Things are finally looking up for Saigon. A few years ago, the hard-knock NYC rapper looked like he was about to become a big star. After a string of very strong mixtapes, he signed with Atlantic Records through producer Just Blaze’s Fort Knocks Entertainment, and, in 2005, landed a recurring role on HBO’s “Entourage,” while readying his first album, The Greatest Story Never Told.
Unfortunately, that title took on unintended irony when, due to a variety of problems — mostly, probably, the demise of the major-label system — the project was delayed and delayed and then shelved. Saigon wrote a famous post bemoaning the record industry on his Myspace page under the heading “I Quit.”

Come February, all these years later, his album is finally going to come out, thanks to a partnership between Fort Knocks and the independent Suburban Noize Records. As a warm up, he has a new EP, Yardfather’s Prologue, which includes the above “Get Busy,” an excellent example of storytelling rap set to a beat made from the sounds of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. video game.

The beat is ingenious. But it’s not at all the first time Super Mario has been so flipped. Producer DJ Rob, for one, used it for Cocoa Brovaz 1999 underground classic, “Super Brooklyn.”

And here’s Nintendo’s original, in action, which makes me wish that Saigon’s video was not shot in black and white. All those great pixely colors!

Strong stuff: “Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That’s just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer.”

I had no idea things were so bad out there! Be careful, everybody. And just in case, you should probably review this guide from the mayor on how to stay safe in New York City. Will it work on giant roaches? Yeah, probably.

“For those of us who don’t do it, parenting is a bit of a mystery. A strange, magical, glamorous mystery that we imagine is bedevilled by all sorts of complex and exciting challenges. What a mind-blowing experience it must be to manufacture another human being and steer him into the world, we think.

Which is why it was such a disappointment looking after a friend’s teenager for a week. I now realise that parenting involves only two things: persuading a child to eat and persuading a child to put on a coat.”

“So 2014 is the new July 2011. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the caveats and the asterisks that the Obama administration and NATO want to place onto the dates, and understand that neither date heralds the End Of The War. But there’s a word for politicians who need you to listen carefully to their statements to grasp the full depth of their meanings: liars. They’re putting out a line that suggests on its face that the war will wind down or end when they’re actually promising no such thing.”
 — Oh I see.

This is my new desktop picture. It’s from Avatar, the final fight scene when Jake Sully battles Colonel Quaritch in his lethal mecha suit! Actually, it’s not. It’s from this slideshow of finalists from the German Society of Wildlife Photographers’ European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Which is better, really, because James Cameron probably won’t show up speaking Na’vi at the awards ceremony. Check them out. Lots of beautifulness.

Fans of Dr. Dre or Erykah Badu will recognize the slinky guitar riff from the young Mississippian rapper Big Krit’s latest (it’s a sample from Soul Mann and the Brothers’ cover of “Bumpy’s Lament” from Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack to Shaft.) But to me the coolest thing about this song is the perspective: Krit rhymes in the persona of a pot-smoking, X-box-playing, Cribs-watching loser. One who has dreams of glory and riches like we’re used to, but one who, at the end of the song, is clearly not going anywhere good. And pretty harshly called out for it. There’s a lot of Notorious B.I.G. here. In an impressive way.

Have you seen those commercials for Thursday Night Football in which the NFL tries to make it seem like Thursday Night Football is a thing? There’s up-tempo sorta-rock music and ordinary dudes looking excited and Patriots owner Robert Kraft driving a golf cart to an expensive-seeming outdoor restaurant/yacht club (really), where they presumably all settle in for a rollicking evening of football on a network no one gets. Anyway, so that starts tonight. The Falcons are favored by one point at home against the Ravens. Both David Roth and Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin are picking Baltimore. You know, for the record.

Now that the December Wired is hitting inboxes, some women are noticing that the cover image, which is breasts, seems to them like an extension of the magazines use of women as rare decorative objects. (Even while the issue does address advances in tissue reconstruction.) Since in particular women don’t make the cover this decade on their Wiredey merits. Fortunately Wired editor Chris Anderson is listening!

@anildash I hope your 2nd reaction was to read the article, on the science of breast tissue engineering. Make sense now?less than a minute ago via web

Chris Anderson
chr1sa

Or not. But did you read it ladies?

The ladies did! Also.

@chr1sa @anildash Alt cover for female Wired readers: re-engineered extra-ocular tissue strained from eye-rolling.less than a minute ago via web

Elizabeth Spiers
espiers

“With his feeble flame of ‘hope’ thoroughly doused here in the United States by last week’s elections, President Obama has set out around the globe in search of throngs still enthralled by his flowery rhetoric. He found them, of course, in Indonesia this week by telling them about how Americans must stop mistrusting Islam. So that is why your president is halfway around the world instead of being here in the United States to celebrate the sacrifices American soldiers, sailors and airmen have made around the world to keep the real, still-burning flame of freedom alive.”