Neil Gaiman's blog turned six years old today, and -- since he has "people" to code up neat toys for him-- it got this amazing post for a present.

If you were a girl in a Black Star t-shirt, and if your rap name was Hesta Prynn, would I be capable of forming an unbiased opinion of your rhyming?

No, probably not.

This may be why I can't decide if "Keep choice legal/your wardrobe regal/Chekhov wrote The Seagull/and Snoopy is a beagle" is awesome or inane.

So, here we go, some different shit with a pretty swell beat on YouTube, for you to decide.

New post on the other blog.

Three links from tabs that have been open in my laptop for most of the last week:

• Carl Zimmer in PLoS Computational Biology on the relationship between computational and molecular techniques and "natural history" approaches in biology.


• The best of Jayson Stark's Useless Information Department. A pitcher gets credited with a strikeout of a batter without the two of them ever being on the field at the same time, and other zaniness.


• A Malcolm Gladwell article that I read in 2000, long before I ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell. In reality, I don't really like Gladwell all that much, but this piece is really interesting. It covers the history of the birth control pill. Read it for the parts that explain this bit:

  It remains, in other words, a drug shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church--by John Rock's desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. This was John Rock's error. He was consumed by the idea of the natural. But what he thought was natural wasn't so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was.

  My impression in general that Gladwell simplifies things a bit much sometimes, so maybe a grain of salt is advisable, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

Lately it has become cool to post an especially lame count down post. Color me hip.

The Wikipedia entry for ax mentions that it is "a shortening of "ask" in Ebonics."

The Suns' guard makes a good point.

Matt (New York): Raja, you have some experience with NBA tussles. What are your thoughts on the brawl between my Knicks and the Nuggets? Do you think the suspended players got off easy, or were they unfairly scrutinized because they play in the NBA? Seems like in other leagues, players get off scot-free.

Raja: I saw the fight, but I wasn't involved in the events leading up to it, so I can't speculate too much. I'll say this: It's interesting when NHL players are praised for being great fighters, but in the NBA, we're "criminals" and "thugs." It's a shame, but what are we going to do? That's society. There are deeper issues in play. We just have to be aware of that.

Something similar struck me when I watched Barry "The Mullet" Melrose praising two (white) hockey players for a "great tussle" a couple of days ago on SportsCenter. Absolutely ridiculous.

Via Crooked Timber, an excellent essay on the nature of James Brown's funk. To entice you, a nice long excerpt:

As I've explained elsewhere, I think about hipness a fair bit, and one of the things I think about is how very, very few things remain hip all the time. Hipness is Heisenbergian: the act of observation changes the thing observed. If I say that Madlib (say) is hip, the mere fact that I, a paunchy middle-aged music professor, say he's hip will mean that he's actually a little less hip, because it means that I've heard about him, and now that you've read this, so have you. (Ideally you know of Madlib's hipness because he got you high in his bomb shelter or something. You gotta live it or it won't come out of your horn, as Charlie Parker said.) So hipness is unstable, and you can't ever really define hipness in terms of individuals. Even so, there are a few musicians who are basically hip all the time: Miles Davis, John Lennon, and, it now must be said, James Brown. James Brown is hip because hipness, as a concept, as an eschatology, is unthinkable without him.

ESPN.com's Page 2 has done an obscenely long two parter on all of the absurd moments from the sports world in 2006, in which we learn all sorts of arcane, idiotic stuff, such as:

An Indian runner who won an Asian Games silver medal in the women's 800 meters failed a gender test.

and

A former Marshall University cheerleader sued for sexual harassment, claiming that the squad's cheers had sexual code names, that a female coach encouraged cheerleaders to act in a sexually provocative manner at a golf team fundraiser and that a male cheerleader rubbed his scrotum on her face.

The lawsuit claims that when the cheerleader refused to go along with the sexual hijinks, she was put on probation for "not being personable."

and

A Nebraska youth football coach was charged with 96 counts of possession of child pornography after handing out football camp flyers that had been printed out on child porn he had been looking at while drunk.

If you absolutely have to have a pentecostal wedding, the only way to make it work is with a gay guy and an atheist for groom's men.