I watched a documentary on 2pac the other day. I believe it was called Tupac: Resurrection. 2pac's story is so fascinating to me. He lived in complete poverty his entire childhood. His dad abandoned him and his mom was a reasonably high ranking member of the Black Panthers. Not your typical family makeup

He moved to Baltimore right before high school and was lucky enough to go to what seemed like a pretty good school that focused a lot on the arts. I didn't catch how he got into that school. The important part was that he got exposed to a lot of classic writing like Shakespeare. I think what he learned at that school influenced his future writing a lot. Around that time, his mom became a crack head. The thing is that he was clearly brilliant. He just had so much anger from his childhood. I don't think anyone has lifted up the black community while tearing it down at the same time as much as 2pac. In one song he's asking why men treat women poorly and asking that to stop. The next song he's talking about killing people and smacking bitches around. It's pretty crazy. Of course, he justifies it by saying that not all women are bitches. He says he's only referring to a certain type of woman. I think there's merit to the argument, but I think he still did damage to the black community when he rapped like that.

He had guys like Bob Dole trying to say that record companies shouldn't put out music with the type of lyrics that he had. I think he has every right to say what he wants. The fact is that he was speaking it how he saw it, even if it was a terrible picture to paint. At the end he talked a lot about how he knew he was going to die. He just felt it coming. His goal was to record at least 3 songs a day so that he could leave as much material as possible. You gotta give him credit for working as hard as he could so that he could leave something behind. They showed the intersection that he got shot at and it's one I've driven through many times in Vegas. I'm going to check it out again next time I'm out there.

Another quick note on rap - there was a pretty big thread in OT recently talking about the top 5 rappers. I don't know how you can't put 2pac at #1. The way he rapped was so different than any other rapper I've ever heard. He was a poet. Plan and simple. As much as I like someone like Lil Wayne, there is no way the guy is a poet. He just gets high on drugs and spews nonsense. That's fine. It's entertaining. 2pac had a clear message that meant something. That puts him at the top for me.

I was searching for something on Obama the other day and one of the top google dropdowns was "Is Obama the antichrist?" I was pretty taken aback. I thought that was worth mentioning because how crazy it is. It also got me thinking about the google dropdowns. I wonder how much they influence people. What if a crazy person clicks that link and becomes some fanatical antiobama person when they never would have come across it otherwise. I'm not saying that's likely to happen, but it could. I know the idea would have never even crossed my mind if it wasn't for google. I'm sure there are plenty of other instances where a dropdown affected someone's search in a negative way.

I looked into the google autocomplete some more and found some interesting things. It won't complete on the word kill. Illegal drugs seem to be fair game. You type "how do you do smoke" and it will complete with pot, heroin, you name it. Does anyone know their policy behind this? How does this autocomplete even work?

I mentioned the Wrestler in CTZ last week, but it's worth bringing up again. That movie is really good. It's the type of movie that sticks with you. I was still thinking about scenes from it days after I had seen it. I watch a shitload of movies so that doesn't happen too often. The acting is amazing. The story line is as good as it is sad. There are some good wrestling scenes too. It was one of the best movies of 2008 (even if I didn't see it until 2009). It better win some Oscars.