The musings of a madman...

The date was January 29, 1993… Wait, hold on a second.  Y’all remember Family Matters, right? The show was a spinoff of Perfect Strangers, apparently the black lady who worked with them at the newspaper had a hilarious family with a more hilarious neighbor and showrunners decided that their show and their random negrous shenanigans would be more interesting in the long run than Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous.      The whole show got aped by the popularity of the aforementioned neighbor and “Family Matters” fell victim to the phenomena of black people referring to shows by the name of the most popular character on the show as the title instead of actually mentioning the show itself by its actual title. [ Phlip note : yes, this was a real thing, I shit you not] Anyway… As at least one of the two of you may recall, the show began with three children; Eddie, Laura and Judy Winslow.  In the 4 th season, it is rumored that the real-life parents of the youngest

     I’ll be honest…  Until last Monday, I had never even HEARD of Black Lightning. As a part-time comic book nerd who has found himself in a dearth of time for it for most of my adult life – who, by the way, was never much for DC Comics anyway – it was just completely under my radar.      Episode 1 was about to come when my lady mentioned it to me.  “Hell, I’ll watch,” I said after a perfunctory Google search of the premise of the show.      On the whole, I was impressed with the show.  The presentation of Black life in America, a man willing to do what he must for his own kids and in the protection of those in his responsibility and a well-written story were all wins.  This is The CW we’re talking about here, so I was fully expecting low-value production bordering campy or even comical. In the latter, they did not disappoint.  This would be made ESPECIALLY obvious when our hero finally donned his costume.  Cheesy superhero quotes ensued, even through attempts by the w

     “Good Times” What ‘good time’ there to be had when you literally can NOT escape the projects under any circumstances?      Hollyweird.  Hates.  Us. Is that becoming a constant around here?  It should be, since it seems to always a proven point.      In one of a few instances where a Black family is shown with both parents present as a constant, they seemed to find themselves mired in far-fetched bullshit to show off that they couldn’t catch a break.  Of 133 episodes of Good Times through the years, the Evans family (no relation) – as an ongoing plot focus – made several attempts to get OUT of what is implied to be Cabrini-Green. I won’t even bother with why they were even IN Chicago when the show was spun off of Maude, which was set in NY. Anyway…      A black family making due with no substance abuse, extramarital children, no babies having babies an artistic older son, a daughter on her way to school and a young son who is interested in the issues.  Sh

Hollywood hates us.  Seriously, Hollywood is a passively-declared, but aggressively-behaved enemy of the Ankh-Right.  Scroll through your social media timelines; the hot item of the moment is Game of Thrones.  If you haven’t noticed yet, GoT suffers from a debilitating lack of color.  Apologists want to say that it is due to the fact that the basis for Westeros is Medieval Europe, but we will storm right through that logic red light and blame it on MORE racism in Hollywood. We get Salladhor Saan as a pirate and sellsail, both SUPREMELY enviable professions in a fantasy tale of kings and queens, right?  He gets himself into three episodes over three seasons and is eventually reduced to a joke and sent the fuck on his way in exchange for some gold and leaves his pride behind. Hell, at least they let him live. Xaro Hhoan Daxos gets himself into five episodes in season two.  An exiled self-proclaimed King, he epitomizes the Cocky Negro™ that Hollywood lives to remind us

I write…      I know, if you’re reading this now, you have likely been here for a great many of the past 7 and one half months of Thursdays and already knew this fact.  I am apparently pretty decent at this “fictional creativity” thing.  It is a nerve I have been actively scratching for over 10 years, verifiable from the blog attached to a MySpace account I have not logged into in years and continued right here on this one.  It has manifest one unpublished novel and dozens upon dozens of short stories.  One could go as far as to say that it is a dream job of mine that I have never managed to bring to fruition.      I am also an asshole… I will have an idea for something and my sense of humor will send the whole thing on a hard fast left and I find myself in a spot that I might not have INTENDED to be in, but have to deal with culpability for creating for myself. I was once contacted in response to one of my stories about possibly writing commercials for various brands

That all it takes to kill one of these stupid-ass reality shows is for someone to be found dead? VH1 -- who has had WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better programming than MTV or B lack E mbarrassment T elevision for about 5 years by my count, word to the former ego trip magazine -- has been jumping the shark TERRIBLY for about 3 of those years now with this reality dating show nonsense. It has become so bad that the LOSERS of these shows are given their own shows. Then some wholly terrible shit like Ray J getting his own show happens, and I am willing to bet that he will milk another series out of this shit too. Personal feelings on coonin' aside, sometimes I find it hard NOT to watch these shows, occurrences of scantily clad women with large cans will do that to a heterosexual man. That is not what this blog is about, though. In one of the myriad of spinoffs of Flavor of Love , itself a sendup of The Bachelor , we find ourselves with a loser of not one but THREE VH1 shows; Rock of Love , Rock