We started off the new millennium with lots of hopes. The whole “Year 2000″ thing sounded so exciting and futuristic, and we were all expecting great things to come. Instead, this decade has been an awful start that hopefully won’t set the stage for the next 90. While some areas had wild amounts of success and made our lives better (like all these fancy new cell phones), just about every part of our lives has suffered some kind of step backwards in the 2000s.
Here’s why I can’t wait for the month to end and will be welcoming 2010 with open arms.
The Music of the 00’s
It all started off with this and has just gone downhill.
Linkin Park: Pure awful on a disc
In 2000 the #1 album was “The Beatles: 1″, and by 2005 it was a 50 Cent album. That’s how fast things went downhill. The rest is history. Year after year we are treated to another piece of repetitive trash, a new Britney comeback album, or something else that just makes you dumber every time you hear it. It’s gotten so bad that we now consider a song who’se only lyrics are “Tonight’s gunna be a good night” to be perfectly acceptable. Excuse me while I go barf.
It’s ridiculous how much 90’s music I listen to now just because today’s “artists” have driven me in another direction so rapidly.
The music industry as a whole became something we all hated. Nothing like hearing record labels cry poor from piracy only to find out now that they use unauthorized recordings in compilations all the time.
Vermin Supreme giving an interview during the 2008 primaries
I can’t believe this went so long without me noticing it. Being involved in politics for as long as I have, I’ve seen some really screwball candidates. But at long last, I think I may have found a candidate who is even more absurd than the infamous Vermin Supreme.
Now, to Mr. Supreme’s credit, he can form coherent sentences in the manner in which the average Joe would say such things…he just says stuff that we would never say. But hey, he was running for president of the United States (and one of the few people I’ve ever met who was also a fan of Imperial Emperor Norton I). Livonia City Council Candidate Glenn Moon on the other hand, not only says things that no mentally competent person would ever say, but he says them in a manner in which prepositions are completely optional and has invented his own nomenclature. Continue Reading
The internet is a funny place in many regards. The anonymity seems to continue to disappear as people get more comfortable with their online profiles, and people are exposing the weirder sides of themselves at a rather alarming rate.
Along with this comes with the internet creeping into our every day lives. Now that social networking has brought our personal thoughts, political opinions, and the mundane details of our lives into the view of others, we’re looking at our friends in a different lights.
Somehow in the midst of all this, is the Facebook application Speed Date. Somewhere between an e-Harmony account and trolling Myspace profiles lies the logic between this application: look at a random bunch of pictures and quick profiles, see who you like, and contact them. All the while, not looking like a total creep in the process. Oddly enough, I can’t remember when or why I added this app, but I know it only started paying attention to me after I got a girlfriend and as thus, kept trying to hook me up with weird local girls.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. The whole point of Speed Date is to find someone to hang out with (at least), right? So it makes you wonder why some word their profiles and likes the way they do. Let’s explore some of the “matches” Speed Date has sent me and encouraged me to “send a flirt” to.
Here’s a handful of local girls that “teh interwebs” thought I might be interested in. Really.
NeighborhoodScout.com is a fantastic resource for people looking to move. It as all kinds of fun stats on where want to live, how far your “neighborhood” goes, crime rates, school information, etc. No doubt it saves a Realtor a ton of time every year as they work to convince people to buy homes all over the country. Of course with this data, you can see where the safest and most dangerous neighborhoods are in the country.
Walletpop.com did a story recently analyzing the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. Only one Detroit hood made the list, coming in at #23: The Mount Elliott / Palmer neighborhood. Within this small scope of streets there are a little over 150 projected violent crimes every year (or one every 2-3 days), the violent crime rate per thousand is almost 100, and the odds of you becoming a victim of such a crime if you live there is 11%, which is quite a bit by most standards (even the most dangerous neigborhood in America has odds of 25%).
The thing that makes the Mt. Palmer neighborhood interesting is that it’s a mix of residential dilapidation and an industrial wasteland: the neighborhood houses the Motor City Industrial Park, a massive complex that was once home to Packard Motors and now sits abandoned, with no clear owner, and is set on fire seemingly every couple of weeks now. As a Realtor, the only convincing point I could make to sell a home here is the price. There is nothing else that is even remotely inviting.
Mt. Palmer is located on the east side of the city, between Gratiot Avenue and I-94 to the east and west, as well as East Grand Blvd. and Mount Elliott to the north and south. You can view a map over at the Neighborhood Scout Website. It’s common knowledge that the east side of the city is more problematic than the west side, however while the residential parts don’t appear as bad on the outside, it looks as though this really is the place where anything can happen.
Here come the pictures. The sepia tone gives it a nice eerie feeling to it all, but of course you can see the full roll of pictures in full color over in the photos section. Click on any photo to view a larger resolution. Continue Reading
