Nice interview and quotes.  Click here to read.

The British web-site The Observer has named Jay-Z the ‘Mogul of the Decade.’ This is a big accomplishment being that Hov didn’t start to pop over-seas until after the Blueprint, until then he was mostly known for his Annie sampled “Hard Knock Life.” But after a string of successful albums starting with “The Blueprint”, and some smart business moves, Jay-Z has become the man to beat in the business world. And it doesn’t hurt that his wife can hold her own at the table also.

Read the complete article after the break.

What do you think has been your crowning achievement of the Noughties? Right now? Right this second? Eleventh No 1 album, surpassing Elvis as the No 1 solo artist. I think that is a statement in itself, especially within hip-hop, where everything is about the gift of discovery – what’s new today. To be consistent and still have relevancy in hip-hop, to still be at the top of the game is a very difficult thing to achieve. You’re swimming upstream, fighting against the current. So I think The Blueprint was my most perfect album. I think Reasonable Doubt was my best album. And I think this [Blueprint 3] is the album I’m most proud of.

Do you have a favourite album of the decade? Oh man, let’s see. That’s very difficult. The Blueprint would be my favourite. Other than my album? Maybe Graduation [by Kanye West].

And you get some credit for that, too, having given Kanye his break… A bit! Ahahahhahaha! Does Glastonbury feel like a defining moment for you, now some time has passed? Yeah, I think it’s one of the highlights. I would put it up there because it felt like something new. Well, it felt like something old actually – but it felt like a chance to open the door for hip-hop again. It was almost like hip-hop had to prove itself yet again in that type of arena and performing there really brought it home.

Did it restore your affection for the UK as well?

Yeah – it was pretty much my evolution, I was pretty much on my way there anyway, but it definitely opened the doors and made it a natural transition.

Rock fans now have computer games like Guitar Hero. You’re involved with DJ Hero – will that have the same impact on your culture?

Definitely. I think we’re all frustrated DJs – we all make playlists for specific moments, whether it be the gym or a social setting. I just think we don’t have the technical skill to blend one song from the next. But I think this is the fun way to get into it, because at higher levels the game is challenging that way. You can challenge yourself; if you can do that then maybe you can take the next step into DJing.

What do you think the Noughties will be best remembered for?

Being the first generation to put a black man in office – and not just a black man, someone who’s right for the job to give a new face to America, as land of the free, home of the brave. I think at some point after 43 presidents we were becoming a bit hypocritical. I think that’s what this generation will be remembered for.

A year on, have you noticed a change in the country? Are things better now?

Here and abroad, the feeling has been restored. America was always this place where everybody wanted to be. And we were losing a bit of that. I think we finally turned the corner back on the road to being that nation that everyone looks to.

You talk about swimming upstream – where might you go next? I want to make it even more difficult; throw on some scuba diving gear, go 50,000 feet below and swim upstream!

How far can you push it?

It actually challenges me, it’s exciting to me, that’s the thing about being in music – I like swimming upstream. If I didn’t have to, I’d probably lose interest. It’s like being at school – when I was in 6th grade I was reading on a 12th-grade level. I lost my interest, I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t graduate high school – it wasn’t interesting to me. As long as I’m being challenged, it’s exciting.

 

(The Observer)

I vote for Lance Acord!

There were so many casualties during the last decade they can’t all be listed – but here are some of the most important in a heavily U.S.-centric list, in no particular order:

R.I.P.: DEMOCRACY passed away in Florida, taking big chunks of the Constitution with it. As the debacle of the Bush/Gore election dragged on for weeks, the very foundations of the Republic seemed at risk. Our political system was exposed as a crass, corrupt, greedy, and incompetent morass of conflicting agendas and cutthroat strategy and tactics. It has yet to recover, if it ever can. Repression of democracy continues in places like Pakistan with the Benezir Bhutto assassination, in Burma where opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains under perpetual arrest, in Iran where anti-government protesters have been killed in the streets, arrested and executed, or simply “disappeared”, and in dozens of other authoritarian countries around the world.

R.I.P.: THE DOT-COM ERA at one time the most spoken phrase in the world, “dot-com” is a depressing chant of failure and disillusionment today. The fantasy that you could make a fortune by essentially providing nothing in the way of product or service died hard, and took a number of companies big and small with it. The only survivors of the “Dot-Com Bubble” were companies like Amazom.com, that actually offered something to consumers.

R.I.P.: VICTIMS OF TERRORISM in New York, At the Pentagon, and in the skies over Pennsylvania, and around the world. A relative handful of fanatic individuals, armed with nothing more than box cutters, showed us just how vulnerable we are. That revelation continues to unfold today as we bluster and blunder our way through Afghanistan, Iraq, and a continuing nightmare of foreign policy disasters.

R.I.P.: NEW ORLEANS’ POOR when hurricane Katrina destroyed the levees that protected the city from the sea. After three hellish days with no help from the outside world, survivors were dispersed to nearby states, camps, and impromptu government trailer parks (where some still languish today). While the rebuilding of New Orleans’ historic and lucrative commercial districts is complete, and the city’s upper-and-middle-income residential districts are once again thriving, the poorer neighborhoods still face challenges. Around the world tsunami, earthquakes, floods, famine, and drought continue to take their toll. The crisis of global climate change grows worse by the day as political factions continue to argue over its existence.

R.I.P.: SADAAM HUSSEIN proving it wasn’t all bad.

R.I.P.: AMERICAN GLOBAL STANDING as a victim of the arrogant, incompetent, and just plain insulting foreign policy of the Bush administration. From “Freedom Fries” to the Merkel back-rub, it was just one boot-marked cow pie after another.

R.I.P.: THE WORLD ECONOMY driven into the ground by corporate greed, political indifference and collusion, and just plain stupidity. We will be wearing bandages and band-aids for years  to come. It seems the developing nations of the world were hurt the least, mainly because they already had so much less to lose.

R.I.P.: CIVILIAN AND MILITARY CASUALTIES OF WAR never have so many given so much to gain so little.

R.I.P.: ???? leave a comment to add your own casualties to the list.

I will also post a list of the top documentary films and top animated films of the decade. It doesn’t seem correct to include them the following list of films. That being said, I’m not quite sure what the qualifications for this list are, but they include the following: fiction, feature (or longer) length, reviewed in the New York Times (i.e. screened in New York), and released in the United States between 2000 and 2009. In order of year of release:

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, USA, 2001)

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, Brazil, 2002)

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, USA, 2003)

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, USA, 2004)

The Best of Youth (Mario Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2005)

Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy, 2005)

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2006)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, USA/France, 2007)

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, USA/Germany, 2007)

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008)

Events in the United States of America played a huge and very central part of the decade 2000-2009

I seem to remember starting off Y2K standing on the roof of my garage shooting off bear bangers and flares from my pen-launcher issued to me by Technical Field Support Services for the previous field season.  I remember a mild curiousity as to whether the lights would all go out or not.  They of course did not, but since that happened we got to laugh at all the doomsdayers that were worried about the supposed computer superbug known as Y2K that would plunge us all back into the dark ages.

At the time that the calendar rolled over to the year 2000 I was 16 years old.  Now, 26, alot has changed during what Time Magazine called “A Decade from Hell” and that Life called “The Decade that Changed the World”. The decade spanning 2000 to the end of 2009 was, for our generation, the one where we had events that we could vividly remember where we were when… Like our parents generation had the Kennedy assassination, and for Canadians, when Paul Henderson scored to beat the Soviets in the Summit Series.

For the year 2000 we started it with something ridiculous (Y2K), and ended it with something equally ridiculous (hanging chads).  And does anyone even remember the whole Elian Gonzales thing? Or Windows ME (Did anyone even upgrade to that useless piece of junk?)  2000-2001,  for me personally, was my grade 11 year.  This was a year where I spent a great deal of time analyzing myself personally and forming who I was going to be.  For whatever reason, it was also the year that I got my picture in the school yearbook getting my butt handed to me at chess by one Daniel Adler.

There was alot that actually happened in 2001, (Personally, I graduated from High School, turned 18,  and started a post secondary degree) but all of the events of 2001 paled in comparison to the events of September 11.  This was the single defining moment of the decade.  And I, was asleep.  The events occurred early in the day on the east coast, 2 hours later than in my comfy bed in the Mountain Time Zone.  I didn’t have my first class that day until noon so I wasn’t even out of bed until 10:30 or so.  When I was leaving the house around 11:00 to get the bus to the University the radio was on, as it always was. (My dad had a tendancy to turn on CBC really loud in the morning and forget about it when he left for work).  I heard the news only as I was going out the door, but I didn’t believe it.  I thought it was the program where they have someone on in the middle of the day reading stories or radio plays.  I figured it was a War of the Worlds sort of thing.  It was a quiet ride to the University, but everywhere things were empty.  Everyone was inside somewhere glued to the CCTV monitors that were showing coverage of what I had thought was a work of fiction just a half hour before.  Classes were empty as students and faculty alike stood dumbfounded in front of the monitors.  Rumors swirled, misinformation and unsubstantiated claims circulated.  Fortress North America had been breached.  People across the world took in stranded passengers as flights were grounded.  A singular event that showed the worst humanity has to offer brought out the best it had to offer as well.  September 12th, 2001 we were at war.  As of the Thanksgiving weekend in the US for the year 2009 we are still at war.  9/11 was this generation’s Pearl Harbor.

2002, was the year of the new normal.  NATO and the United Nations were fully involved in Afghanistan as we sought to defeat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.  Osama Bin Laden had been identified as the leader of the group responsible for the September 11th attacks in 2001.  And try as we might to find him “dead or alive” we would continue to recieve video tapes of him exhalting his followers to war against the West.  Personally, as a result of my poor showing in my first year of post-secondary education I did not make it in to my faculty of choice (geology) and instead was forced into the Natural Sciences track in an effort to get my act together and pass that damn Linear Algebra for Scientists and Engineers class that I needed, no thanks to my professor. “The ewection of the wecto is ofagano to the wecto wee” -Dr. Wang.  I remember the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, mostly for the fact that Canada won Gold in both the Mens and Womens Hockey competitions.  The Womens victory is especially vivid because of an interesting quirk:  Canada and the US were in the final, on US soil, with an American referee (isn’t that against the rules?) who called penalty after penalty after penalty on the Canadians, yet Canada managed to beat both the Americans and the referee on that day to claim gold.

In 2003, I spent my first year in the geology program at the University of Calgary.  We did field mapping in Longview, Alberta and Trail, British Columbia, and I found out I still had alot to learn about geology.  (Take that inflated ego!).  2003 was the year that the United States lost focus.  2003 was the year of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  At this point we’re not sure if it was bad intel or misinformation spread by the government but the term WMD came into play with amazing fervor.  The United States plowed through Iraq with everyone able to watch on CNN thanks to embedded reporters.  2003 was also the year of Mission Accomplished.  Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein had been deposed and captured, the Iraqi elite guard surrendered in unimaginable numbers… but still, Mission Accomplished was far from the truth.  Through 2003 we learned about Kirkuk and Basra, as all the while the Forgotten War, raged on in Afghaistan with coalition troops there still fighting with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.  I worte an essay on the invasion of Iraq then, in a notebook I had, and if can ever find it, I will post it here.

Not too much changed in 2004.  The wars raged on in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ronald Reagan died…  The Calgary Flames won the Stanley Cup… Well, almost.  They lost in 7 to Tampa Bay. 2004 was a year of late night travels, walks by the river, trips here, there, and everywhere and an opportunity for me to understand myself.  It was the year my mom looked at me dumbfounded and said “I thought you were her boyfriend” (I wasn’t and that was fine with me anyways). 2004 was also the year that I met the woman who would become my wife, online, while looking for information on sleep paralysis which afflicted me precisely twice that year and had never before and has never since.  But 2004 was famous for how it ended.  Boxing Day, 2004, initially reported as a 9.9 earthquake, but later downgraded to a 9.3 shook the Indian Ocean area off of Sumatra.  The megathrust quake generated a tsunami that claimed upwards of 250,000 lives.  The entire earth shook and the shaking in the vicinity of the quake lasted for upwards of 10 minutes.  For the populace of the area it must have been as though the planet was tearing itself apart.

2005 was the year that Pope John Paul II died and was replaced by the Emperor from Star Wars, Pope Benedict XVI.  Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast of the United States and showed us our complete and utter helplessness in the face of mother nature.  Katrina obliterated towns along the coast and flooded New Orleans.  The aftermath showed us the complete inadequacy of the relief plans and the dark side of humanity at the Louisiana Superdome.

2006 was a big year for me, personally.  I graduated from the University of Calgary with a bachelor of science degree in geology on June 6.  Four days later I got married on June 10 in Banff, Alberta, and shortly thereafter I was on a plane to begin my life with my wife and stepson in California. 2006 was a relatively quiet year in the news compared to the previous years of the decade.  Immigration reform and border fences with Canada being the big news of the year.  I spent 6 months in the US, unable to work, waiting for immigration paperwork to come through.  I still managed to find a job at a geotechnical engineering firm in the area, but could only provide my services on a voluntary basis.

2007 had the Virginia Tech shooting and the I35 Bridge Collapse.  The VA Tech shooting by a student took the lives of 33 students and faculty and left a nation wondering why? The collapse of the I35 Bridge killed 13 people and could have been far worse.  About this time the ASCE released a report card on US infrastructure grading the majority of it C or D.  It had been planned to be replaced in 2020.  2007 was the year that I finally got to start working in the United States, green card and social security number in hand.  At the end of 2007.  We also welcomed our daughter, Acacia, into the family on June 7, 2007.  A few months later, on October 31 I got to experience a 5.4 earthquake.

Undoubtedly the biggest story of 2008 was the US Presidential Elections.  George W. Bush was out, having completed two consecutive terms in office, racked up an enormous debt, gotten the country into two seemingly endless wars, and expanded the government by leaps and bounds.  John McCain represented the republicans and did his best to distance himself from Bush, but managed to shoot himself in the foot with his choice for VP, one Sarah Palin (I can see Russia from my house!). But an unstoppable wave followed the Democratic nominee, one Barack Hussein Obama. 250,000 supporters watched his acceptance speech in the cold in Chicago, and over 2 million people packed in to see his inaguration.  Meanwhile, Rush Limbagh and a bunch of other fat, rich white guys screamed that Conservatism had lost because it wasn’t on the ballot.  But to steal from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it was the economy, stupid.  And it really was.  Obama inherited a country, and veritably a world on a downward economic spiral created by ballooning gas prices, risky loans, bank failures, and financial derivatives that even PhD’s couldn’t understand. Obama inherited the United States in it’s worst state since the 1930s.

As we moved into 2009, Federal stimulus moneys began to flow into the country to rebuild roads and highways, even as foreclosures continued, AIG, Citi group, Lehmann Brothers, GM, and Chrysler were all in the tank.  The “Great Recession” was crushing the lower and middle class.  Jobs are still scarce with the national U-3 unemployment rate at over 10.2 percent with the real unemployment U-6 rate closer to 17.5 percent.  20% of homeowners are currenly late on mortgage payments and this includes not only subprime and predatory loans, but also those who are in regular old standard loans that they could afford.  The economy continues to grow, but jobs are still few and far between. The world is still at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq as it has been since 2001, and President Obama is debating sending more troops to Afghanistan to bolster the Forgotten War.   All this and President Obama was awarded the Notbush err… Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to engage and peacefully resolve conflict.  Personally we emerged unscathed until the end of October of this year.  My wife lost her job and as of December 31st, 2009 my company will cease to exist.  Luckily, the company taking us over has plans to keep me.

Things today are hard for everyone and well… in theory in the next decade there is nowhere to go but up.  But if you had told me 10 years ago, that I would be living in the United States, married, with two kids, living through the worst economic times since the Great Depression… I’d have told you you were nuts.  A decade is a long time and a lot can change in that much time. The noughts gave us the defining moments of our generation.  They gave us 9/11, they gave us two wars, they gave us the Great Recession…  They may still give us comprehensive health care reform in the United States before they are through.  At this point though, bring on the teens, I can’t wait to see what they hold.

CC

]]> http://spinelanguage.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-100-best-metal-albums-of-the-decade-65/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:09:02 +0000 dasher10 http://spinelanguage.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-100-best-metal-albums-of-the-decade-65/ http://spinelanguage.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-100-best-metal-albums-of-the-decade-66/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:33:20 +0000 dasher10 http://spinelanguage.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-100-best-metal-albums-of-the-decade-66/ http://asx200.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/commission-urges-crackdown-on-problem-gambling-business-breaking-news-news-com-au/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:31:21 +0000 asx200 http://asx200.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/commission-urges-crackdown-on-problem-gambling-business-breaking-news-news-com-au/

(CFD.net.au – Contract for Difference, Share, Forex, ETFs, Commodities Traders) –

It is one of a raft of harm minimisation measures, including limiting access to ATMs at clubs, in the report released today.

Australians spend about $18 billion a year gambling, including $12 billion on pokies, the report found.

About 15 per cent of Australians gamble regularly, and problem gamblers make up about 10 per cent of those.

But the share of money that problem gamblers feed into the pokies accounts for around 40 per cent of $12 billion figure.

The commission said while progress on problem gambling had been made over the past decade, governments could do more to make gaming machines safer.

It recommends a limit of $1 per bet on all pokies, to limit the amount people can lose each hour to $120, and a $20 cash limit that a person can put into a poker machine at any given time.

It calls for a universal “opt-out” system that allows people to set the amount of money and time they spend gambling.

Cash machines located near pokie machines should only be able to distribute a maximum of $200 per card per day and all prize money should be paid in cheques not cash, the report says.

The commission wants the restrictions in place by 2016.

Source: Commission urges crackdown on problem gambling | Business Breaking News | News.com.au

Successful filmmaking isn’t always about quality. Sometimes the most entertaining film can be, well, pure crap. They fail for every reason in the book – lack of character development, an obscure plot, pure illogicality – yet manage to creep their way into your life, nestle in comfortably and resonate throughout the years. Whether you’re passing the time on a rainy day or looking for a release after a stressful day at work, it’s not the Oscar winners used to fill the void, it’s guilty pleasure

Everyone has their preference when it comes to fine films, but being named a guilty pleasure is far more subjective. They give you the incentive to hate them, but there’s a little something that compels you to keep the DVD spinning or to put the remote down and watch till the end.

Don’t get too wrapped up in the pleasure part; there’s also the guilt factor. I’m not just talking about the guilt you feel about wasting your time with a subpar film rather than watching a more prestigious one; this is about the films you’re completely self-conscious about watching time and time again. The films with titles you mumble when telling a friend what you’re up to, the films that make you blush when someone walks into the room and gets a glimpse at what’s on the TV. That being said, as you read my list of the top guilty pleasures of the decade, I’m blushing and utterly embarrassed.

Click here to see the list.

• The Ten Most Influential Internet Moments of the Decade
• Lollercoaster
• 50 More of Wikipedia’s Most Interesting Articles
• Bulls Escape The Set Of Tom Cruise’s New Movie In Spain
• Orange: Snowball
• Great Amateur Rap
• “Leaves of Grass” Trailer

Hace unos días la Revista NME publicó las que para la elección de sus redactores son las 100 mejores canciones de la decada… hay de todo y aunque se incluyen cosas super comerciales como Rihanna o Beyoncé, está también lo mejor de cada casa… Interpol, Kings of Leon, Oasis, Radiohead, Arcade Fire… vamos, realmente casi todo lo mejor de la decada (aunque es obvio que se dejan cosas por ahí y que sobran otras claramente).

Así que como ahora tengo bastante tiempo libre pues me he dedicado a recopilarlas todas (o casi, porque algunas no están, concretamente 11) en Spotify… una ardua labor solo encomendada para el Mr. Lobo.

NME 100 Tracks of the Decade

Espero que lo disfrutéis… la verdad que hacen una buena playlist para una fiestaca!!!

Mr. Lobo.

P.S.: La foto va a dedicada al Undress… como no podía ser de otra manera… que yo sé que a él le pone a tope!!! (Su música, mal pensados…)

Several weeks ago, you may have read why I think Lance Armstrong is the greatest sporting icon of the decade — part of an ongoing debate among Cardiff journalism postgrads.

Well, it’s poll time so, if you haven’t already, read my case (and perhaps some of the others — links are at the bottom of my post) and VOTE!

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/SKorea-scraps-decades-old-sex-law-targeting-men/articleshow/5271779.cms

SEOUL: South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck down a decades-old law Thursday that had punished men for making false promises of marriage to engage in sexual relations with women.
The nine-member court ruled in a 6-3 verdict that the law infringed upon women’s dignity and privacy and didn’t reflect the current social trend on sex and individualism.

The ruling said the law treated women like “infants,” and went against the government’s “constitutional obligation to aim for the equality of men and women.”

Despite the ruling, South Korea remains deeply conservative and is still influenced by a Confucian heritage after decades of Western influence. Last year, the Constitutional Court upheld a law against adultery, rejecting complaints the law is outdated and constitutes an invasion of privacy. Those convicted under the anti-adultery law face prison sentences of up to two years.

The law tossed out Thursday had punished South Korean men who deceived their girlfriends into having sex with up to a two-year prison term and a fine of more than $4,000. Enacted in 1953, the law only held men liable for false promises of marriage.

“The government should refrain from interfering in men’s sexual activities of tempting women in an unharmful manner,” the verdict said.

Korean Womenlink, a major women’s rights group in Seoul, said it welcomed the court’s verdict.

“It had not been a law that protected women’s human rights but a law that protected women’s chastity,” Korean Womenlink said in a statement.

The court acted on petitions filed by two South Korean men who were convicted of violating the law in recent years.

Court spokesman Noh Hee-bum said the verdict means that the law was immediately abolished and all South Korean men penalized under the law could be acquitted of earlier convictions and receive state compensation if they file for a retrial.

The number of South Korean men indicted under the law had been gradually decreasing, with 42 indicted in 2006 compared with 269 in 1981, according to a court release.

The nominees are in. So let democracy reign and vote for your sporting icon of the Noughties!

November 28, 2009

Dear readers,

The end of the decade is near. In other news,