Does Your Pop Music Suck? “How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Song,” by Kanye West.

/This post has been commandeered by guest blogger Don Bito/

In case you readers were wondering how on earth I got away with chronicling my extremely personal, unnecessarily loquacious journey from uninspired to the opposite of that last week, the answer is: I didn’t.

If you want to know the truth, the universe has, in no uncertain terms, registered its displeasure with my melodramatic biblical references and metaphorical tears by unleashing an all-too-literal flood upon my abode.  Not even the whole house; just my room, where air conditioner evaporation-pan overflow (or some sh*t like that) filled two buckets with its constant dripping throughout the night.

That’s right, readers. You may think being subjected to my whims of verbiage is cruel and unusual, but the whole damn universe just went Dick Cheney on my ass. So, suck it up.

Anywayyyys…today’s pick peaked at #3 on the Hot 100 chart this week. Check out Keri Hilson’s Knock You Down featuring Kanye West and Ne-Yo here. I linked you in since you really ought to see the original video, which is unembeddable thanks to copyright laws and whatevah whatevah.

“Can I Tweet @ Work?”

So I heard an interesting story the other day. I was at a dinner and a friend mentioned that their boss had made the decision to enforce an interesting Internet policy at work. A filter? Nope. A ban on social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter? Nope.

Apparently, this friend’s boss decided that his employees should be prohibited from ever using their workplace computers for personal Internet use. That’s right. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No checking personal email accounts. No paying bills online. No reading news sites.

Welcome the newest phillygrrl!

That’s right, folks. Please join me in welcoming our latest guest contributor, SingleInPhillyGrrl! She writes:

Hi.  I’m SingleInPhillyGrrl.  If there are two things I know well, it’s the single life and the City of Brotherly Love.  I’ve seen the best, the worst, and the ugliest that our fair city has to offer its inhabitants when it comes to the dating life, and am ready to dish.  I will tell you the best Philadelphia dates, the types of guys/girls NOT to be, and guide you every step of the thorny, complicated dating path.

Dating is the sport.  And I’m your John Madden.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Boys, don’t be this guy.  Girls, don’t be this gal.

Talk to you soon, Philadelphia.

Er, I’m brown?

Taking the City of Brotherly Love to the biggest, baddest, brownest blog on the Net: Sepia Mutiny. Yup, gonna be a guest contributor at Sepia Mutiny this summer. Still laughing at how the discussion went from a ‘welcome PG’ theme to a ‘damn those Eagles’ vein. Check it out.

But more importantly, take a look at my inaugural post. It’s about all my favorite things. Bacon. And cheesesteaks. And food carts. And Philadelphia. Freel free to comment! (Okay, it’s about kinda/sorta all of that, maybe. I leave the hard-hitting political stuff to the pundits.) But comment anyway.

Kailash Kher Concert @ Kimmel Center

It’s not too late to check out Kailash Kher at the Kimmel Center this Thursday! (Gotta love the skinny jeans in his intro pic ;) ) Tickets still available. (The Wikipedia bio on Kher.)

Thursday, July 30
7:30pm | Perelman Theater

My favorite song of his?

My Urdu/Hindi is failing me, but I’m thinking the first few lines say “I don’t want diamonds and pearls/I just want to hear you sing.” Hopefully this rough translation is somewhat correct. Anyone want to continue translating?

Penelope Trunk is my hero

Not just because she’s a sucessful executive with various start-ups. Not just because she’s a talented writer with a blog I read (and disagree with) religiously. Because of the post she wrote last week that moved me (and many of her readers according to the 300+ comments) to tears.

Last Tuesday, she wrote a post with her usual candor and clarity. It was about how much a person should reveal about themselves in a blog (which I’ve been thinking about as of late). And then, forgoing her usual rants on life, she went in a totally unexpected direction. Child abuse. Sexual abuse. Physical abuse. More specifically, the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. I’d always pictured a successful woman like her with a set of WASP-ish parents who encouraged her to succeed at all costs. Not at all.

“I remember the next time my dad beat me up though. I called the police and they came. Like always. And my dad said nothing was wrong. Like always. And then the police started to leave. Like always.”

“I’m just from Philadelphia.”

Start watching the Manhattan clip at 3:19. (I use that excuse all the time.)

Trailers Needed for Asian Film Festival

Enter this contest, folks! Here’s the deal. Make a trailer to promote the festival. Not a movie. A trailer. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Now do it.

Mondays are always strange

So in a misguided attempt to distract myself, I managed to read an actual, honest-to-goodness, paper-and-ink newspaper today. Here’s what I found:

1. Chinese chap accused of stealing Apple’s iPhone secrets. Commits suicide. Girlfriend gets laptop for compensation. What?

“Even so, the company paid compensation to Mr. Sun’s family. It declined to say how much, but Mr. Sun’s brother cited a figure of 300,000 renminbi, or more than $44,000, and said Mr. Sun’s girlfriend was also given an Apple laptop computer.”

Your boyfriend just committed suicide so they make up for it with a laptop? I sure hope she refused to take that. On the other hand…I’d do just about anything for a Mac Powerbook.

2. Go unions! Teachers at charter school KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) recently unionized.

“In recent months, teachers have won union recognition at schools including the Boston Conservatory Lab School, a school in Brooklyn that is part of the Knowledge Is Power Program, an Afro-centric school in Philadelphia, four campuses in the Accelerated School network in Los Angeles, and a Montessori school in Oregon. Moves toward unionizing have revealed greater teacher unrest than was previously known.”

Anyone who knows a teacher who work at a charter school knows this is a good thing.

3. The whole Jersey fiasco distracted everyone from Vince Fumo. Good? Bad?

4. I will have no job in the future.

Does Your Pop Music Suck? Nothing Good To Go Bad.

/This post commandeered by guest blogger Don Bito/

I drove into work today without the slightest idea of what I would write about this week.  I hadn’t heard anything new and noteworthy, one way or the other, and I had my doubts about how many weeks I could get away with writing about not-necessarily-recent songs that I just happen to like, and still have you all believe this was a topical pop music review column.

Approaching my desk, a lone tear swelled and dropped from my eye, a single gleaming reminder that the illusion would soon be shattered, the velvet curtain pulled back, that my days as a member of the pop music intelligentsia were now numbered.

And their number…was one.  I was sucked into a greased downward spiral of hopelessness and despair (even more so than I usually am at the start of my shifts).

BUT LO, FROM THE VILLAGE OF INBOX THERE SHON A DIM BUT CONSTANT LIGHT.

Could this be? No, surely it was a figment of my imagination, a momentary hallucination created by my reeling ego to engender false hope and eventually sharpen the pain of my inevitable failure.

YET STILL THERE SHON THE LIGHT.

Oh readers, it WAS true! Not only was I to avoid ruination (this week), but it was none other than the Philly Grrl who had thrown herself upon the seldom-bestowed mercy of my haphazard musical tastes.

A MERCY SHE WOULD NOT RECEIVE. And here’s why…