snap snap!
I do not own these pictures and they are simply appearing on my blog as a part of the informative information I am trying to share. Smooches...
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Monday, March 29, 2010
PICS + THIS TUESDAY!!! THE RETURN OF OPEN MIC @ THE ALL NEW PROST LOUNGE!!!
Inspiration: Dancing With God
My good friend sent this to me and it almost made me cry so I'm sending it to you. Hopefully it will inspire you as well.
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This Friday "Sweetest Taboo" @ Juanita's
I just might check this out! Sounds like fun....
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Thursday, March 25, 2010
Reggie and Kim K Split.......AGAIN
I wonder how scary looking Kris is working around this for Kim's PR.
Don't feel sorry for Kim though, another rumor has it that she's now dating this guy- Soccer player Wayne Bridge:
I guess she went from football to futball.
Yet, another rumor has it that Reggie has move on to some random not so attractive blonde chick.
SORRY NO PIC!
I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder - after all I don't think Kim K is attractive.
Eva and Lance No More
Black celebrity couple Eva Pigford and Lance Gross have called it quits despite having planned a wedding for this summer. The couple's rep released the following statement according to www.essence.com
“Lance Gross and Eva Marcille have mutually decided to end their relationship. The split is completely amicable,”
I'm trippin because I just watch a DVR-ed episode of 106th and Park and Lance was talking about how in LOVE he is. But after hearing the news - I went back and re-watched and he is acting a lil shifty!I wish I could find the video so you can see for yourselves..... Any way - Why can't black love last?
Nicki's A Little Freak!
I'm becoming more of a Nicki Minaj fan as the days go by. I love the wig and she STEALS the video from Usher.
Also peep a Ciara cameo at about 1 min into the vid.
Also peep a Ciara cameo at about 1 min into the vid.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Rev Ron's Son Diggy Busts a "Freestyle"
When I ren accross this it was being labeled as a freestyle. But I'm looking at this video and while it clearly isn't a freestyle it is a pretty tight flow.
I think he might have JoJo beat.
Diggy - Made you look Freestyle (Flow Stoopid) from Diggy Simmons on Vimeo.
I think he might have JoJo beat.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Student Goes Off In Class
From the very beginning til she says "Get your fucking knee out my back" til she says "Oh that bitch is going down" She is a live trip!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Write to Lil Wayne in Prison
This is so Awesome: Every Urban Prep Senior is College-Bound
The entire senior class at Chicago 's only public all-male, all-African-American high school has been accepted to four-year colleges. At last count, the 107 seniors had earned spots at 72 schools across the nation.
Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman surprised students at an all-school assembly at Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Englewood this morning to congratulate them. It's the first graduating class at Urban Prep since it opened its doors in 2006.
Huberman applauded the seniors for making CPS shine.
"All of you in the senior class have shown that what matters is perseverance, what matters is focus, what matters is having a dream and following that dream," Huberman said.
The school enforces a strict uniform of black blazers, khaki pants and red ties -- with one exception. After a student receives the news he was accepted into college, he swaps his red tie for a red and gold one at an assembly.
The last 13 students received their college ties today, to thunderous applause.
Ask Rayvaughn Hines what college he was accepted to and he'll answer with a question.
"Do you want me to name them all?"
For the 18-year-old from Back of the Yards, college was merely a concept--never a goal--growing up. Even within the last three years, he questioned if school, let alone college, was for him. Now, the senior is headed to the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta , Ga. next fall.
Hines remembers the moment he put on his red and gold tie.
"I wanted to take my time because I was just so proud of myself," he said. "I wanted everyone to see me put it on."
The achievement might not merit a mayoral visit at one of the city's elite, selective enrollment high schools. But Urban Prep, a charter school that enrolls using a lottery in one of the city's more troubled neighborhoods, faced difficult odds. Only 4 percent of this year's senior class read at grade level as freshmen, according to Tim King, the school's CEO.
"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."
College is omnipresent at the school. Before the students begin their freshman year, they take a field trip to Northwestern University . Every student is assigned a college counselor the day he steps foot in the school.
The school offers an extended day--170,000 more minutes over four years compared to its counterparts across the city--and more than double the number of English credits usually needed to graduate.
Even the school's voicemail has a student declaring "I am college bound" before it asks callers to dial an extension.
Normally, it takes senior Jerry Hinds two buses and 45 minutes to get home from school. On Dec. 11, the day University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana was to post his admission decisions online at 5 p.m., he asked a friend to drive him home.
He went into his bedroom, told his well-wishing mother this was something he had to do alone, closed the door and logged in.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" he remembers screaming. His mother, who didn't dare stray far, burst in and began crying.
That night he made more than 30 phone calls, at times shouting "I got in" on his cell phone and home phone at the same time.
"We're breaking barriers," he said. "And that feels great."
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Are You One of these Chicks?
Written By The Fly Guy
It's time to officially clear the air. There seems to be this common misconception, which suggests that men have lower standards when choosing a mate. That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, men are a lot pickier than we lead you to believe. To prove this point, I've decided to share "Five Types of Women That All Men Hate." So pay close attention, and if this sounds like someone you know, then that may explain why they can't seem to keep a man.
1. Ms. "Stick In The Mud"
This woman never seems to have any fun … ever. Her idea of a good time is probably a quiet evening at home reading the encyclopedia while eating a Lean Cuisine. On top of that, she doesn't know how to give or take a joke, since she takes herself way too seriously. Will you relax … please?
2. Ms. "No One Else"
Ms. "No One Else" wants all of your free time—every single second of it. As soon as the two of you get close, she stops talking to all of her friends and expects you to do the same. Some men may reluctantly agree, but that arrangement soon grows old.
3. Ms. "Something To Prove"
Ms. "Something To Prove" has always worked hard to show the world she was capable of doing anything she set her mind to. And while the entire male population applauds her strength, we get kind of tired of her reminding us about it throughout the entire date.
"I've got a good job."
"I don't need a man to do anything for me."
"I've always been independent."
"I'm going to write a book encouraging other women to be strong like me."
Honestly, we'd rather listen to a Paula Abdul Greatest Hits album than to sit through an entire evening of that.
4. Ms. "Read My Mind"
For some reason, Ms. "Read My Mind" expects her man to know exactly what she's thinking at all times. As a result, she constantly tests him, using his responses to gauge his level of love. This type of behavior should be avoided, as very few men are interested in dealing with the constant guessing games.
5. Ms. "Chatterbox"
Communication serves as the cornerstone for all serious relationships. However, some women overdo it a bit. The problem with Ms. "Chatterbox" is that she spends most of her time talking, and none of it listening. Before long, this type of woman grows even more annoying than that one drunk uncle who always tries to hit on your female friends.
The Fly Guy Moral: So now that I have outlined the five types of women that all men hate; what now? Will you continue to hold out hope that he will one day change his mind and accept you as you are? Or will you learn the art of compromise and begin addressing those personal issues that aren't conducive to a healthy relationship? I pray you choose the latter.
To read more from the Fly Guy, visit The Fly Guy Chronicles
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
TYSON BECKFORD AND KORTO MOMOLU HOST DESIGNERS CHOICE FASHION PREVIEW
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
Know Your History People!
Next American City » Magazine » The Last Homes Standing
Dispatches
The Last Homes Standing
By Jill Somers
Driving down Highway 10 on the outskirts of Little Rock, the view from the car window appears like any other suburban American landscape—new strip malls, parking lots, restaurants, coffee shops, and cleaners—all relatively close to upper- and middle-class white neighborhoods. But there is a small plot of housing here that seems out of place. A cluster of around 150 homes belong to the residents of Pankey, a black middle-class community built around 1930. Josephine and Samuel Pankey bought the land, then five miles northwest of the Little Rock city limits, from white farmers. They sold lots to black families for between $12.60 and $24 each (they would also, according to property deeds, accept one quarter of the total price as down payment, plus equivalent payments in potatoes, vegetables, or chickens).
Today, the remaining homes in this onetime suburb of Little Rock—now battling for space against a New Balance store and a Starbucks—stand as a symbol of black self-reliance in the face of rampant city racism and, these days, sprawl. Josephine Pankey moved to Arkansas in 1893 from Cleveland. Samuel Pankey was born into slavery in 1856 in Chester, South Carolina.
They were both schoolteachers and married in September 1904. They lived on West Ninth Street in an historic African- American neighborhood in Little Rock, and started a real estate business out of their home in 1916. Ten years later, a wave of mob violence led to the lynching of a black man named John Carter, whose body was dragged down Ninth Street by white rioters. Businesses closed on West Ninth, and families left. The Pankeys fled for farmland outside the city that Josephine hoped to turn into her own ideal suburb, free from racial discrimination and oppression.
She originally called the area “Josephine Pankey’s Additions to Little Rock.” The unincorporated suburb of Pankey had a strong collective identity and community bond. Buying land from Mrs. Pankey meant becoming a member of the 1916 Real Estate Club, where members paid dues of five cents per week. Josephine donated land for four churches, a school, and a Girl Scout camp. Many African Americans were unable to get home loans until the 1970s, so Pankey residents built the houses themselves by hand. Henrietta Douglas, born in 1908, told the Arkansas Gazette in 1979 that the houses were “put together board by board, people would build as many rooms as they could afford and add on to them later as they needed.”
There is something of a map of the community’s history in the Pankey cemetery, a small plot of 60 graves now in danger of being replaced by commercial development. (A large bank recently moved in, and the building sits approximately ten feet from the headstones.) Daphne Piggee, a 60- year-old lifelong Pankey resident, is fighting to get the cemetery registered as a national historic site. She says the names on the graves—Piggee, Douglas, Norwood, Dyer—reflect the names of families who have been in the area for decades, and still live there. “Everyone knew everybody,” she says of her childhood in Pankey. “I want my children to know the history of Pankey; it’s the history of where they have been.”
As the city limits and white neighbors crept closer to Pankey, the community’s space was questioned, attacked, and increasingly diminished Pankey resisted annexation to Little Rock for years, but that changed in 1979 when the city absorbed the unincorporated community within its legal limits. Most residents protested annexation but were also told the community would be preserved. In 1986, the city’s planning commission approved re-zoning of the land around Highway Ten—which runs through the center of the community—in order to widen the roads from two lanes to five. Two Pankey residents’ homes were demolished to make room for the highway, and other residents’ land was trimmed back because the new highway ran close to their front porches. The re-zoning allowed for office and apartment development rather than single family homes, and not long after that, development in the northwest corner of the city took off.
George Dyer, a retired railroad employee and Pankey resident who built his own home there in 1955, says, “Back when the city annexed Pankey, the leaders here weren’t educated. We didn’t understand the move. We didn’t know that we could start our own place, that we could have had a fire and police department of our own.” In other words, because residents were not informed and aware of their options, the city made decisions for them.
More trouble came in 1988 when a fire damaged the Pankey School. The Little Rock School District had acquired it through a court order, but then permanently closed and demolished the building, instead of repairing it. (Josephine Pankey had been a school teacher before she got into real estate, and longtime residents were crushed.) Hayward Battle, the attorney for a group of Pankey residents, labeled Little Rock School District Administers the “personification of evil.” He told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “They’re like the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor,” speaking about how fast the demolition happened.
“They ripped the heart right out of this community.” The school district gave Pankey residents the option to lease the school building’s land, and eventually, in 2000, the neighborhood association decided to build a community center—one that would serve as a child-care and resource center for all ages, with tutoring facilities, computer labs, and a recreation hall.
But seven years later, the center is still incomplete, something Dyer and others say is Pankey’s last straw in its battle to retain independence as a community. “We ran out of grants,” he says, matter- of-factly. The Pankey Community Improvement Association built the Josephine Pankey Education Center facility and is registered as a non-profit association. Dyer, who is the group’s treasurer, convinced his daughter to write grants for the center, but she resigned after disagreements with newer city councilmen. And controversy over the center continues. Some think that because fewer children live in Pankey, the large building is an unnecessary expense. But Dyer says the community center would be open to surrounding neighborhood adults and children, and would be a place for people of all races, housing situations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to convene.
In the meantime, Pankey residents have new neighbors to deal with—namely, a Starbucks coffee shop, a few gated apartment complexes, strip malls, and big-box retail stores. Though the 150 or so Pankey houses were appraised at values between $5,010 and $37,580 in 1998, many of the homes sit on a hilly, scenic 80-acre area with large hardwood trees—land that is, in many cases, much more valuable to developers than the houses themselves. In August 2001, city inspectors found several code violations in Pankey homes, ranging from scattered auto parts in unkempt yards to boarded windows. But today, according to a Coldwell Banker representative selling real estate in the area, two houses on the north side of the highway are selling as one piece of real estate for $3.5 million dollars. Another home on one lot has an asking price of $1 million.
While a few stubborn residents refuse to sell, Andrew Wiese, a professor of American Urban History at San Diego State University and the author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century, says Pankey’s fate—like so many other black suburbs—may be sealed. “This has race written all over it,” Wiese said, referring to an aerial photograph of Pankey on Google Earth. “You see the community and its residential landscape, then there is a ring around the rim of the community where commercial development is, then an outer ring where the upper-middle-class, white planned subdivisions begin.” Owner-built black suburbs built on the edges of cities in the ‘30s and ‘40s that survived urban renewal of the ‘60s are now facing gentrification or, worse, demolition—a kind of “suburban renewal.” In general, he says, whites do not want to build residential development right next to places like Pankey, so the property is seen as a prime target for commercial development.
“They’re going to do what they want to do, that’s the way I see it,” says current resident Willie Douglas. “The most you can do is get what you can while you’re getting out. They’re gonna take it somehow. Let them take it for something.” Other residents vow they’re not going to budge. Dyer, the retired railroad executive, says, “All kinds of big-money men are looking to buy our property for nothing and turn this place into all commercial buildings. But I am not selling. I want my grandson to live in my house once I am gone.” He owns eight lots in Pankey, some of which are vacant and some he’s let family members build houses on. He will not be leaving his ranch-style brick home anytime soon, even if he goes broke. “As long as I have breath in my body,” he says, “I live here.”
According to an 'old enough to know' acquentance of mine - John Carter was lynched because a white woman was riding through town in her horse drawn carraige when the horse became 'spooked' (her words not mine) and John Carter, an African American jumped in to help get the horse back in control.
How far have we come? How far do we have to go?
Dispatches
The Last Homes Standing
By Jill Somers
Driving down Highway 10 on the outskirts of Little Rock, the view from the car window appears like any other suburban American landscape—new strip malls, parking lots, restaurants, coffee shops, and cleaners—all relatively close to upper- and middle-class white neighborhoods. But there is a small plot of housing here that seems out of place. A cluster of around 150 homes belong to the residents of Pankey, a black middle-class community built around 1930. Josephine and Samuel Pankey bought the land, then five miles northwest of the Little Rock city limits, from white farmers. They sold lots to black families for between $12.60 and $24 each (they would also, according to property deeds, accept one quarter of the total price as down payment, plus equivalent payments in potatoes, vegetables, or chickens).
Today, the remaining homes in this onetime suburb of Little Rock—now battling for space against a New Balance store and a Starbucks—stand as a symbol of black self-reliance in the face of rampant city racism and, these days, sprawl. Josephine Pankey moved to Arkansas in 1893 from Cleveland. Samuel Pankey was born into slavery in 1856 in Chester, South Carolina.
They were both schoolteachers and married in September 1904. They lived on West Ninth Street in an historic African- American neighborhood in Little Rock, and started a real estate business out of their home in 1916. Ten years later, a wave of mob violence led to the lynching of a black man named John Carter, whose body was dragged down Ninth Street by white rioters. Businesses closed on West Ninth, and families left. The Pankeys fled for farmland outside the city that Josephine hoped to turn into her own ideal suburb, free from racial discrimination and oppression.
She originally called the area “Josephine Pankey’s Additions to Little Rock.” The unincorporated suburb of Pankey had a strong collective identity and community bond. Buying land from Mrs. Pankey meant becoming a member of the 1916 Real Estate Club, where members paid dues of five cents per week. Josephine donated land for four churches, a school, and a Girl Scout camp. Many African Americans were unable to get home loans until the 1970s, so Pankey residents built the houses themselves by hand. Henrietta Douglas, born in 1908, told the Arkansas Gazette in 1979 that the houses were “put together board by board, people would build as many rooms as they could afford and add on to them later as they needed.”
There is something of a map of the community’s history in the Pankey cemetery, a small plot of 60 graves now in danger of being replaced by commercial development. (A large bank recently moved in, and the building sits approximately ten feet from the headstones.) Daphne Piggee, a 60- year-old lifelong Pankey resident, is fighting to get the cemetery registered as a national historic site. She says the names on the graves—Piggee, Douglas, Norwood, Dyer—reflect the names of families who have been in the area for decades, and still live there. “Everyone knew everybody,” she says of her childhood in Pankey. “I want my children to know the history of Pankey; it’s the history of where they have been.”
As the city limits and white neighbors crept closer to Pankey, the community’s space was questioned, attacked, and increasingly diminished Pankey resisted annexation to Little Rock for years, but that changed in 1979 when the city absorbed the unincorporated community within its legal limits. Most residents protested annexation but were also told the community would be preserved. In 1986, the city’s planning commission approved re-zoning of the land around Highway Ten—which runs through the center of the community—in order to widen the roads from two lanes to five. Two Pankey residents’ homes were demolished to make room for the highway, and other residents’ land was trimmed back because the new highway ran close to their front porches. The re-zoning allowed for office and apartment development rather than single family homes, and not long after that, development in the northwest corner of the city took off.
George Dyer, a retired railroad employee and Pankey resident who built his own home there in 1955, says, “Back when the city annexed Pankey, the leaders here weren’t educated. We didn’t understand the move. We didn’t know that we could start our own place, that we could have had a fire and police department of our own.” In other words, because residents were not informed and aware of their options, the city made decisions for them.
More trouble came in 1988 when a fire damaged the Pankey School. The Little Rock School District had acquired it through a court order, but then permanently closed and demolished the building, instead of repairing it. (Josephine Pankey had been a school teacher before she got into real estate, and longtime residents were crushed.) Hayward Battle, the attorney for a group of Pankey residents, labeled Little Rock School District Administers the “personification of evil.” He told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “They’re like the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor,” speaking about how fast the demolition happened.
“They ripped the heart right out of this community.” The school district gave Pankey residents the option to lease the school building’s land, and eventually, in 2000, the neighborhood association decided to build a community center—one that would serve as a child-care and resource center for all ages, with tutoring facilities, computer labs, and a recreation hall.
But seven years later, the center is still incomplete, something Dyer and others say is Pankey’s last straw in its battle to retain independence as a community. “We ran out of grants,” he says, matter- of-factly. The Pankey Community Improvement Association built the Josephine Pankey Education Center facility and is registered as a non-profit association. Dyer, who is the group’s treasurer, convinced his daughter to write grants for the center, but she resigned after disagreements with newer city councilmen. And controversy over the center continues. Some think that because fewer children live in Pankey, the large building is an unnecessary expense. But Dyer says the community center would be open to surrounding neighborhood adults and children, and would be a place for people of all races, housing situations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to convene.
In the meantime, Pankey residents have new neighbors to deal with—namely, a Starbucks coffee shop, a few gated apartment complexes, strip malls, and big-box retail stores. Though the 150 or so Pankey houses were appraised at values between $5,010 and $37,580 in 1998, many of the homes sit on a hilly, scenic 80-acre area with large hardwood trees—land that is, in many cases, much more valuable to developers than the houses themselves. In August 2001, city inspectors found several code violations in Pankey homes, ranging from scattered auto parts in unkempt yards to boarded windows. But today, according to a Coldwell Banker representative selling real estate in the area, two houses on the north side of the highway are selling as one piece of real estate for $3.5 million dollars. Another home on one lot has an asking price of $1 million.
While a few stubborn residents refuse to sell, Andrew Wiese, a professor of American Urban History at San Diego State University and the author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century, says Pankey’s fate—like so many other black suburbs—may be sealed. “This has race written all over it,” Wiese said, referring to an aerial photograph of Pankey on Google Earth. “You see the community and its residential landscape, then there is a ring around the rim of the community where commercial development is, then an outer ring where the upper-middle-class, white planned subdivisions begin.” Owner-built black suburbs built on the edges of cities in the ‘30s and ‘40s that survived urban renewal of the ‘60s are now facing gentrification or, worse, demolition—a kind of “suburban renewal.” In general, he says, whites do not want to build residential development right next to places like Pankey, so the property is seen as a prime target for commercial development.
“They’re going to do what they want to do, that’s the way I see it,” says current resident Willie Douglas. “The most you can do is get what you can while you’re getting out. They’re gonna take it somehow. Let them take it for something.” Other residents vow they’re not going to budge. Dyer, the retired railroad executive, says, “All kinds of big-money men are looking to buy our property for nothing and turn this place into all commercial buildings. But I am not selling. I want my grandson to live in my house once I am gone.” He owns eight lots in Pankey, some of which are vacant and some he’s let family members build houses on. He will not be leaving his ranch-style brick home anytime soon, even if he goes broke. “As long as I have breath in my body,” he says, “I live here.”
According to an 'old enough to know' acquentance of mine - John Carter was lynched because a white woman was riding through town in her horse drawn carraige when the horse became 'spooked' (her words not mine) and John Carter, an African American jumped in to help get the horse back in control.
How far have we come? How far do we have to go?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Nivea's New Video ft. Wayne
I don't know if I get this video. I mean I understand the song but why is Wayne here? Is it because, as on of the hottest in the game he's relevant? Is it necessary to give us an inside glimpse of what happened?
Did you peep how very unconcerned he looked at the end of the video? I think that's how he feels about life.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Pick your SEX BATTLE- Grown Folks Game Night
I'm going to this!
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Play Your Cards Right @ Juanita's
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