The recent BBC article, “Dark skin ‘does not block cancer’,” is a wonderful opportunity to write about a larger issue in the rasx() context. After you read the BBC article consider these:

• Traditional, authentic Africans often use pigments, oils and mud to protect/decorate their skin under the sun. Protection from the sun and ceremonial/poetical decoration of the body seems a strange combination to an analysis-biased people.
• The BBC article helps sell sunscreen products to a “larger market.” The previous sentence in no way suggests some simplistic payola relationship between one or more multi-national corporations and the BBC.
• The BBC article does admit that people with wealthy amounts of melanin get melanoma largely on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. I deliberately use the word ‘admit’ because to me the article avoids suggesting that having melanin in the skin is of any worth outside of jargon-filled sentences. It would be so difficult for young people “of color” to read between lines to find any worth regarding their inherited physical nature—especially when many young people have difficulty reading in the first place. Hey, kids, we get one crude, Spartan sentence: “Very dark, black skin has a natural SPF of about 13 and filters twice as much UV radiation as white skin, for example.” Shut up and be happy.
• The BBC article does not take into account that “dark skinned” people in the United States are “mixed” with Caucasian genes, and many other genes from non-African pools.

It is this last point that is most important. Failing to understand this is of the racist mentality of those struggling against racism. When I was a young white liberal, I permitted the thoughts of “pure” Blackness to run wild around my mind. With maturity and experience—especially in intimate relationships with women—I found that the same hypothetical white person can live inside of anybody of any skin color. And as many of us “pure Blacks” get older we may be embarrassed to find ourselves with osteoporosis, Crohn’s Disease—and, yes, melanoma (among many other ailments supposedly of European origin).

When you get through being offended by the phrase ‘hypothetical white person’ look into in “Basic Black: The Funky Sutra” to see something else… Now, my high school was King/Drew Medical Magnet. During my time there (when the school was just a bunch of small bungalows and parked trailers) we learned about the “hypothetical 70-kilogram man.” The real-world politics behind this “scientific” phrase is that the “hypothetical 70-kilogram man” is actually the hypothetical white male. It’s a waste of my time to try to show any person over elementary school age that what we know as “modern medicine” is based on research biased toward the physiology and psychology of this hypothetical man. And, when he gets melanoma, everybody in the whole world should too. We don’t want to hurt his feelings… He has nuclear weapons…

One of the reasons why “intellectual property” is so important to big media companies is that creative commons footage of Pat Boone singing Tutti Frutti can surely be used against him. Digital rights management promises to be one of the mechanisms of censorship in the western tradition of centralized monarchy.

The original singer of Tutti Frutti is Little Richard. Once you hear him sing the song you will begin to understand why Pat Boone attempted to even come near it with any insincere forms of flattery. Now when you run the numbers, my wild, uninformed guess is that Pat Boone made more money off of his wack-ass version of the song than Little Richard. And this is the exact same wack-ass, billion-dollar situation Microsoft has enjoyed with respect to Apple for decades.

So now the industry is buzzing with Microsoft’s Zune vs. Apple’s iTunes. And Microsoft fully expects to sell more corn beef hash than filet mignon. This is just the latest chapter in this decades-long “gentleman’s agreement” between those who are truly creative and those who you see on television everyday.

Now Little Richard is not a barrel of flawless peaches. There is that terrible story I read about what he did to Jimi Hendrix… but when we start messing with Jimi Hendrix we have to leave the whole property game behind and move into other states of consciousness… So, under the corny circumstances, Apple is like Little Richard and Microsoft is like Pat Boone—but no one in this candy-ass cracker-ass business world is like Jimi Hendrix. Technology had to be modified to deal Jimi wah-wah with the “real” world. The entrepreneur is one thing; the force of nature is another thang, baby…

Much of Western civilization is powered by electricity, which in turn comes from the great kingdoms of Moloch under the earth—our vast, cavernous stores of fossil fuels. Legends from the sages in Texas say that this fuel is endless and this is why we need to look underground, in the caveman world, for our energy resources.

Completing the previous smart-ass paragraph means that you are able to see data on one of the DreamHost.com servers hosting the database supporting this Blog. However, in “What a week!” the DreamHost.com action figures write with a firm, Kung Fu grip:

Our string of bad luck is not over yet. After the file server crash last weekend and the subsequent internal network issues that we have been cleaning up all week, this evening brought us a Los Angeles area power outage that took down our data center (again, we know…). This time the generators worked fortunately, but the UPS system did not.

It may appear that the tone in this post might encourage the blokes at DreamHost.com to be more secretive with the slick Byzantine mosaic poker faces that makes poor people think rich people are demigods. On the contrary, DreamHost.com does not try to play me for an idiot and eventually some “mainstream” news source will break the big story about power crises in the IT industry. There may be a cute headline like, “How’s the weather? It’s Not Just IT Small Talk: Power Crises in the IT Industry.”