Paths Not Taken

Gotta Love B. Scott!

Diana Ross/Upside Down

AND

Teddy Pendergrass/Turn Off The Lights

When I saw this story on the Today Show this morning it merey broke my heart. Billy Wolfe is a kid who has been bullied and tormented since elementary school. Billy, 16, has endured black eyes, cuts, and bruises simply because he’s considered an “easy target”.

When he spoke I could see the fear and tension. His parents are threatening to sue the school district based on videos showing Billy being beaten by his peers.

As a mother, I couldn’t help but wonder what I would do if one of my girls were being bullied. In my mind I would jack the little mother fuckers up when they least expected it and issue out a beautiful can of whip ass, NOTE *see The Hand That Rocks The Cradle* and go on about my business. But in reality you can’t just go and attack a little pre-pubescent fucker who’s beating on your kid……well, yes you can but I’ll leave that for another post.

As parents, it’s our job to recognize when things aren’t going right with our children. We have to encourage them to talk to us without being too judgemental with their responses. It’s also important to at least take into consideration what the kid whose doing the bullying is going through at home.

Kids who bully are sometimes brought up in an environment where they are either being abused or neglected in some way.

I think Billy’s parents did the right thing by taking legal action against the school district for not putting forth an effort into making sure that Billy’s bullies would be repremanded for their actions. Especially when they were caught on tape beating the crap out of this kid.

What say you?

Here’s some food for thought:

Pearl Jam/Jeremy

Sir Elton John

Sir Elton John/Sacrifice

DETROIT - Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a one-time rising star and Detroit’s youngest elected leader, was charged Monday with perjury and other counts after sexually explicit text messages contradicted his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also charged the popular yet polarizing 37-year-old mayor with obstruction of justice and misconduct in office.

Former Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, 37, who also denied under oath that she and Kilpatrick had a romantic relationship in 2002 and 2003, was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

“Some have suggested that the issues in this case are personal or private,” Worthy said. “Our investigation has clearly shown that public dollars were used, people’s lives were ruined, the justice system severely mocked and the public trust trampled on. … This case is about as far from being a private matter as one can get.”

The charges could signal the end of Kilpatrick’s six-year career as mayor of one of America’s largest cities.

Perjury is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. A felony conviction would mean Kilpatrick’s immediate expulsion from office under the Detroit City Charter. Calls for his resignation have surfaced since late January and the Detroit City Council asked him to step down last week.

Kilpatrick was to hold a noon news conference but had not yet appeared and his office and lawyers were not commenting. A message seeking comment from Beatty’s attorney, Jeffrey Morganroth, was not returned.

Kilpatrick has said he would not resign and last week said he expects to be vindicated when all aspects of the scandal are made public.

Worthy said she expected the mayor and Beatty to turn themselves in by 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Worthy began her investigation the day after the Free Press published excerpts of the embarrassing text messages in late January. The messages called into question testimony Kilpatrick and Beatty gave in a lawsuit filed by two police officers who alleged they were fired for investigating claims that the mayor used his security unit to cover up extramarital affairs.

In court, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied having an intimate relationship, but the text messages reveal that they carried on a flirty, sometimes sexually explicit dialogue about where to meet and how to conceal their trysts.

Kilpatrick is married with three children. Beatty was married at the time and has two children.

The city agreed to pay $8.4 million to the two officers and a third former officer who filed a separate lawsuit. Documents released last month showed Kilpatrick agreed to the settlement in an effort to keep the text messages from becoming public.

The text messages published by the Free Press revealed a romantic discourse.

“I’m madly in love with you,” Kilpatrick wrote on Oct. 3, 2002.

“I hope you feel that way for a long time,” Beatty replied. “In case you haven’t noticed, I am madly in love with you, too!”

Worthy filed eight counts against Kilpatrick and seven against Beatty.

Kilpatrick faces charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, misconduct in office, perjury in a court proceeding and two counts of perjury other than in a court proceeding.

Beatty is charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury in a court proceeding and two counts of perjury other than in a court proceeding.

For Beatty, who attended high school with Kilpatrick and managed his campaigns for Michigan’s state House and the mayor’s office, the scandal forced her to resign.

City lawyers and Kilpatrick’s attorneys waged a futile legal battle to keep documents related to the lawsuit settlement and text messages from public eyes.

Calls for his resignation surfaced in late January from some city union leaders and Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox repeated that call.

Stipe, R.E.M. take rougher-edged approach
Stipe: They made a fast record so ‘there was no way for us to overthink it’

NEW YORK - Think fast. R.E.M. has banished the quiet, dream-like mood of their last two records and is about to unleash the hard, sharp-eyed “Accelerate,” their first album in four years.

As Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills follow the first single’s edit-it-yourself video with the album’s launch on iLike and a worldwide tour, frontman Stipe spoke to Billboard.com about the set’s “really fast, really raw” take on politics, teenage geekdom and the media; and how he and his bandmates “worked really hard to try to upset the things we had gotten bogged down in.”

Billboard: Your decision to premiere “Accelerate” on iLike follows neatly from the decision to pretty much open-source the video for “Supernatural Superserious.”

Michael Stipe: Good term there. I think that was my idea but it was based on stuff that (director) Vincent Moon had done that I really admired. I thought, “Well, we can take this and expand on the idea and offer something that’s a little bit of fun,” which I think is in keeping not only with the footage that he was able to get of the band kind of stumbling around New York, but with the song itself, which has a little bit of a sense of humor.

Billboard: A sense of humor, and a fun guitar riff. You’ve said the song was about teenage humiliation and the kinds of things that follow you through your life. I thought that was interesting because I wondered what inspired you to write that now, long after adolescence?

Stipe: We all have our geek moments that we kind of carry with us or that have some impact on us throughout our lives (laughs). I hate to use the term “geek anthem” but it’s a little bit, for me, like that. I have friends — who are adults — who move with such grace and poise through life and in fact completely embrace the incredibly stupid aspects of growing up and the humiliating teenage moments. They can totally laugh about and make fun of themselves and allow themselves to be, I think, more of a complete adult because of it. So that was really kind of the inspiration for the song.

Billboard: I think we have all harbored things like that years and decades later, and then we think, “Why am I thinking about this now?”

Stipe: Yeah, it’s like that one horrifying school picture where you either knew or didn’t know that that was the day they were taking the school picture. OK, so now anyone in the world can now pull that up online if they want to look at you when you were in sixth grade and had, whatever, really stupid glasses. But the song inhabits an almost more internal humiliation, something that happens to all of us because we were all kids and we all have insecurities on some level or the other. This one, I kind of particularly wrote it around a seance gone horribly wrong at a summer camp that then manifested itself later in life as kind of a sexual deviance, but a fun one.

Billboard: Most of the songs on the record, like “Supernatural,” sound like the band re-exploring rock and a harder sound. Did you set out to do that?

Stipe: No, I think more than anything we wanted to stay on point. We wanted to do a record really fast so there was no way for us to overthink it. In terms of the material, we kind of went to the most obvious place. We wrote really fast songs and we tried to keep them really raw and in-your-face, and that’s what we wound up with.

Billboard: This record is also out in an election year. Is the character in “Mr. Richards” a politician? Are you talking about the state of the country there, like Dylan’s “Mr. Jones”? Is “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” a call to action?

Stipe: “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” to me, is more aimed at a figure in the media. “Mr. Richards” is definitely a political figure. It’s really about the injustices that we face under a system where somebody can, can … can disregard … Let me pull my thoughts together. I always stammer when I get really upset (laughs). It’s about injustices and one of those great injustices — and you’ll find plenty of examples of it in the current U.S. administration — is people that get away with something that is almost inhuman. Rather than that being shameful, they wear it like a badge of honor. The fact that they did something so corrupt and actually got away with it, rather than just dropping it into the bottom drawer of their desk, it’s like, “I’m even more Teflon than you think I am.” Like, “Look at what I can do.”

Billboard: Did you write the lyrics for the album while Mike and Peter were writing the music?

Stipe: My promise to them was that I would show up on the first day of recording with finished lyrics. So, the first stint that we did was in Vancouver, and the first day I showed up, I had seven songs. We were recording every day, probably eight or nine hours a day. I finished another song while we were there and started another half of a song. By the time we got to Dublin, (where) we did these live shows, these kind of live rehearsals before we went into the studio, I finished the song that I had started in Vancouver and had written another one.

My part of it was to not have to have Peter sitting on the couch for four weeks waiting for me to finish lyrics; (to not) have Mike not knowing how to sing a background vocal or where to take the bass part or the keyboard part because he didn’t know where the vocal melody was going to go.

It was kind of like there was an agreement between the three of us that we were all going to try to work really hard to try to upset the things that we had gotten bogged down in in the past. And to try to make a record really fast and really in-your-face and really raw and make our decisions quickly and then live with them rather than picking apart every single thing and overworking it, which is what had happened on the last record.

Billboard: Who picked the opening bands, the National and Modest Mouse, for the summer leg of your upcoming tour?

Stipe: All three of us. I had seen the National and met the guys really briefly at the Oxygen Festival. Peter knew the band and I took Mike to see a show they played in London. Mike was completely blown away by them live. Peter is friends with Johnny (Marr, Modest Mouse’s guitarist) and we all like the band a real lot (laughs). We thought, “Well, this is going to be a really great bill.” I’ve never seen Modest Mouse perform before, (so) for me it’s going to be super exciting to have that kind of daily inspiration. That’s really what having great opening bands can provide.

Robbie Nevil/C’ Est la Vie

What better way to celebrate the 1st day of Spring!

*Robert Frost *

The Rose Family

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only know
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose–
But were always a rose.

KC teen charged after son, two other toddlers eat cocaine:

A Kansas City teenage mom faces child endangerment charges after hospital tests revealed that her 2-year-old son and two other young children ingested crack cocaine.

The children apparently sampled crumbs that the mom left behind when she darted out to sell drugs, court records allege.

Children’s Mercy Hospital staff contacted police after one of the children suffered seizures earlier this week.

Jackson County prosecutors on Thursday charged Tasha Cole, 17, with four felony counts of endangering the welfare of a child. They requested a $75,000 bond.

After giving police several false stories, Cole admitted that she left the children with a friend while she sold drugs, according to the affidavit filed in court to support the charges.

According to court records:

Cole told police that when she returned to the apartment in the 3000 block of Harrison Street, she found the children playing with the plate on which she had “cut” the crack cocaine. A razor blade lay on the floor.

Cole told detectives that when she put the plate down earlier, it had crumbs of cocaine on it. She told police that she picked up the razor blade but left the plate. About 10 minutes later she realized the children were playing with the plate, and she took them across the hall and told relatives what happened.

One relative wanted to take the children to the hospital, but Cole told her not to because she was “scared.” Later, when her son began having seizures, she took him to the hospital.

Not told about the cocaine, hospital staff treated the boy, took a urine sample and released him. Later, the sample came back positive for cocaine.

Hospital staff asked Cole to return and notified police.

As part of the investigation, the other two children who had been in the apartment, ages 3 and 2, were checked. Both tested positive for cocaine, according to the court documents.