So this is my dream from last night:

I went back to school.
Taking like a 12 week course or something.
Sitting in a huge auditorium the first day.
Realizing the course ends in mid-February.
Wasn’t happy about that.
Chatted with some students in front of me.
Then the class ended and I walked into a gymnasium.
And we were playing this really intense, low-flying game of basketball.
Like more rugby than basketball.
Then my little brother showed up.
Just kind of lurking in the corner of the gym.
And the coach said that if anyone wanted to stay back and do some work on a new jacuzzi, they’d get paid well for it.
Apparently they were putting in a new jacuzzi in the gym.
And my brother was involved with it.
But I didn’t stay back.
The amount we’d have gotten paid, after the coach did the math, was like a million dollars, except not dollars. It was a different currency. And I thought I was being ripped off.
So I didn’t do it.
And then I asked my little brother about his involvement with the whole thing, and he said that it was a really good deal.
And that he’d make his money back.
For some reason I think he spent like $5k on a new jacuzzi and thought he was going to make a killing by charging students $1 or $2 to use it on their breaks.
And I just couldn’t make the numbers work, which worried me, because my little brother’s a bit bull-headed, and he was about to get cleaned out because of a wacky school-jacuzzi idea.
So I took the bus home.
But when I got home our whole roof was missing.
But I didn’t realize it at first.
At first I went into my room, which still had its roof.
But it was cold.
There was a draft.
So I went into the hallway and realized the entire rest of the house was completely missing its roof. Like someone had detached it like Lego.
And then my mom and dad came in.
And I asked them about it.
And they said they didn’t know exactly why the roof was missing. Like it only occurred to them that this was unusual when I brought it up.
So then this worker comes up.
And I guess he’s part of the roof crew, who I’m guessing were all out to lunch or something.
And he says, “sure, we could have just done it in pieces, too.”
Like, that was an option, but he opted to remove the whole roof, instead.
And the whole reason we were getting roof work done in the first place?
Because the smoke from when we cooked wasn’t being vented outside properly!
FOR THAT THEY REMOVED THE WHOLE ROOF!!
So my dad started making some calls.
The roof worker had disappeared.
And I guess my dad was worried that we’d have to pay for the new roof.
Like I guess he thought the workers had removed it because it was a code violation or something.
And that because the roof was violating code, the workers were obligated by law to remove it, and now my father would have to pay for a whole new one.
So he called a friend of ours who’s a big-time real-estate developer.
But he said he had no clue.
And my father said he’s not paying for it.
But the whole time he’s being thoughtful, and not at all stressed.
Then a van pulls up with the team of roof workers.
And the main guy who we saw before said that he thought he could have the whole thing up in a couple hours.
And I was just like, “seriously? You can a build a whole roof in a couple hours?”
I didn’t even see any wood around.

Aaaaand…scene.
That was good. Cathartic.

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Great sketch from Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live:

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The Charlie Rose interview with Jay-Z last month took place in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum, home to one of the largest art collections in the world, and located about a 10 minute drive from the Marcy Houses housing project, where Jay-Z grew up. The approximately 500 people in attendance listened to the duo for over an hour before the floor was opened up to questions from the audience, something that isn’t possible with the normally minimalist format (sans audience) of Rose’s show. The video below is an edited form of the audience Q&A session, and what struck me, again, was how gracious, genuine, and honest Jay-Z seemed. It didn’t feel as if he had an agenda, even though he was there to promote his new book, Decoded.

Incidentally, on the topic of the promotion of his new book, a friend had an interesting observation: Jay-Z is very directly targeting non-urban consumers. His appearance on PBS’s Charlie Rose came after interviews with NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, OWN’s Master Class, Bloomberg’s Game Changers, Interview Magazine, and Forbes.com, where he was interviewed alongside billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett. And while it’s fair to say that all these outlets enjoy a diverse audience, it’s similarly fair to point out that each of their audiences is decidedly non-urban (white). To wit, his promotional tour has not included a stop at BET, or an interview with Vibe. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this (The publisher has had more success selling books to white people than black people? The publisher believes Jay-Z has a larger white audience than black audience? The publisher believes Jay-Z’s existing fans will find these interviews and know about the book regardless of where they’re done, so it makes more sense to do interviews with outlets that will expose Jay-Z’s story to a new audience? The publisher believes that Jay-Z’s audience is NPR and Forbes.com’s audience? The publisher believes that the selected outlets will reach a larger audience than smaller, specialty (urban) outlets, and for some reason doesn’t believe that Bloomberg and Forbes.com can also be viewed as small specialty outlets?), but it’s definitely interesting.

Here’s an excerpt from Decoded, which analyzes the lyrics of 36 of Jay-Z’s songs and details the rapper’s rise alongside the emergence of hiphop as an artform:

I don’t remember exactly where I was in August 2005, but at the end of that month I was mostly in front of the television, like most other people, transfixed and upset by the story of Hurricane Katrina. Most Americans were horrified by what was happening down there, but I think for black people, we took it a little more personally. I’ve been to shantytowns in Angola that taught me that what we consider to be crushing poverty in the United States has nothing to do with what we have materially — even in the projects, we’re rich compared to some people in other parts of the world. I met people in those shantytowns who lived in one room houses with no running water who had to pay a neighbor to get water to go to the bathroom. Those kids in Angola played ball on a court surrounded by open sewage, and while they knew it was bad, they didn’t realize just how [messed] up it was. It was shocking. And I know there are parts of the world even worse off than that.

The worst thing about being poor in America isn’t the deprivation. In fact, I never associated Marcy with poverty when I was a kid. I just figured we lived in an apartment, that my brother and I shared a room and that we were close — whether we wanted to be or not — with our neighbors. It wasn’t until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor. I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were — whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip. But that’s when it registered to me that my family didn’t have as much. We definitely didn’t have the same refrigerator she had in her kitchen, one that had two levers on the outer door, one for water and the other for ice cubes. Poverty is relative.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don’t like to think of themselves as poor. It’s embarrassing. When you’re a kid, even in the projects, one kid will mercilessly snap on another kid over minor material differences, even though by the American standard, they’re both broke as [hell].

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.

I remember coming back home from doing work out of state with my boys in a caravan of Lexuses that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom’s apartment to get something and looked out the window and saw those three new Lexuses gleaming in the sun, and thought, “Man, we doin’ it.” In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant, but at the time I could just feel that stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad [thing] is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.

I watched the coverage of the hurricane, but it was painful. Helicopters swooping over rooftops with people begging to be rescued — the helicopters would leave with a dramatic photo, but didn’t bother to pick up the person on the roof. George Bush doing his flyby and declaring that the head of FEMA was doing a heckuva job. The news media would show a man running down the street, arms piled high with diapers or bottles of water, and call him a looter, with no context for why he was doing what he was doing. I’m sure there were a few idiots stealing plasma TVs, but even that has a context — anger, trauma. It wasn’t like they were stealing TVs so they could go home and watch the game. I mean, where were they going to plug them [TVs] in? As the days dragged on and the images got worse and worse — old ladies in wheelchairs dying in front of the Superdome — I kept thinking to myself, This can’t be happening in a wealthy country. Why isn’t anyone doing anything?

Kanye caught a lot of heat for coming on that telethon and saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but I backed him one hundred percent on it, if only because he was expressing a feeling that was bottled up in a lot of our hearts. It didn’t feel like Katrina was just a natural disaster that arbitrarily swept through a corner of the United States. Katrina felt like something that was happening to black people, specifically.

I know all sorts of people in Louisiana and Mississippi got washed out, too, and saw their lives destroyed — but in America, we process that sort of thing as a tragedy. When it happens to black people, it feels like something else, like history rerunning its favorite loop. It wasn’t just me. People saw that Katrina [stuff], heard the newscasters describing the victims as “refugees” in their own country, waited in vain for the government to step in and rescue those people who were dying right in front of our eyes, and we took it personally. I got angry. But more than that, I just felt hurt. In moments like that, it all starts coming back to you: slavery, images of black people in suits and dresses getting beaten on the bridge to Selma, the whole ugly story you sometimes want to think is over. And then it’s back, like it never left. I felt hurt in a personal way for those people floating on cars and waving on the roofs of their shotgun houses, crying into the cameras for help, being left on their porches. Maybe I felt some sense of shame that we’d let this happen to our brothers and sisters. Eventually I hit the off button on the remote control. I went numb.

And here’s the audience Q&A. Kudos to the kid for asking one of the video’s most interesting questions.

And, finally, here’s the at times awkward interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. I’m not sure why the interview felt so awkward for me in places, but it definitely did. I guess it’s because it was a radio interview and also because I’m not familiar with Terry Gross. Charlie Rose, for example, can be hilariously awkward with most of his guests, but because you can see him and have seen him dozens if not hundreds of times, you see the awkwardness and just go, “that’s so Charlie” (or privately wonder how he was considered a good enough interviewer to advance so deeply in the industry). But I don’t have that familiarity with Gross, so I guess it feels more awkward because I’m worried that Jay-Z is feeling awkward. Maybe? To someone, somewhere, this all makes sense. That person is probably not you. The NPR interview:

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This is a great interview with Jay-Z on Charlie Rose.

They talk mostly about Jay-Z’s experience coming up as a rapper, his influences, and the way his background as a drug dealer served as a safety net until he really hit it big as an entertainer. I don’t know if anything revolutionary is revealed in the interview, but there are some fun stories about Puff, Biggie, Tupac, and Eminem, and he talks about how he forgot the lyrics to his songs the first time he performed live. He also has some great insight into what the lyrics of 99 Problems are really referring to.

The one thing I take away from the interview is the sense that he’s doing exactly what he was put on earth to do. Just listen to his voice as he talks. It’s so smooth. Thank God he found his calling.

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The first trailer for The Tree of Life, the fifth film directed by Terrence Malick, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, shot in 2008 and finally slated for release in 2011:

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Courtesy of my brother, the TurBaconEpic (a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig), for those who give thanks for gluttony this weekend:

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Adrian Wojnarowski has an amazing article over at Yahoo! Sports about Kobe Bryant’s drive. You should definitely read the whole thing, but the opening does a great job of setting the tone, talking about how Michael Jackson reached out to Kobe as a rookie and ended up mentoring him over several long visits to Jackson’s Neverland Ranch:

“It sounds weird, I guess, but it’s true: I was really mentored by the preparation of Michael Jackson,” Bryant told Yahoo! Sports.

Bryant isn’t much for nostalgia and sentimentality, but it hung in the air as he cut into his steak over dinner recently in the fourth-floor restaurant at the Graves Hotel. Jackson is gone, but Bryant is going on 15 years with the Lakers.

“We would always talk about how he prepared to make his music, how he prepared for concerts,” Bryant said. “He would teach me what he did: How to make a ‘Thriller’ album, a ‘Bad’ album, all the details that went into it. It was all the validation that I needed – to know that I had to focus on my craft and never waver. Because what he did – and how he did it – was psychotic. He helped me get to a level where I was able to win three titles playing with Shaq because of my preparation, my study. And it’s only all grown.

“That’s the mentality that I have – it’s not an athletic one. It’s not from [Michael] Jordan. It’s not from other athletes.

“It’s from Michael Jackson.”

I think people underestimate how important this personality trait is to reaching the mountaintop. It’s not just about “passion,” or about “determination,” or about “desire.” You have to have a single-minded, obsessive compulsive insanity to you. It’s not about striving for wins, or for records, or for fame, or for money. It’s about perfection. It’s about swinging for the heavens. It’s about immortality – achieving what can never be achieved again, surpassing what people believe is possible to such an extent that you shift the paradigm, that you change the conversation forever.

The single greatest threat to a person with this mentality is satisfaction. If you’re ever – ever – satisfied, then you’ve lost all hope. You have, for all intents and purposes, retreated towards mediocrity. And any chance you had at immortality has vanished.

The downside, of course, is balance. You won’t have any. But that’s the price you pay. And, ultimately, what you accomplish is rarely for your own benefit. You might have fleeting moments of happiness, but only until you realize that there’s more you can do. And you return, to continue working, to continue improving. Because there is no end. Perfection is something you’ll never achieve. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re getting closer to it than anyone has ever gotten before.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand in artists, it’s satisfaction.

Don’t be satisfied. Be psychotic.

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I’ve just discovered The Big Picture, a photo blog for the Boston Globe maintained by Alan Taylor. The blog is meant to be a throwback to Life Magazine, and, in Taylor’s own words, “is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.”

Apparently maintaining the blog gives Taylor special access to awesome photos, because National Geographic every year allows him to weed through the best entries into their annual photography contest and post his favourites, along with captions supplied by the photographers themselves.

The gallery below consists of the 47 photographs that Taylor thought stood out the most from this year’s batch of entries in the three categories of People, Places and Nature.

My three favourite photos are the one up top, by Freddy Cerdeira, and the two below, by Mats Almlof and Yevgen Timashov. The one on the bottom, in particular, of the cloud and ship, stuck out to me because I’ve seen similar scenarios play out while traveling between individual islands in the Solomons. It’s beautiful to see such a localized downpour, and I remember on at least two occasions being in boats where I saw rainstorms like this in the distance and then realizing that our destination was actually on the other side of the rain. I’m not sure how to describe skimming along the Pacific Ocean directly into a wall of rain, where that fine line so clearly delineates the weather on either side of it. The closest thing I can compare it to, I guess, would be walking up to and then into an actual cloud (which I also had the opportunity to do in the Solomons). Coconuts taste better in the clouds, by the way. Sweeter. You should try some. Some cloud coconuts. Because they’re sweet. Yum.

I love parts of the Triangulo House, designed by Roberto Rivera and Ana Ulloa at Ecostudio Architects in Costa Rica, but man oh man is it clear that the homeowners weren’t designing with either senior citizens or children in mind. I mean, I love the idea of floating stairs as much as the next guy, but come on, that’s an accident just waiting to happen.

And what’s the point of railings if they can’t stop a 2 year old on the loose?

The bathrooms are another issue. Those pebbles are aesthetically pleasant – hey, look, we’re showering in a “waterfall” on a mountainside in the Costa Rican jungle – but they cut down on usable space so much.

And don’t even get me started on the water feature in the foyer. Sheesh. Can you imagine everyone’s shoes piling up when you have guests over? You just know someone’s penny loafers are going to end up taking a bath.

But, hey, on the plus side, the view’s pretty great. So, you know, maybe it’s better if kids and seniors aren’t getting in the way…

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In Bill Simmons’ NBA Western Conference Retro Preview, he takes time during his analysis of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the moves made by their General Manager, David Kahn, to offer this aside on Bryan Colangelo, the GM for the Toronto Raptors:

Colangelo had a choice between paying Beasley $11 million for two years (with a qualifying offer of $8.1 million in 2012-13) or signing Amir Johnson for $34 million for five years … and chose Johnson!? Did he suffer a head injury right before the 2006 draft and not tell us? I’m dumping Kahn for Colangelo as this season’s GM Whipping Boy. He didn’t just ruin the Raptors these past four years; he shoved them down the stairs, beat them to death with a baseball bat and buried them in a sanitation site.

To illustrate Simmons’ point, here’s a comparison of Beasley and Johnson’s numbers this season:

Yes, Johnson is playing 13 fewer minutes per game than Beasley, and yes, Johnson is coming off the bench whereas Beasley is a starter, but it certainly seems as if, for the same money, Beasley would be the obvious choice. Especially since you’d have the option of cutting ties with him after two seasons, or using his expiring contract as trade bait after one season. I’m not saying that we necessarily should have gotten Beasley, but I am saying that Johnson’s contract was an awful decision, and that a much more reasonable alternative to signing Johnson for 5 years and $34m would have been to take Beasley back in the Bosh deal. The argument is probably best summed up like this: Amir Johnson will never be an All-Star. Michael Beasley might be an All-Star this year.

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Simmons is a raging tornado of quotability.