Tupac

I recently read an article about the life and music of Tupac Shakur that really fascinated me. I've been reading quite a bit about him since then and made the discovery that he was incredibly talented outside of being the king of rap. He wrote a lot of poetry and a book of his poems has actually been published. The book is called The Rose That Grew From Concrete. Here is the poem that the book is named after- I think its really cool.

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

DDR

I think I spent more money playing arcade games this week than I ever have in a given week. Actually, it was only one game- Dance Dance Revolution. I think I spent about $2. I've never really been into arcade games or electronic games of any kind until my friend Julia enticed me to start playing DDR with her at her apartment using a playstation and DDR pads. I slowly progressed from the beginner level to the light mode, and now I can even pass the standard mode sometimes. Well, last Friday after our Ramadan break the fast dinner (I will write about this in the future) we plopped a few quarters into the DDR machine at the Union arcade on the U campus and started stomping on a machine to the beat of techno music while flourescent pink and green lights lit up around our feet. We finally went public with our dancing/video game playing talent. I have heard that only Asians can really play DDR, but Julia and I are working hard to break that stereotype. We met at the Union once again on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday to play the game. Thursday we played for a couple hours on the playstation. DDR is a great game- its fun, its good excersize, and it involves music. It couldn't get any better. If you haven't tried it several times you should.

I've Been Flimped

I suppose that I should use this first blog to explain what it means to be flimped. To be honest, I don't think it really means anything, but some linguist back in the seventies proposed that it would be impossible for a language to have a verb 'to flimp' where 'to flimp something' means 'to kiss a girl who is allergic to that thing'. For example, if I were to flimp whiskey, that would mean that I kissed a girl who is allergic to whiskey. Anyway, its kind of silly, but I don't see why such a word couldn't exist. It would be a good way to talk about people, when you don't want everybody to know who you are talking about. A conversation could go something like this:
Me: "Hey Jonny, how was your weekend?"
Jonny: "Rad"
Me: "What happened that was so great?"
Jonny: "I flimped papaya"
Immediately I would know that he kissed Harriet, because she is the only girl that I know who is allergic to papaya. I do realize that there are some problems with using "flimp"; it requires that both participants in the conversation know who is allergic to what and that the "what" that they are allergic to isn't something like peanuts or bees or cats or penecillin because those things don't narrow it down very well. Anyway, good luck flimping.
(Oh, I should mention that Jonny and Harriet aren't real people [however, they may have been inspired by real people])