Abagond

This is not based on any grand survey, it is just based on me. I will be straight and honest rather than politically correct.

Here is what I look at in a woman’s appearance, more or less in this order, all in a few seconds:

1. Age: I rarely find myself looking at women younger than 16 or much older than myself. It seems my brain is busily picking out women for me to look at. So I never even notice the women who are the wrong age. The same goes for those with the wrong hair:
2. Hair: I rarely find myself looking at women who do not have dark hair or at least thick hair – the darker and thicker the better.
3. Eyes: They say true beauty comes from within. It does. And it is in the eyes that you see it first. They are like windows into a woman’s heart, into her soul. When I look into the eyes of the so-called beauties of Hollywood it seems like no one is at home, that there is nothing deep in them, so they are not beautiful to me. That said, big eyes are better than small eyes; almond-shaped Egyptian eyes are better than Chinese eyes and both are better than round German eyes.
4. Cheekbones: High cheekbones drive me wild.
5. Lips: I love thick lips. I could look at them all day.
6. Figure: After the face comes the figure. I know the face comes first because I spend half my time looking at the Chinese women in New York who have pretty faces but have no figures! I like thick women over thin: those with an hourglass figure and some meat on their bones.
7. Breasts: I am not a breast man, but large breasts do make a woman look better – as long as they are in proportion to the rest of her body!
8. Waist and hips: The wider a woman’s hips are compared to her waist the better she looks.
9. Bottom: If you have a pretty face and a big, round bottom that sticks out, then I am yours – except my wife would kill me (she got to me first with her pretty face and round bottom).
10. Upper legs: The thicker the better. Yes.
11. Lower legs: I love looking at calves in black stockings if they have a good shape.
12. Feet and ankles: I am not an ankle man. But I do love women in tall, high-heeled black boots.

I rarely look at fat women who are white or Asian but I do look at fat black women.

I look at women of all colours but I like black women the most. I missed seeing them when I was in Australia – but love Jamaica.

I thought I would stop looking at women once I got married, but it does not work like that. I thought I would slowly lose interest in younger women the older I got. It does not work like that either.

See also:

• Examples
  • Getting off the W train at 42nd Street
  • On the C train
  • Sex clouds my mind
• politically correct beauty
  • How race affects beauty for me
• women
• Maria Shriver’s jaw
• Why I love:
  • black women
    • The eyes of black women and white women
  • thick women
• thick black women
• big bottom girls
• The ten most beautiful women in the world

Avonte Wright (c. 1974- ) was one of the top black swimsuit models in America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She is now retired and running her own skin care business, but her pictures still appear in magazines.

She has beautiful eyes, great lips and a wonderful face. But it is mainly her large breasts that have brought her success as a swimsuit model. Her measurements are 36D-25-34 (91-64-86 cm).

Her breasts seem too large for her body, just like with Pamela Anderson, yet they seem to be natural. She says they get in the way of people taking her seriously.

She often makes the point that beauty comes as much from the inside as from the outside.

She has been in music videos for Men at Large, Dogg Pound, Sisqo, and R. Kelly. She has also been on television and in films, but mainly as a dancer or a pretty face. You can see her in “The Parkers”, the HBO film “The Mike Tyson Story”, “Rude Awakening” on Showtime and in the straight-to-DVD film “Three Strikes and Foolish”.

She is best known by far for her pictures in calendars and men’s magazines. She is often pictured with Sacha Kemp.

She is not as famous as, say, Buffie the Body or Melyssa Ford: she has been on cover of Black Men magazine twice, for example, but she has never made the cover of King. She has been in Smooth magazine but never on its cover. You will not find her in the Wikipedia.

In March 1998, when Black Men first put her on the cover, they took a chance: she was unknown except on the Internet. When she first saw herself on the cover she thought it was someone else: they had made her skin lighter! She appeared again on the cover in March 2000.

Like Kenya Moore and Lizz Robbins, she was born a bit too early to be a video vixen in the full sense.

She is also a bit too thin. The move from thin black models to thick ones starting in the late 1990s meant her sort of figure fell out of fashion.

She retired from modelling and went back to school. After that she started her own business, Skin Amour. The name means “Skin Love”. It sells make-up that makes your skin look good.

She got into that business when she was going with a man who had better skin than she did! So she tried all different kinds of things to make her skin look better. She was like a walking science project. In time she found stuff that worked, but since she could not buy it anywhere, she made it for herself and started selling it to others.

She is from Hollywood, Florida.

She says: “I don’t let the game change me, I change the game!”

See also:

• Skin Amour
• thick black women
• King magazine
• Black Men magazine
• video vixens
• The most beautiful black women
• Lizz Robbins
• Kenya Moore

L’Trimm (1988-1991), made up of rappers Lady Tigra and Bunny D, was a one-hit wonder known for the song “Cars With The Boom” (1988 ). Nearly 20 years later the song holds up surprisingly well.

Their bubblegum form of old school hip hop never caught on. In fact, it was the complete opposite of the gangsta rap that did take over by the middle 1990s.

Their music was not one bit street. It was completely unserious, but that was part of its charm. Unlike other female rappers, Tigra and Bunny sounded like girls, like airhead high school girls, in fact.

L’Trimm was part of the Miami Bass music scene, which gave us 2 Live Crew. Even though Miami Bass affected later forms of hip hop, like crunk, it never caught on nationwide. That helped to put an end to L’Trimm.

The name “L’Trimm” came from Trim jeans, but made to sound French.

Lady Tigra (Rachel de Rougemont) and Bunny D (Elana Cager) lived in Kendall, a suburb of Miami, and became friends in high school. They appeared as dancers on the television show “Miami Teen Express”.

The rapper Mighty Rock used to drive them home from school. One day he had to stop at Hot Productions. There Paul Klein heard the girls rapping. When he saw how pretty they were he thought they would make a good act. They recorded some songs.

Then one day they heard a song of theirs on the radio. They were shocked. They called Klein. He said, “What do you think we did all this for?!” and hung up.

The song “Grab It!” (1988 ) did well in Miami. Soon after “Cars With the Boom” came out, which was a hit across the country. I remember seeing it on The Box in New York.

L’Trimm came out with three discs of songs:

• 1988: Grab It
• 1989: Drop That Bottom
• 1991: Groovy

Only the first one is still in print. It has both “Grab It!” and “Cars With the Boom”. The other two were not as good.

While making “Groovy” L’Trimm wanted to move in the direction of house music but Hot Productions had other ideas. So L’Trimm walked off, never to record again. Hot Productions already had enough for “Groovy”, but it did not sell well.

Bunny moved to Indiana, got married, settled down and had four children.

Tigra moved to New York, where she helped to run a nightclub. In 2007 she came out with some new songs, which you can hear on her MySpace page. She also did “The Pinkberry Song”, which you can hear on pinkberry.com. Sounds just like the old Tigra.

In 2005 Jay R came out with the song “My Other Car Is a Beatle”. It has L’Trimm rapping “Cars With The Boom” over Gary Numan’s new wave rock song “Cars” (1979) with a bit of the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” (1965) thrown in. Who knew that three songs about cars could sound so good together?

See also:

• Saturday Soul: L’Trimm, “Cars That Go Boom” – the Cocoa Lounge blog post that made me want to write this one!
• L’Trimm on MySpace
• Lady Tigra on MySpace
• hip hop
• gangsta rap

The Vulgate (405) is the Bible as it was put into Latin by Saint Jerome. It was the main Bible people read in the West till the 1500s. It was the only book that Gutenberg ever printed. Even today the Catholic Church still uses it.

It is written in easy Latin: although Jerome wrote to his friends in the old-fashioned Latin of Cicero, for the Vulgate he used the Latin of the streets, which was already beginning to turn into Portuguese and French and so on. His starting point was the Old Latin Bible.

Some English Bibles are based on the Vulgate: Wycliffe, Douai-Rheims, Confraternity and Knox. But not the King James or Authorized Version: it goes back to the Greek and Hebrew that the Bible was written in.

Some English words that come from the Vulgate: creation, salvation, justification, rapture, testament, regeneration, apostle, angel and the phrase “far be it”.

The Vulgate’s New Testament is far better than anything in English:

1. It is much easier to turn the Greek of the New Testament into Latin than into English.
2. It is more faithful to the wording of the New Testament.
3. Jerome had much older copies of the New Testament than we do. He even had the book of Matthew in Hebrew. We have it only in Greek, which came later.
4. The koine Greek that the New Testament was written in was still a living language in Jerome’s day. He would know the shades of meanings of words much better than we possibly can.

For the Old Testament, Jerome started out by basing it on the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that Christians had always used up until then. But then he gave that up and based it on the Masorah instead, the Hebrew Bible that Jews used.

It is because of this decision by Jerome that Catholics and Protestants now use the Masorah for the Old Testament while Orthodox Christians still use the Septuagint.

The part of the Old Testament that Christians know best is the book of Psalms. Since Christians knew the wording of the Septuagint psalms so well, Jerome translated them twice: once from the Septuagint and once from the Masorah. That is why you see the book of Psalms twice in some Vulgates.

The Catholic Church says the Vulgate has no errors that would affect religious teachings. That is a natural thing for it to say: it has been using the Vulgate for over a thousand years. Until the 1960s Latin was the language all the priests and bishops knew. It was even the language used in part of the church services.

There are two sorts of Vulgates that you can get these days:

1. The Stuttgart: an attempt by scholars to get as close to what Jerome wrote as possible. It is based on the oldest copies of the Vulgate that we can find.
2. The Nova Vulgata: the Vulgate used by the Catholic Church. Not all of it is Jerome’s: some of it is new.

See also:

• Bible
• Authorized Version
• Greek
• Latin
• Catholic
• Protestant

Caroline Kennedy:

Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals….

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president – not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Read more.

See also:

• Barack Obama for President
• Barack Obama
• 2008 elections
• Caroline Kennedy

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a French jazz singer and dancer who came from America. She was the Jazz Age made flesh, a shooting star that burned across its sky. Hemingway said she was “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw or ever will.”

She was tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles. So said Picasso.

About 1500 men asked for her hand in marriage. One killed himself at her feet. Two others fought over her with swords among the graves of St Stephen’s in Budapest.

She came to Paris in 1925. She fell in love with the city and called it her country.

Her “Danse sauvage” that year made her famous: wearing little more than some feathers she danced the Charleston to jazz music. She danced wild and free, possessed by the music.

Even though she came from a place as ordinary as St Louis in the middle of America, the daughter of a washerwoman, because she was black the white men of France saw her as more African than American. She was “primitive” and “exotic”.

“White folk’s imaginations are really something when it comes to the Negro,” she said.

She played to this picture of her as a black savage with the “Danse sauvage” and later with her famous banana dance: all she wore were 16 bananas!

From dancing she branched into singing and acting. She travelled the world and wore the most beautiful clothes. She walked her leopard down the streets of Paris.

Now famous in Europe, she returned to America in 1935. But America was not ready for an “uppity coloured girl”, as her husband later put it. When she got back to France she gave up her American citizenship and became French.

In 1940 Paris fell to Hitler. Because she was so famous she could travel freely behind enemy lines with few questions asked. She wrote down enemy secrets for the French Resistance in invisible ink on her sheet music!

In 1942 she sang for the troops in North Africa, raising their spirits in a dark time.

She was not able to have children herself – she nearly died during childbirth – so she adopted 12 children from her world travels:

1. Aiko (Korea)
2. Luis (Colombia)
3. Janot (Japan)
4. Jari (Finland)
5. Jean-Claude (Canada)
6. Moses (French)
7. Marianne (France)
8. Noel (France)
9. Brahim (Arab)
10. Mara (Venezuela)
11. Koffi (Ivory Coast)
12. Stellina (Morocco)

They all lived together at her big, beautiful house in south-western France.

She was a big believer in the brotherhood of man. That is why she spoke at the civil rights march on Washington in 1963 and yet could not support the Black Power movement.

By the 1960s she was deeply in debt and lost her house. The princess of Monaco gave her another, smaller one to live in.

In her last years she sang at Carnegie Hall in New York – accepted at last by America – and made a comeback in Paris. She died in her sleep at age 68, almost 50 years to the day after she came to Paris.

See also:

• Sarah Baartman
• black actresses
• France
• Race in America
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Hitler
• The Jezebel stereotype

Sarah Baartman (1789-1815), also known as Saartjie Baartman or the Hottentot Venus, was an African woman who became a sideshow in London and Paris. She was almost completely naked and had a very large behind, even for the part of Africa she came from – near Cape Town in South Africa. Those who paid more were allowed to touch it.

She was promised riches if she came to Europe, but she ended her life in prostitution and drink in the streets of Paris, far from home, dying at age 26 of an “inflammatory and eruptive sickness”.

It gets worse.

After she died her body was cut up and studied by Napoleon’s doctor, Georges Cuvier. He made a cast of her body and put her skeleton, brain and labia in the Museum of Man in Paris where it was seen for more than a hundred years, until the 1970s.

She is well known by her own people, the Khoisans (who used to be called Hottentots). She has come to stand for all the sick injustices they have had to live through under white rule.

Baartman’s parents were killed when she was little. She became a slave of a Dutch farmer who lived near Cape Town. In 1810 a man from England promised her half the profits if she came to London with him to show her off.

She was shown off to Londoners as if she were an animal. She was kept behind bars most of the time, almost completely naked. She was told to act like a wild animal. Sometimes she was let out to do tricks, like sitting, standing and walking on command.

A man from Jamaica saw this and demanded that she be freed. But the judge, after speaking with her, said she was doing it of her own free will.

In 1814 she came to Paris where she became part of the show of an animal trainer. When the French tired of her she was forced into prostitution.

Her labia were large and hung down from her body. That is natural for Khoisans but not for whites. Some took it as physical proof that black women are mad for sex. While she was alive she let no one see them, as it is a private part of a woman’s body, but once she was dead Cuvier had them shown in public.

When Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994 he asked France to return her remains. It took eight years and a special law, but in the end the French gave her back. Her body has now been laid to rest on a hill near where she was born.

Sadly, it is not a huge jump from the Hottentot Venus of the 1810s to the Danse sauvage of Josephine Baker in 1925 to the video vixens of 2008. But there has been progress of a sort: no one thinks of putting Buffie the Body in a museum after she dies.

See also:

• video vixens
• Buffie the Body
• black women
• Josephine Baker
• The Jezebel stereotype

Buffie Carruth (1977- ), better known as Buffie the Body, is an American video vixen. She is a sort of black Pamela Anderson but instead of having huge breasts she has a huge behind – with the word “Tasty” written on it.

She has an amazing body. Her measurements are 36C-26-44 (91-66-112 cm). She says, “There are a lot of jeans that they just don’t make in my size.” But her face is only somewhat pretty at best, certainly not beautiful.

She says her body is all natural, a gift from God. Unlike Kim Kardashian or Angel Lola Luv, you do not see strange pictures of her with thin legs that seem out of place with the rest of her body. She has the thick legs you would expect in a woman like her.

But as natural as her body might be, much of what you see in pictures is airbrushed:

• She says King doctored her figure on its cover.
• The word “Tasty” is missing from some pictures – a sure sign of airbrushing.
• Her skin often has that strange golden colour that black women get when they are heavily airbrushed.

At least until 2007 she did not exercise regularly and seemed to live largely on Kool-Aid and Southern fried pork chops.

Her calendars have sold as far away as Switzerland and China, but her body does not appeal to all men. Ben Westhoff of the Village Voice for one, who met her once to do a story: “She’s sweet. But I have to come clean. The fact is, her big ass does nothing for me. Perhaps, as a white guy, I’m just not hard-wired to understand.”

She grew up in Athens, Georgia, an hour and a half east of Atlanta. The third of seven children, her father left when she was young. She became a stripper.

In 2004 a friend created a Yahoo! Group about her and put up some pictures. It was an instant hit. In 2005 she was an even bigger hit when she appeared in F.E.D.S. magazine.

Soon she was in music videos, but, as it turns out, she has only been in a few:

• Tony Yayo and 50 Cent: “So Seductive” (2005)
• Juelz Santana: “Oh Yes (Mr Postman)” (2005)
• DJ KaySlay, Papoose, Bun B, Shaq: “You Can’t Stop The Reign” (2006)
• Gucci Mane: “Go Head” (2006)

She says videos do not pay much. She sees them only as a stepping stone.

Her pictures in magazines like King, Sweets, Smooth, Black Men and XXL is what made her name. There are even special issues that feature only her.

She sells DVDs and calendars on her website and hosts parties. She does over a hundred parties a year, going from city to city.

In the film “ATL” she played Big Booty Judy.

She drives a Mercedes CLS 550.

These days she seems prouder of her credit rating than her body measurements. She is trying to turn herself into a business empire.

See also:

• Healthy, my ass | Salon.com – article by Debra Dickerson, who says Buffie the Body is setting a bad example for black women, setting them up to become fat and unhealthy.
• video vixens
• Kim Kardashian
• WHR: waist to hip ratio
• thick black women
• big bottom girls
• King magazine
• Ki Toy Johnson

Twiggy (1949- ) was a British supermodel famous in the 1960s. Back then she seemed shockingly thin and boy-like, even to white people, but now most high fashion models are like that. Current ideas of thin as beautiful start with her.

Marshall McLuhan said, “Twiggy is an X-ray, not a picture.”

Diana Vreeland, the head of Vogue magazine in the 1960s said she was perfect: “the straightest legs, knees like little peaches, tiny narrow supple feet, rounded arms, and beautiful wrists and throat. She was both modern and romantic.”

When asked about her figure Twiggy said, “It’s not really what you call a figure, is it?“

But what mattered most was not what McLuhan, Twiggy or even Vreeland thought, but what the fashion designers thought. They loved her figure, or the lack of it: she made their clothes look so wonderful.

Her height was 1.69 metres (5 foot 6.5 inches), her weight, 41 kg (90 pounds) and her measurements, 81-58-81 cm (32AA-23-32). She barely had any breasts. She was anorexic-thin without being anorexic: she ate like a horse.

Growing up, Twiggy hated her figure: “You were supposed to look like Brenda Lee, very curvy and round, pointed breasts and pointed-toe shoes,” she said. She only started to like her figure once it made her rich and famous.

She was so thin that the other children called her “Twigs”. No matter how much she ate she did not gain much weight. Her mother took her to the doctor to see what was wrong. Nothing was wrong: it was just the way she was.

Born Lesley Hornby, she grew up in north London. By age 15 she had dropped out of school and worked for a hairdresser. Against her mother’s wishes she took up with a man ten years older than her, Nigel Davies.

But Davies was no ordinary man: against all common sense of the time, he thought she could become a model. He had her hair cut short and put her picture in shop windows. Her look caught on. By 1966 the Daily Express called her “The Face of 66″. In 1967 she came to America and was famous overnight.

She spoke English not in the RP of the Queen and the rich, but in the Cockney of the ordinary people of London. She wore the new mod fashions of Mary Quant, who wanted to bring high fashion to the masses.

In 1970 Twiggy left modelling to sing and act. Most of her stuff is forgettable, but she was good in “My One and Only” with Tommy Tune on Broadway in the 1980s and in the film “The Boy Friend” (1971). One of her songs reached number 1 in Japan and another reached number 35 in Britain in 1977.

In the 2000s she was a judge on Tyra Banks’s television show “America’s Next Top Model”. She also modelled for Marks & Spencer, the British department store.

See also:

• fashion model
• anorexia
• WHR: waist to hip ratio
• white women
• McLuhan
• white beauty: a brief history
• Tyra Banks
• RP

Anorexia nervosa (1978- ), called anorexia for short, is where someone eats less and less to get thinner and thinner, but no matter how thin she gets (it is almost always a she) she still thinks she is fat! It mainly affects girls from ages 12 to 25. Most come from well-to-do families.

After about age 12 most girls in America and Britain think they are fat and try to lose weight. Anorexia starts out that way too but then it loses all sense and reason: as the girl loses more weight she fears gaining weight even more! No matter how thin she gets she still thinks she is fat! Nothing her mother or her friends or her doctor say will make her think otherwise. She has gone partly mad.

It is no laughing matter: tens of thousands of girls die of it every year in America. Since you cannot talk sense into them many get thinner and thinner till they die.

How to tell if you are anorexic:

• Are you fat?
• Was your last period more than three months ago?
• Does your weight fall below these sort of numbers:
  • metric:
    • 1.60 metres: 45 kg
    • 1.70 metres: 51 kg
    • 1.80 metres: 57 kg
  • English:
    • 5 foot: 90 lbs
    • 5 foot 6: 108 lbs
    • 6 foot: 129 lbs

If you answered “yes” to at least two of these questions then there is a good chance you are anorexic. See your doctor to be sure.

Some anorexics cut up their food into small pieces and move them about on their plate so you think they are eating. They lose interest in boys. Some wear too many layers of clothing because they lack the body fat and ongoing digestion that keeps most of us warm. Their skin becomes dry and their hair starts to fall out. Even their hearts get smaller!

Those with bulimia nervosa also try to lose weight by not eating, but then they get so hungry they pig out. Shame and guilt set in so they make themselves throw up. Since they never get thin this can go on for years and years. It is dangerous too: the body is not designed to throw up after every meal. Do it too often and your heart will run out of the potassium it needs to work.

No one knows what causes anorexia. Most anorexics do not feel good about themselves unless they are “perfect” – maybe because their parents only loved them when they were good. Perfect can mean perfect scores at school or in sports, but it can also mean having a perfect body. In America since the middle 1970s a perfect body means one that is as thin as possible.

They try to look like the thin, beautiful women of Hollywood and fashion magazines. But most girls can never be that thin no matter how much weight they lose. It is a fight against nature they can never win.

See also:

• fashion model
• Hollywood
• Twiggy
• white beauty: a brief history
• male gaze

In honour of Martin Luther King Day here is part of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood….

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day – this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

See also:

• Read the whole speech here or, if you see a picture above, click on it to hear it on YouTube.
• Bob Dylan: The Death of Emmett Till
• Race in America
• Jim Crow

‘Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago, when a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door. This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well, the colour of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up. They said they had a reason, but I disremember what. They tortured him and did some evil things, too evil to repeat. There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain and they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain. The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie, was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die.

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial, two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till. But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime, and so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see the smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs. For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free, while Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust, your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust. Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow, for you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man that this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan. But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give, we could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.- Bob Dylan.

See also:

• Race in America
• Jim Crow
• The black brute stereotype

John Edwards (1953- ), a Democrat, was a one-term senator from the state of North Carolina in the American South. He ran for president in 2004 and became John Kerry’s running mate. He is ran again in the 2008 election but dropped out at the end of January.

By the middle of January 2008 he was running third among Democrats, far behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He is well to the left of both. He does not have Hillary’s money nor Obama’s star power.

Of the three, his positions and policies were far more thought out. That alone has already forced Obama and Clinton to take stands close to his own. So even if Edwards does not make it to the White House, some of his ideas might:

• End the war in Iraq and pull out most of the American troops.
• Cut poverty by a third in ten years.
• Provide universal healthcare.
• Take back the Bush tax cut.
• Raise the minimum wage.

Edwards is for abortion, stem cell research, capital punishment and the Patriot Act. He is against same-sex marriage.

He was for going to war in Iraq in 2003 but changed his mind in 2005.

Edwards has good looks, charm and a silver tongue. He even seems to mean what he says. But he has little experience, even less than Obama.

Edwards has modelled himself after Robert Kennedy, who ran for president in 1968. Like Kennedy, Edwards is for ending the war and ending poverty. He is a rich man standing up for the other America where people are not rich at all, the America he came from.

Edwards was born in South Carolina but grew up in North Carolina. His family was not well-to-do: he was the first to go to university. He got a law degree and practised personal injury law. He took doctors and big companies to court and won millions for the harm they have done. Since he got a cut of the money from every court case he won, he became rich.

Then in 1996 his 16-year-old son died in a car accident. It shook him. He left law and stood for public office. In 1998 he became a senator.

In 1999 he defended President Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial in the Senate. He was so good Al Gore put him on his short list of possible running mates in 2000.

That got Edwards to thinking about running for president himself, which he did in 2004. John Kerry beat him but made him his running mate.

In 2004 doctors found cancer growing in his wife’s breast. They cured it, but then in 2007 they found it growing in her bones. There is no cure for that.

Edwards started running for president early in 2007 when he stood next to a house in New Orleans that Katrina destroyed. He courted labour unions. He spoke about the “two Americas” and how he will fight against the big companies and special interests.

Last updated: Thu Jan 31 08:31:10 UTC 2008 

See also:

• johnedwards.com
• 2008 elections
• Democrat
• Robert Kennedy
• Hillary Clinton
• Barack Obama
• political left and right
• America

Special English (1959- ) is a simple form of English that the Voice of America (VOA) uses in its radio broadcasts to reach the 700 million who have studied English as a foreign language. Most of them them cannot understand the BBC or CNN.

It is simpler than native English in three ways:

1. It uses only 1500 different words.
2. Its sentences are short and simple. They are rarely more than 20 words long.
3. It is spoken slowly enough so that each word is spoken separately.

These changes double the number of people who can understand a broadcast in English. About 1500 million people know some English, but for half of them it is a foreign language they studied in school.

Here is an example of Special English:

This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine will go to three researchers who found a way to learn about the duties of individual genes. They discovered how to inactivate, or knock out, single genes in laboratory animals. The result is known as “knockout mice.”

The VOA produces a new 30-minute show in Special English every day. You can hear it on short wave radio or the Internet. You can even download it to your iPod and listen to it on the bus!

While the VOA sees Special English as a way to reach more people, most listeners see it as a way to practise their English! This is especially true in China.

The VOA website says Special English has only 1500 words, but in practice it is more like 1700 words: their Word Book uses 1700 different root words to give the meaning of the chosen 1500. Among the 200 stepchildren are some very simple words like eye, ear and else.

On top of that the list of 1500 is not that strict: because it has history, popular and influence, for example, you are allowed to use historical, popularity and influential.

And other words tend to make their way into reports. The example I gave above uses the word gene. It is not one of the 1500 words nor does the piece go on to say what a gene is! You can use words like that so long as you make their meaning clear.

Special English is not a general purpose language. It has plenty of words you need to report the news, like campaign, crisis and climate, but it is missing some very ordinary, everyday words, like cake, courage and cup.

It keeps up with the times: every ten years words are dropped while others are added.

Special English does not come from Basic English. Although some of the same ideas went into the design of both languages, Basic English is general purpose while Special English is not.

Specialized English, on the other hand, comes straight from Special English. It is Special English with a slightly different mix of words, one more suited to spread the word of Christ. It drops words like dictator, diplomat and dissident and adds words like deserve, devote and divorce.

See also:

• voaspecialenglish.com – the VOA website
• Spotlight Radio – which uses Specialized English
• English
• Basic English
• International English
• Common English

Kim Kardashian (1980- ) is a rich party girl from Los Angeles, California. Till 2007 she was mainly known as a friend of Paris Hilton, but then a sex video of her and her boyfriend, the singer Ray J, made the rounds on the Internet. After that she made the cover of Complex, King, Playboy and other magazines.

According to this blog she is the fifth most beautiful woman in the world. She has big, beautiful eyes, a beautiful face, long, thick black hair and a great figure with a nice big behind. Her measurements are 35D-26-40 (89-66-102 cm). She is 5 foot 3 (1.60 metres).

When Paris Hilton was asked if she wanted a big behind like Kardashian, she said, “.. it’s gross! It reminds me of cottage cheese inside a big trash bag.”

In reply Kardashian said, “If Paris Hilton thinks my butt looks gross, I don’t really care. At least I have a butt.”

Even though Kardashian is white, black men seem to like her more than white men. She was the first white woman to make the cover of King magazine yet she barely made white American Maxim’s Hot 100.

Since she herself seems to prefer black men, did she use her family’s money to give herself a black woman’s body?

She says no: all the women in her family have her sort of figure. But there is at least one picture of her where her legs seem too thin compared to the rest of her body and another one where her bottom was clearly smaller than it is now.

She said that Jennifer Lopez’s pride in her figure gave her the courage to show off hers. And that she did, naked, in Playboy in December 2007 in what she calls “tastefully done” pictures.

She said she appeared in Playboy at the urging of her mother (yes) and “because I’m not one of those stick skinny girls you see. I felt like girls today need to see a normal body.”

When Vivid Video put out her sex video in 2007 she took them to court. How could she face her grandmother? But later that same year Kardashian herself put out a much longer sex video.

Many think she masterminded the whole sex video thing from beginning to end: it was all a bit too much like what her friend Paris Hilton did a few years before. And the video is too well done to seem like something private that suddenly saw the light of day.

If the name Kardashian seems somehow familiar you are probably thinking of her father: he helped to defend OJ Simpson at his murder trial in 1995. He came out of retirement to do it: he and Simpson were friends.

In 1989 when she was little her parents divorced. Her mother married Olympic gold-medal winner Bruce Jenner.

She was married to R & B producer Damon Thomas from 2000 to 2004. A mistake, she says.

She and Paris Hilton have known each other since they were little girls: their mothers were friends.

See also:

• The ten most beautiful women in the world
• white women
• Paris Hilton
• Cher
• California
• King magazine
• big bottom girls
• Playboy