Clearing My Mind

Things that I have been thinking about lately:

-Why were Starter jackets ever popular? I guess Starter was the first company to really co-brand their product with professional sport leagues and there is the whole “Tipping Point” theory. But the jackets made you look like Violet Beauregarde after chewing on Wonka's magic chewing gum.

-I can’t remember the last time I had a vanilla frappe/shake. I mean, for my first ten years I had an exclusive contract with vanilla and now I would never consider it. Maybe I should.

-What type of mother did LL Cool J have? Why was she telling him to go around knocking out people? Should someone have contacted social services?

-How the hell does the Nintendo Gun work? Someone tried to explain some reflective theory to me and I am sure it’s right… but doesn’t that seem a bit ahead of its time?

-I have a feeling a lot of people are going to lose quite a bit of money on the Bears/Saints game this weekend.

-Where does the current Office streak of phenomenal episodes stand in sitcom history? Since The Merger, every episode has been killer. Every single Thursday, you can count on sitting down at 8:30 and laughing your ass off.

-It’s nice that the Chargers have so many people going to the Pro-Bowl… with all the time to prepare, the AFC should win in a landslide. Now that’s a game I may bet on.

-How long until a Baseball Beckett is worth more than the cards in it? I was looking through one a couple weeks ago and my god… talk about demand falling quickly.

-I am getting used to this no snow thing on the east coast.

-Maybe it’s time for me to switch up my haircut. I have been saying “2 on the sides and take the top down” for 14 years. The problem is, I don’t know what else to say. Every time I go into get my haircut I am prepared to do something different. Then they ask me how I like it and I repeat verbatim the aforementioned sentence. The only other haircuts I know are: the whiffle, the flat top, and the fade and I sported one of those three every other year I have been alive. Any ideas here? Anything?

-Do people who listen to popular rap today like the same rap music that we do here. Do they listen to the latest Lil’ Wayne song, then pop in The Low End Theory? There was a divide in the early 1990’s in the hip-hop culture. About the same time the Biggie and Tupac stuff went down, it divided into two camps. Rap, with its crystal, 24 inch rims, and butchering of the English language, began to represent the genre at the mainstream level. This did not happen overnight, but it has happened. Hip-hop, the intellectual and socially driven form of the genre, submerged into the underground and now you either don’t know or you know. I wonder what type of world we would be living with if the two paths were switched. If A Tribe Called Quest never broke up and became what Wu-Tang was in the mid to late 90’s. I imagine things would be different if it were De La Soul, Tribe, and the Jungle Brothers were being played on local radio stations instead of Nelly, DMX, and Ludicrous. I think about that a lot.