4/14 Episode 311 Act Two. Everything Must Go. Nellie Thomas sold ammunition illegally on the South side of Chicago. He made a good living – in cash. And that was his problem. The money was driving him crazy. He was ashamed to tell his family how he earned it, he was afraid he’d be robbed, and he didn’t know how to get rid of it. So he kept it in big black garbage bags which he hid around his house and yard. Then one day, he came up with the perfect way to get rid of the money. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh tells Nellie’s story. Sudhir’s a sociology professor at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

I stand exposed and plead guilty.

I am pleased to see your gesture of voluntary self-emasculation and am sure that it will contribute to the further empowerment of our disenfranchised chromatically-challenged brothers and sisters everywhere in the supra-South Asian diaspora.

Bliss,

You like 2 and 1/2 men and Friends? This is unforgivable.

Well, I really like Frasier too.

You have to check out ‘How I met your mother’ for quality American laffs.

I saw a couple of episodes recently screened by the BBC here in the UK. It seemed okay although not as snappy as Frasier or 2.5 Men (maybe I’d need to watch it continuously to really get into it). Some hot women, though, which I noticed and appreciated.

BTW, us yankees want to thank you for Jimmy Carr. He’s quite fantastic.

Yeah he’s good. Takes badmaashi to a whole new level He can be quite wildly politically-incorrect, but I don’t find him gratuitously offensive like Ricky Gervais sometimes is during his live performances. There’s a line between being borderline-risque and just being a jerk in the name of being “cheeky”.

Anyway, enough threadjacking from me Back to the debate about the ghetto, or as some of us in the UK used to jokingly refer to places like Southall in West London, “the pind”…..

Since I spend time in the ghetto, allow me to let you in on a secret. It’s all a big practical joke that blacks are playing on whites. once the use of the n-word became as bad as denying the holocaust, blacks got together and decided to move the goalposts. So they took words that (unlike the “organically” racist n-word) had absolutely no racist connotations, first negro then afro-american, and declared them racist. Hysterically, whites followed suit.

so then they decided to take the joke to an incredibly absurd–almost andy kaufman– level. They decided to start using the n-word themselves! while maintaining the taboo!! Ridiculously, whites fell in line.

Now, theyÂ’re moving onto words like “ghetto” that only tangentially refer to blacks. Next up “white christmas” will be banned. I’m telling you, theyÂ’re all uptown now laughing their asses off.

@Neal, was there an uproar over that new supreme court ruling about school integration? I agree that it does probably have more to do with race than anything else.

Amazing, i had the exact same experience working as a community organizer in Chicago. This is a highly complex issue, I think – since Sudhir’s time the race politics in the city have mutated a little bit, and I think desis sometimes do have a determinate and potentially threatening presence, specifically in terms of the classic merchant relationship many corner store owners have with community members. However since I also occasionally pass for Black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican, I think I blended in a bit more.

Hopefully, it wont turn into a real tense relationship like with Koreans and Blacks in LA.

cojones, I think. Cajones would be large boxes though possibly the feller has some of those too.

Nice to bring in our Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters, though.

True that!