arts and Culture from the Middle East_ presents an evening celebrating a triplet of telling objects, culled from the pages of its spring-and-summer issue.

Writer, film critic, and web theorist Gary Dauphin on the Cleaver Sleeve -- a revolutionary trouser design (circa 1975) by the soon-to-be-ex–Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.

Bidoun Editor in Chief Lisa Farjam on the secret of her beating heart.

Writer Anand Balakrishnan on castrated pop singers, American imperialism, Arab mustaches, and the mystery of Naguib Mahfouz's white linen suit.

All this, plus --
Magic tricks!
Slide shows!
A harrowing journey to the Cairo Agricultural Museum!
A video by Ziad Antar!
And music by DJ/rupture!