"By the way, is anyone asking about the family makeup of the bikers in Waco?"

"No? Exactly."

"B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s.... But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper�s shack..."

"He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim. He was embraced by rock �n� roll fans of the 1960s and �70s.... Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: 'O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs� feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.'... When he saw 'long-haired white people' lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, 'I think they booked us in the wrong place.' Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: '�Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.'"

B. B. King has died. He was 89.

"The city�s birthrate is steadily declining, but not among the affluent, and that rise is changing the feel of the city."

So says the teaser on the front page of the NYT that takes us to "Baby Boom Among New York�s Affluent," which is illustrated by this startling ad � anti-birth propaganda from the city:



"What happens to me?" = words the government puts in the mouth of the unborn child, who presumably has the opinion that she should not be born. And try to wade through the race-and-class politics of this:

Between 2004 and 2013, of all the racial groups that the city�s Health Department measures, birthrates increased only among whites. Beginning around 2010, as birthrates among whites started steadily to climb up, birthrates among blacks began to go down. In 2013, blacks had a birthrate of 12.7, the lowest of any group in the city, with the abortion rate four times as high among black women as among white women...

For decades there were factions on the right worried about poor minorities �overbreeding� and taxing the city�s resources. Historically, there has been far less panic about the affluent having a lot of children, and yet they change the feel of the city, driving family-size S.U.V.s and generating a more suburban sensibility. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible....

So the affluent white people end up sick even of themselves � or especially of themselves � and the NYT tries to amuse its affluent-white-female readership with this kicker:

Perhaps those ads could be recast and targeted at TriBeCa mothers with small children, warning them of the tough realities: �You may think you want a fourth child. But what if your husband never buys you that four-bedroom apartment and never says yes to the weekend nanny?�

ADDED: Two things:

1. Why pick on "factions on the right" who worried about "poor minorities" breeding when you've got an ad that plainly reveals that the city government � liberals � were actively fighting exactly that?

2. It's quite politically incorrect to portray a woman as looking to her husband to buy her a home and and a servant. Don't these upscale, affluent types have egalitarian marriages these days? I would have thought that TriBeCa mothers are equal partners in decisionmaking within their marriages. Why did that sexist stereotype suddenly appear? When does the NYT let its guard down?

"The Problem Isn�t That Trevor Noah Is Offensive. The Problem Is That He�s a Giant Dope."

Headline at Slate.

The problem is not that Trevor Noah tells offensive jokes. It�s not even that he routinely breaks The Daily Show's covenant of speaking truth to power in favor of speaking truth to fat chicks or Thai hookers or, as the Washington Post�s Wendy Todd points out, black Americans who give their kids names that Noah disapproves of. The problem is that Noah�s jokes are so annihilatingly stupid.

Jeez, they're swarming this poor man. A giant dope? Isn't that insult dopey? I read the article, and it seems that Noah's problem is he needs better joke-writers. I'd say: He's getting "The Daily Show"'s joke-writers, so the question is only how he looks, how he delivers the jokes, and how he manages the interviews. If you're not going to rest on the ground that his old jokes were so offensive that he can't be the face of the brand, what's the problem? He's a giant dope? That makes zero sense. It's as if the writer � Jessica Winter � doesn't know that there are writers. That's annihilatingly stupid.

Now, the Wendy Todd article (linked above) makes a much stronger point: It seems that "The Daily Show" may be installing Noah because he's been getting away with mocking black people. Todd, who is black, says:

[On "The Tonight Show"] Noah joked that black people are misidentified as African Americans. �They�re not African, but we�ll play along,� he said, adding, �Many of them really try to connect with Africa, you know? Some of them have these African names. They�ll be like, �Yeah, yeah, that�s my girl Wanda, yeah, yeah. Yeah that�s right, that�s Dashiqua, or dat�s Taniqua.� Noah emphasized all this �hilarity� by using stereotypical B-Boy hand gestures to drive it home � because this is how all black people communicate, obviously. Leno�s predominantly white audience ate it up....

Not only did Noah get away with these routines, now he�s being rewarded for them. And the sadder thing is that the next time we have this �there aren�t enough people of color in the late night arena� conversation, people will point to Noah and say, �See, we gave you another one.�

Who was that the man who killed the Wisconsin state trooper in Fond du Lac?

We talked about this shoot out here. The topic of race came up, though the article didn't mention the race of the man, Steven Timothy Snyder, who was also shot and killed, or of the trooper, Trevor Casper. But insinuations about race crept into the comments. I was accused of hitting "a new low," because I "must have known the reaction your post would get from some of your horribly racist commenters."

Now we learn something racial about Snyder and not just that he was white:
Click for more �

"It�s also interesting because I�m actually black, but you assumed otherwise."

Great instant recovery by Nancy Giles there, but that was hilarious.

"This is not about starting a conversation. This is about coffee wars.... The sole objective here is to try to increase the brand�s cultural relevance."

Said a USC educator named Jeetendr Sehdev, in my favorite quote in the NYT article titled "Starbucks Initiative on Race Relations Draws Attacks Online."

ADDED: Jeetendr Sehdev � according to his Twitter profile:

Celebrity branding authority. USC professor. Brit in LA. Scientifically examining the world of celebrity. #IntelligentPop

Following!

"Starbucks to encourage baristas to discuss race relations with customers."

"Beginning on Monday, Starbucks baristas will have the option as they serve customers to hand cups on which they�ve handwritten the words 'Race Together' and start a discussion about race."

The initiative follows several months of consultations with employees that started in December, in part as a result of protests that roiled several U.S. cities....

Cognizant of what a powder keg the issue of race is, Starbucks says its baristas will be under no obligation to engage with customers on the topic. The goal is simply to foster discussion and an exchange of ideas.

"Charles Barkley Says Paying NCAA Athletes Is A Turrible Idea, And Americans Still Agree."

Can someone explain to me why the Huffington Post used that "turrible" spelling? Is it mocking Barkley's speech? It it mocking the idea?

The idea sounds right to me, by the way:

"There�s only a couple of players on the college team that actually can really play in every sport, so sometimes you have to look at the big picture... All of those kids are getting a free education. But let�s say we do it your way � we have to pay the diving team, the swimming team. That�s crazy. Less than 1 percent [of college basketball players] are going to play in the NBA... What about the other 99 percent that are getting a free education? Think about it."

I'm looking at the comments now and see that the top-rated comment is:

The spelling of terrible in the article title ("Turrible") diminishes both the point of Mr. Barley's opinion and his education. Further, given how some in his country have worked to to portray African American men, it can also be interpreted as racist.

That gets the response "but that's how he says the word" � which is something I wondered about, but didn't know � and the original commenter comes back with "And in how many instances have journalists used regional accents when writing on a commentary's opinion?" � which is exactly how I would have responded to the assertion that Barkley happens to pronounce "terrible" like that. I mean, he'd have to be awfully famous for that word, pronounced that way before it wouldn't seem disrespectful and a cheap way of discounting what is a damned good argument. He's not famous enough for saying "turrible" that I knew it. Are there any other cases of famous people so famous for a way they pronounce a word that the respelled word would be used like that in a headline? The only thing I can think of is a bunch of dumb old headlines about Ed Sullivan and his "really big shew."