KING YELLOWMAN!!!

Here's the video clip that I watched as a young teen when I realized just how cool King Yellowman was. Awesome stuff. He has the crowd eating out of the palms of his hands...

DEATH IN THE DANCEHALL

I’m not sure anymore, more
Who is knocking on my door, door
All the faces that I knew
So sunny and blue, blue
I-man can see it in the sky
Tenor Saw already die die
…When dem a go stop kill off the superstar? Super Cat

Claude Mills
Freelance Writer

A rash of events over the past week has resurrected fears that dancehall’s long flirtation with violence and death may be shifting into a new dangerous phase – one where the artistes themselves may be living out the trigger-pulling gun-fantasies that dominate their songs, and worse yet, fighting among themselves.
“I have never seen it this before where deejay and deejay a literally war,” Isaiah Laing, director of Supreme Promotions, said.
“Panhead died from gunshots and it was rumoured that it was another deejay who did it but it was not proven. The way it is being programmed now, if anything happen to either one of these artistes, they are going to say it is the other one who did it.”
Last week, two separate incidents where eyewitnesses allege that they saw deejays firing shots at a barbershop in Cassava Piece and then later at a studio in Havendale, St. Andrew.
“Even in the early days of Beenie-Bounty feud, it was never like this because those two artistes want to see each other in the business, but these artistes…we’re flirting with disaster, I feel some very important people are going to die, given the direction of the music right now,” Mr. Laing said.
If you listen to industry insiders talk, there is no rhyme nor reason for the edgy tension and animosities in an industry where having a good time is the major raison d’etre . However, there has always been a bit of an uneasy ‘alliance’, if you will, between death and dancehall, one of the island’s indigenous art forms. Jamaica itself is an enigma because there is so much that is attractive about this country and so much that is repellent. Europeans jam by the thousands to roots rock reggae with its conscious vibe, while the more rebellious young people have a great fascination with the younger idiom, dancehall, with its outsized ‘anything goes, nothing is verboten’ full throttle take on life.
Dancehall chronicles in scathing scatological terms the violence and feats of sexual gratification that run like a fault line throughout the Jamaican society. The genre itself, by its very nature, creates a paradoxical set of issues that can bolster a dancehall artiste’s careers even while putting that artiste’s life in mortal danger.

Most artistes, once they ‘buss’ and gain wealth, become folk figures in their community, and build mini-fiefdoms around themselves where they call the shots. However, Laing contends, most entertainers are not natural leaders who can handle the power that they suddenly wield.
“They can’t handle the hype,” Laing concluded. “And they have to understand that these are serious time. There are too many guns in the wrong hands, and given the fact that there are not many convictions for murder because of the justice system, a killer might get away scotch free, or without even being arrested, so these followers might be inclined to do anything.”
Laing says he understands the unique pressures facing these young men.
‘“I was glorified as being a bad boy police, but if you were to come in a crowd where I was, you couldn’t know who is Laing because I was humble, even though deep down, I was hype because I know that I could do when it was time for action when me and he real bwoy dem buck up. They need to know that they are role models and act in ways that command respect from the entire society.“

Since 1980, the violence in Jamaican society has reached pandemic proportions, and the continued murders that occur merely underscores the increasingly perilous state of young black men in Jamaica. Not even entertainers are exempt from the mad carnival of criminality. Gerald ‘Bogle’ Levy was killed by assailants in January 2005, He was hardly the first dancehall personality to die in a hail of bullets because General Echo, Tenor Saw, Nitty Gritty, Dirtsman, Panhead and Early B all met brutal early gunshot-related deaths. Some schools of thought blame dancehall deejays and personalities for the poor choices they make once they acquire wealth and material success because several continue to pledge allegiance to the ghettos they grew up in and the often exhibit a willingness to partake in dangerous situations.
“Some get too rich and tun eediat. Dem come from nowhere and ah drive X5, Rolls Royce, BMW, so dem de pon top of the world, two yute ah call dem bossy, but none ah dem anno real bad man,” Ninjaman, a deejay who has had several scrapes with the law himself, said.
“Dem was barber, baker, mechanic long before dem buss, Kartel and Mavado anno bad man, everytime dem run gone ah station, old time bad man like Josey Wales, Super Cat or me, we nah do dat, we ah put it on pon you. So if Josey Wales see the light, Super Cat see the light and me, who have the worst name of all, see the light and we can change, what happen to dem and we pave the way fi dem mek millions of dollars,” Ninjaman reasoned.
“The community fi get together and beat dem, dem not even bad like me toenail. Dem need fi put demselves inna the vein where people can see them and respect dem…badman name is not a recommendation,” he said.
He also warned the entertainers that the “fans will take the powers away from you” if they continued to abuse the respect they had been given.

“If they should take time to drive around Jamaica and see the development taking place, they would not want to destroy this country, they need to make their minds develop much the same way the country is developing and be aware of themselves so that Jamaican can prosper and create a future for them and their children,” Ninjaman concluded.

STREET CREDIBILITY

Many deejays feel that they have to spend their time in the ‘garrisons’ to maintain their street credibility.
“We have to be out there, in the garrisons, that’s where our hardcore audience is. If you’re hot, you’re hot in the streets, and that’s also where you can run into a lot of trouble. That’s the risk, doing what you do to ‘buss’ is what can get you shot,” one deejay who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
The fact still remains that there is an attraction to criminal and violence for the nation’s huge pool of undereducated men who are falling even further into a maelstrom of joblessness, poverty and prison. Dancehall, by its very nature, represents a unique subculture of Jamaica, and it has its own particular sets of laws, idiosyncracies and rules that govern it. You got to be in it to understand.
In Vybz Kartel’s single, ‘AKA’, he deejays: “AKA, we don’t play, f*& all night, smoke all day/cloth A.K./Still deejay/We play music, we don’t play…” That shows that dancehall is one of the few professions where you can drink Guinness all day long, and smoke weed, and it can still be considered “working”. Many of its heroes come from dysfunctional backgrounds, and despite their material success, they have little chance or desire to achieve ‘upward mobility’, and despise the’ cocktail party culture’ of the island.
“I live uptown, but I party downtown. In Jamaica, the ghettos are everywhere and the people are real, and loyal. My uptown neighbour nah go watch my headback, mi need the ghetto so mi stay well protected. I have to stay in the streets to keep current in the dancehall, and if that means exposing myself to danger, that’s just like in Jamaica….death de everywhere,” another top deejay reason.
Dancehall’s cousin has the same problem. The twin patron saints of slain rappers, Notorious B.I.G, whose mother is Jamaican, and Tupac Shakur, both of whose fascination with thug life and death meant they were doomed to repeat the macho street theatre they lived out in their songs. Other rap stars such as Run DMC’s Jam Master Jay (slain in 2002 in a New York recording studio) and Scott La Rock (whose 1987 killing in New York was the first high-profile rap slaying) died in their own communities.

SOURCE: http://www.musik-news.org/post/36032/Reggae_obits.html

Bionic Steve Killed
Marcus ‘Bionic Steve’ Townsend, an entertainer made popular by his feisty song Fly the Gate, which was turned into a political anthem. Bionic Steve was shot and killed on January 17, 1997. His mangled body was found in a gully on Spanish Town Road.
Black Rat (David Bingham) Killed
Humourous deejay Black Rat was shot and killed on July 20, 2002 at his home on Dunbarton Avenue in Kingston 10. His assailants also made off with jewelry valued at $15,000.
Carlton (Carly) Barrett b. 1950
On Good Friday of 1987, news about Carlton Barrett’s death made the rounds. The original drummer of the Wailers was allegedly ambushed at his gate by his ex-wife’s boyfriend. His death sparked many glowing tributes and he was hailed as one of the greatest drummers to emerge from the island of Jamaica. He reputedly originated the ‘One Drop’ rhythm and has songwriting credits on two songs from Bob Marley and The Wailers’ Natty Dread album - Talkin’ Blues and Them Belly Full.
Charlie Ace
Gunned down in Kingston Early 1980’s
Dirtsman(Patrick Thompson) b. 1967 Spanish town
Robbed & Murdered December 21st 1993 Spanish town JA
Patrick ‘Dirtsman’ Thompson, Papa San’s older brother, was shot dead at his home in Dela Vega City, Spanish Town, St. Catherine.
D.J. Village (Horace Pinnock) b.1977 JA
Shot dead in London after a Robbery November 20th 2001
Early (Earlando Neil) B “The Doctor”
Shot Accidentally at the Windsor Cricket Club, Dorchester MA. September
11th 1994
Errol Thompson(J.B.C. DJ) 1952 Kingston
Killed In Kingston 1983
Free I (Jeff Dixon) b.1946 Manchester JA.
September 11, 1987 was a sad day in Jamaica, as the country reeled from the news that one of the original Wailers, Peter Tosh, along with his disc jockey and recording artiste friend, Free I, and ‘Doc’ Wilson had been killed at the singer’s Barbican, St. Andrew, home
Garnett Silk (Smith) a.k.a. “Bimbo”- b.1970 Manchester JA
Garnett Silk also lost his life on December 10, 1994. Silk died with his mother at their Manchester home when an explosion resulted in their house being razed. Some reports say that the explosion was caused when a bullet punctured the cylinder outside the singer’s house.
General (Errol Robinson) Echo
General Echo, also known as ‘Ranking Slackness’ was shot and killed in an alleged shoot-out with the police on Constant Spring Road on November 22, 1980. Flux and Big John, two members of his sound system, Echo Tone Hi Fi, also died in the incident. Part of Echo’s legacy is his hit song Arlene.
Henry “Junjo” Lawes b. 1953
Henry ‘Junjo’ Lawes, credited with discovering talent such as Barrington Levy on his Volcano sound system and record label, was shot to death in Harlesdon, North London England on June 13, 1999.
Hugh Mundell a.k.a. Jah Levi b. 1962 Kingston JA
Killed In Kingston following a Robbery at his home 1983
Junior Braithwaite b. 1949
Junior Braithwaite, an original member of the Wailers also fell victim to the gun. He was shot to death in Duhaney Park on June 2, 1999. He was the lead singer on the Wailers’ song It Hurts To Be Alone.
King (Osbourne Ruddock) Tubby b. 1941 Kingston
Gunned down following a robbery outside his home in Tower Hill,
Kingston February 6th 1989
Major (Wayne Jones) Worries
Major Worries was shot and killed by a security guard in Spanish Town in August of 1987. He was a deejay on the King Jammy’s sound system, along with eventual superstar Shabba Ranks.
Poet Michael ‘Mikey’ Smith was stoned to death on August 17, 1983, in Stony Hill, St. Andrew, as he passed a political meeting. Smith was known for his scathing commentaries about the harsh realities of Jamaican life, as described in his often-recited poem Mi Cyaan Believe It
Mikey Wallace
Gunned Down In Kingston July 6th 1999
Nitty (Glen Holness) Gritty b.1957
On 24 June 1991 at 3:30pm while at Brooklyn, New York’s Superpower
Records, Nitty Gritty and dj Supercat reportedly entered into an
argument over money and a Jr Cat stage show. Details are unknown, but it
was reported that both men fired handguns at one another and Supercat
allegedly shot Nitty Gritty four times. Nitty Gritty died on the spot.
To our knowledge Supercat was never jailed and he was found innocent on
the grounds of self-defense.
Panhead (Anthony Johnson) b.1966 St. Mary’s JA.
Robbed & Killed outside his House In Spanishtown Jamaica October 1993
In 1993 deejay Anthony ‘Panhead’ Johnson, who was known for hits such as African Princess, was shot dead at his home on Davidson Avenue, Drewsland.
Paul Tyrell (Shocking Vibes)
Killed March 2004 Kingston Jamaica
Peter Tosh (Winston H. McIntosh) b. 1944 Westmoreland
Murdered at his Home September 11th 1987
Philip Linton (Owner & Producer [at] Arrows Studio)
Shot & Killed March 4th 2004 Outside his Studio
Prince Far I, a deejay, was shot dead on September 15, 1983. He was described by his biographer as ‘a man to grace any style with wisdom, a chanter to quake the walls of the city, a preacher to strike fear in the weakheart, humble in the garden and proud in the city’. He became popular in the 1970s with Heavy Manners and Deck of Cards.
Tenor Saw(Clive Bright) b. 1966 Kingston
Found Dead on the Roadside, Texas (said to be a case of hit & run
driving) August 1998
Tenor Saw, best-known for his 1985 hit “Ring the Alarm,” a song based on the then-ubiquitous “Stalag 17″ rhythm, was killed abroad in August 1988. He is also known for the classic, ‘Golden Hen’ and was the one who sang prophetically that ‘when the roll is called up yonder he and Nitty Gritty would be there’. The album Wake the Town was released posthumously in 1992.
Theophilus Beckford (’Easy Snappin’) b. 1935 Kingston
Brutally Murdered with Machete Kingston Jamaica February 2001
Turbo Belly
Shot & Killed In New York January 2004
Valerie Cowan (Tommy Cowan’s 1st Wife)
Murdered in Kingston during a Robbery 1992

Is An Apology Enough?

By JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National WriterMon Apr 9, 6:25 PM ET

It's a familiar dance that plays out ever more frequently in our popular culture. A public figure transgresses, and we wait to dissect the apology. Was it sincere enough? Contrite enough? Specific enough? Did he feel our pain?

Don Imus' critics don't really care. For them, it's time to dispense with the ritual and move on to a world where actions have consequences.

Not that the radio host wasn't working hard to save his job on Monday, seeking to atone for his "nappy-headed hos" comment in a testy appearance on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio program. But for many, the public apology — used so often in the past year — was seeming like a tired vehicle, even a "meaningless incantation," in the words of ethics columnist Randy Cohen.

"I don't care about an apology," said Angela Burt-Murray, editor in chief of Essence magazine, who's been one of the stronger voices speaking out against Imus' characterization of the Rutgers women's basketball team. "You're not a child on the playground. You're an adult who needs to take responsibility for his actions. And there need to be consequences."

The public apology has merely become a quick fix, Burt-Murray said, to get back to business as quickly as possible. "Michael Richards apologizes. We move on. Mel Gibson apologizes. We move on," she said. "When does it stop? When do WE make it stop?"

For one of the nation's top feminist activists as well, Imus' efforts at public remorse are pointless.

"It's completely hollow," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, who called his words "beyond racist and sexist." Her organization launched a drive Sunday for members to contact Imus' corporate bosses at CBS Corp. and NBC Universal to demand his firing — and she says a few thousand have responded so far.

"This guy is just trying to get himself out of trouble," said Gandy. "It's hard to take him seriously when you look at his past. He's not a first-time offender. The 47th time, I think it rings pretty false."

Imus had made several attempts to apologize for his remarks — his level of contrition apparently expanding with each new attempt. Last week, he said people should relax rather than be incensed over "some idiot comment meant to be amusing." On Monday, he gave a 10-minute explanation on his own show, saying "you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it," and indicated the climate on his show would change. On Sharpton's program, he acknowledged he'd gone "way too far."

By the public-apology standards of the past year, he's trying hard. Gibson went on national television with Diane Sawyer to say he wasn't an anti-Semite. Richards, aka Kramer of "Seinfeld," made a rambling apology on David Letterman's for his "n"-word tirade. Author James Frey faced the music with Oprah Winfrey. And Sen. John Kerry, after his gaffe about the military, went to explain himself at the microphones of ... Don Imus.

This ever-rising chorus of mea culpas leaves Cohen, author of a syndicated ethics column, rather disgusted.

"What passes for a public apology is utterly pro forma," he said. "It's: 'I apologize and I take full responsibility' ... after which the person goes right on and does the same thing as before."

Cohen was careful to note that there ARE times when apologies are meaningful. When you're in a fight, for example, and you say something hurtful at the height of passion, your apology means something.

Or when your apology has real meaning, such as recent official apologies for slavery by the Virginia Legislature and the North Carolina Senate.

Or when the person apologizing shows real, undeniable remorse and a clear intention never to repeat a similar offense again. Few people believe that about Imus, Cohen says.

The "nappy-headed ho" comments were "only a slightly exaggerated form of what Imus does every day," Cohen says.

"I'd fire the guy."

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press

Sellout Music...

So the other day I was at work and someone played "We Built This City" by Jefferson Starship on their computer and I commented that I hated the song because it reflected just how much the former Jefferson Airplane had sold out. A co-worker said to me, "I like when artists sell-out because they make happy music..." Why do I even bother?

From The WTF File: I Snorted My Father....

LONDON (AP) - Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."


(AP) In this March 12, 2007, file photo, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones appears in the press room...
Full Image


Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Richards, one of rock's legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.

"I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.

"I've no pretensions about immortality," he added. "I'm the same as everyone ... just kind of lucky.

"I was No. 1 on the 'who's likely to die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list," Richards said.

Dub Island Session...

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100 Things That You Didn't Know About Africa

1. The human race is of African origin. The oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans (or homo sapiens) were excavated at sites in East Africa. Human remains were discovered at Omo in Ethiopia that were dated at 195,000 years old, the oldest known in the world.

2. Skeletons of pre-humans have been found in Africa that date back between 4 and 5 million years. The oldest known ancestral type of humanity is thought to have been the australopithecus ramidus, who lived at least 4.4 million years ago.

3. Africans were the first to organise fishing expeditions 90,000 years ago. At Katanda, a region in northeastern Zaïre (now Congo), was recovered a finely wrought series of harpoon points, all elaborately polished and barbed. Also uncovered was a tool, equally well crafted, believed to be a dagger. The discoveries suggested the existence of an early aquatic or fishing based culture.

4. Africans were the first to engage in mining 43,000 years ago. In 1964 a hematite mine was found in Swaziland at Bomvu Ridge in the Ngwenya mountain range. Ultimately 300,000 artefacts were recovered including thousands of stone-made mining tools. Adrian Boshier, one of the archaeologists on the site, dated the mine to a staggering 43,200 years old.

5. Africans pioneered basic arithmetic 25,000 years ago. The Ishango bone is a tool handle with notches carved into it found in the Ishango region of Zaïre (now called Congo) near Lake Edward. The bone tool was originally thought to have been over 8,000 years old, but a more sensitive recent dating has given dates of 25,000 years old. On the tool are 3 rows of notches. Row 1 shows three notches carved next to six, four carved next to eight, ten carved next to two fives and finally a seven. The 3 and 6, 4 and 8, and 10 and 5, represent the process of doubling. Row 2 shows eleven notches carved next to twenty-one notches, and nineteen notches carved next to nine notches. This represents 10 + 1, 20 + 1, 20 - 1 and 10 - 1. Finally, Row 3 shows eleven notches, thirteen notches, seventeen notches and nineteen notches. 11, 13, 17 and 19 are the prime numbers between 10 and 20.

6. Africans cultivated crops 12,000 years ago, the first known advances in agriculture. Professor Fred Wendorf discovered that people in Egypt’s Western Desert cultivated crops of barley, capers, chick-peas, dates, legumes, lentils and wheat. Their ancient tools were also recovered. There were grindstones, milling stones, cutting blades, hide scrapers, engraving burins, and mortars and pestles.

7. Africans mummified their dead 9,000 years ago. A mummified infant was found under the Uan Muhuggiag rock shelter in south western Libya. The infant was buried in the foetal position and was mummified using a very sophisticated technique that must have taken hundreds of years to evolve. The technique predates the earliest mummies known in Ancient Egypt by at least 1,000 years. Carbon dating is controversial but the mummy may date from 7438 (±220) BC.

8. Africans carved the world’s first colossal sculpture 7,000 or more years ago. The Great Sphinx of Giza was fashioned with the head of a man combined with the body of a lion. A key and important question raised by this monument was: How old is it? In October 1991 Professor Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, demonstrated that the Sphinx was sculpted between 5000 BC and 7000 BC, dates that he considered conservative.

9. On the 1 March 1979, the New York Times carried an article on its front page also page sixteen that was entitled Nubian Monarchy called Oldest. In this article we were assured that: “Evidence of the oldest recognizable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in artifacts from ancient Nubia” (i.e. the territory of the northern Sudan and the southern portion of modern Egypt.)

10. The ancient Egyptians had the same type of tropically adapted skeletal proportions as modern Black Africans. A 2003 paper appeared in American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Dr Sonia Zakrzewski entitled Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions where she states that: “The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the ‘super-Negroid’ body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many ‘African’ populations.”

11. The ancient Egyptians had Afro combs. One writer tells us that the Egyptians “manufactured a very striking range of combs in ivory: the shape of these is distinctly African and is like the combs used even today by Africans and those of African descent.”

12. The Funerary Complex in the ancient Egyptian city of Saqqara is the oldest building that tourists regularly visit today. An outer wall, now mostly in ruins, surrounded the whole structure. Through the entrance are a series of columns, the first stone-built columns known to historians. The North House also has ornamental columns built into the walls that have papyrus-like capitals. Also inside the complex is the Ceremonial Court, made of limestone blocks that have been quarried and then shaped. In the centre of the complex is the Step Pyramid, the first of 90 Egyptian pyramids.

13. The first Great Pyramid of Giza, the most extraordinary building in history, was a staggering 481 feet tall - the equivalent of a 40-storey building. It was made of 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, some weighing 100 tons.

14. The ancient Egyptian city of Kahun was the world’s first planned city. Rectangular and walled, the city was divided into two parts. One part housed the wealthier inhabitants – the scribes, officials and foremen. The other part housed the ordinary people. The streets of the western section in particular, were straight, laid out on a grid, and crossed each other at right angles. A stone gutter, over half a metre wide, ran down the centre of every street.

15. Egyptian mansions were discovered in Kahun - each boasting 70 rooms, divided into four sections or quarters. There was a master’s quarter, quarters for women and servants, quarters for offices and finally, quarters for granaries, each facing a central courtyard. The master’s quarters had an open court with a stone water tank for bathing. Surrounding this was a colonnade.

16 The Labyrinth in the Egyptian city of Hawara with its massive layout, multiple courtyards, chambers and halls, was the very largest building in antiquity. Boasting three thousand rooms, 1,500 of them were above ground and the other 1,500 were underground.

17. Toilets and sewerage systems existed in ancient Egypt. One of the pharaohs built a city now known as Amarna. An American urban planner noted that: “Great importance was attached to cleanliness in Amarna as in other Egyptian cities. Toilets and sewers were in use to dispose waste. Soap was made for washing the body. Perfumes and essences were popular against body odour. A solution of natron was used to keep insects from houses . . . Amarna may have been the first planned ‘garden city’.”

18. Sudan has more pyramids than any other country on earth - even more than Egypt. There are at least 223 pyramids in the Sudanese cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroë. They are generally 20 to 30 metres high and steep sided.

19. The Sudanese city of Meroë is rich in surviving monuments. Becoming the capital of the Kushite Empire between 590 BC until AD 350, there are 84 pyramids in this city alone, many built with their own miniature temple. In addition, there are ruins of a bath house sharing affinities with those of the Romans. Its central feature is a large pool approached by a flight of steps with waterspouts decorated with lion heads.

20. Bling culture has a long and interesting history. Gold was used to decorate ancient Sudanese temples. One writer reported that: “Recent excavations at Meroe and Mussawwarat es-Sufra revealed temples with walls and statues covered with gold leaf”.

21. In around 300 BC, the Sudanese invented a writing script that had twenty-three letters of which four were vowels and there was also a word divider. Hundreds of ancient texts have survived that were in this script. Some are on display in the British Museum.

22. In central Nigeria, West Africa’s oldest civilisation flourished between 1000 BC and 300 BC. Discovered in 1928, the ancient culture was called the Nok Civilisation, named after the village in which the early artefacts were discovered. Two modern scholars, declare that “[a]fter calibration, the period of Nok art spans from 1000 BC until 300 BC”. The site itself is much older going back as early as 4580 or 4290 BC.

23. West Africans built in stone by 1100 BC. In the Tichitt-Walata region of Mauritania, archaeologists have found “large stone masonry villages” that date back to 1100 BC. The villages consisted of roughly circular compounds connected by “well-defined streets”.

24. By 250 BC, the foundations of West Africa’s oldest cities were established such as Old Djenné in Mali.

25. Kumbi Saleh, the capital of Ancient Ghana, flourished from 300 to 1240 AD. Located in modern day Mauritania, archaeological excavations have revealed houses, almost habitable today, for want of renovation and several storeys high. They had underground rooms, staircases and connecting halls. Some had nine rooms. One part of the city alone is estimated to have housed 30,000 people.
26. West Africa had walled towns and cities in the pre-colonial period. Winwood Reade, an English historian visited West Africa in the nineteenth century and commented that: “There are . . . thousands of large walled cities resembling those of Europe in the Middle Ages, or of ancient Greece.”

27. Lord Lugard, an English official, estimated in 1904 that there were 170 walled towns still in existence in the whole of just the Kano province of northern Nigeria.

28. Cheques are not quite as new an invention as we were led to believe. In the tenth century, an Arab geographer, Ibn Haukal, visited a fringe region of Ancient Ghana. Writing in 951 AD, he told of a cheque for 42,000 golden dinars written to a merchant in the city of Audoghast by his partner in Sidjilmessa.

29. Ibn Haukal, writing in 951 AD, informs us that the King of Ghana was “the richest king on the face of the earth” whose pre-eminence was due to the quantity of gold nuggets that had been amassed by the himself and by his predecessors.

30. The Nigerian city of Ile-Ife was paved in 1000 AD on the orders of a female ruler with decorations that originated in Ancient America. Naturally, no-one wants to explain how this took place approximately 500 years before the time of Christopher Columbus!

31. West Africa had bling culture in 1067 AD. One source mentions that when the Emperor of Ghana gives audience to his people: “he sits in a pavilion around which stand his horses caparisoned in cloth of gold: behind him stand ten pages holding shields and gold-mounted swords: and on his right hand are the sons of the princes of his empire, splendidly clad and with gold plaited into their hair . . . The gate of the chamber is guarded by dogs of an excellent breed . . . they wear collars of gold and silver.”

32. Glass windows existed at that time. The residence of the Ghanaian Emperor in 1116 AD was: “A well-built castle, thoroughly fortified, decorated inside with sculptures and pictures, and having glass windows.”

33. The Grand Mosque in the Malian city of Djenné, described as “the largest adobe [clay] building in the world”, was first raised in 1204 AD. It was built on a square plan where each side is 56 metres in length. It has three large towers on one side, each with projecting wooden buttresses.

34. One of the great achievements of the Yoruba was their urban culture. “By the year A.D. 1300,” says a modern scholar, “the Yoruba people built numerous walled cities surrounded by farms”. The cities were Owu, Oyo, Ijebu, Ijesa, Ketu, Popo, Egba, Sabe, Dassa, Egbado, Igbomina, the sixteen Ekiti principalities, Owo and Ondo.

35. Yoruba metal art of the mediaeval period was of world class. One scholar wrote that Yoruba art “would stand comparison with anything which Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Rome, or Renaissance Europe had to offer.”

36. In the Malian city of Gao stands the Mausoleum of Askia the Great, a weird sixteenth century edifice that resembles a step pyramid.

37. Thousands of mediaeval tumuli have been found across West Africa. Nearly 7,000 were discovered in north-west Senegal alone spread over nearly 1,500 sites. They were probably built between 1000 and 1300 AD.

38. Excavations at the Malian city of Gao carried out by Cambridge University revealed glass windows. One of the finds was entitled: “Fragments of alabaster window surrounds and a piece of pink window glass, Gao 10th – 14th century.”

39. In 1999 the BBC produced a television series entitled Millennium. The programme devoted to the fourteenth century opens with the following disclosure: “In the fourteenth century, the century of the scythe, natural disasters threatened civilisations with extinction. The Black Death kills more people in Europe, Asia and North Africa than any catastrophe has before. Civilisations which avoid the plague thrive. In West Africa the Empire of Mali becomes the richest in the world.”

40. Malian sailors got to America in 1311 AD, 181 years before Columbus. An Egyptian scholar, Ibn Fadl Al-Umari, published on this sometime around 1342. In the tenth chapter of his book, there is an account of two large maritime voyages ordered by the predecessor of Mansa Musa, a king who inherited the Malian throne in 1312. This mariner king is not named by Al-Umari, but modern writers identify him as Mansa Abubakari II.

41. On a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 AD, a Malian ruler, Mansa Musa, brought so much money with him that his visit resulted in the collapse of gold prices in Egypt and Arabia. It took twelve years for the economies of the region to normalise.

42. West African gold mining took place on a vast scale. One modern writer said that: “It is estimated that the total amount of gold mined in West Africa up to 1500 was 3,500 tons, worth more than $****30 billion in today’s market.”

43. The old Malian capital of Niani had a 14th century building called the Hall of Audience. It was an surmounted by a dome, adorned with arabesques of striking colours. The windows of an upper floor were plated with wood and framed in silver; those of a lower floor were plated with wood, framed in gold.

44. Mali in the 14th century was highly urbanised. Sergio Domian, an Italian art and architecture scholar, wrote the following about this period: “Thus was laid the foundation of an urban civilisation. At the height of its power, Mali had at least 400 cities, and the interior of the Niger Delta was very densely populated”.

45. The Malian city of Timbuktu had a 14th century population of 115,000 - 5 times larger than mediaeval London. Mansa Musa, built the Djinguerebere Mosque in the fourteenth century. There was the University Mosque in which 25,000 students studied and the Oratory of Sidi Yayia. There were over 150 Koran schools in which 20,000 children were instructed. London, by contrast, had a total 14th century population of 20,000 people.

46. National Geographic recently described Timbuktu as the Paris of the mediaeval world, on account of its intellectual culture. According to Professor Henry Louis Gates, 25,000 university students studied there.

47. Many old West African families have private library collections that go back hundreds of years. The Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written mediaeval books. There may be another 6,000 books still surviving in the other city of Walata. Some date back to the 8th century AD. There are 11,000 books in private collections in Niger. Finally, in Timbuktu, Mali, there are about 700,000 surviving books.

48. A collection of one thousand six hundred books was considered a small library for a West African scholar of the 16th century. Professor Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu is recorded as saying that he had the smallest library of any of his friends - he had only 1600 volumes.

49. Concerning these old manuscripts, Michael Palin, in his TV series Sahara, said the imam of Timbuktu “has a collection of scientific texts that clearly show the planets circling the sun. They date back hundreds of years . . . Its convincing evidence that the scholars of Timbuktu knew a lot more than their counterparts in Europe. In the fifteenth century in Timbuktu the mathematicians knew about the rotation of the planets, knew about the details of the eclipse, they knew things which we had to wait for 150 almost 200 years to know in Europe when Galileo and Copernicus came up with these same calculations and were given a very hard time for it.”

50. The Songhai Empire of 16th century West Africa had a government position called Minister for Etiquette and Protocol.
51. The mediaeval Nigerian city of Benin was built to “a scale comparable with the Great Wall of China”. There was a vast system of defensive walling totalling 10,000 miles in all. Even before the full extent of the city walling had become apparent the Guinness Book of Records carried an entry in the 1974 edition that described the city as: “The largest earthworks in the world carried out prior to the mechanical era.”

52. Benin art of the Middle Ages was of the highest quality. An official of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde once stated that: “These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him . . . Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”

53. Winwood Reade described his visit to the Ashanti Royal Palace of Kumasi in 1874: “We went to the king’s palace, which consists of many courtyards, each surrounded with alcoves and verandahs, and having two gates or doors, so that each yard was a thoroughfare . . . But the part of the palace fronting the street was a stone house, Moorish in its style . . . with a flat roof and a parapet, and suites of apartments on the first floor. It was built by Fanti masons many years ago. The rooms upstairs remind me of Wardour Street. Each was a perfect Old Curiosity Shop. Books in many languages, Bohemian glass, clocks, silver plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster carpets, pictures and engravings, numberless chests and coffers. A sword bearing the inscription From Queen Victoria to the King of Ashantee. A copy of the Times, 17 October 1843. With these were many specimens of Moorish and Ashanti handicraft.”

54. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Clarke, an English visitor to Nigeria, remarked that: “As good an article of cloth can be woven by the Yoruba weavers as by any people . . . in durability, their cloths far excel the prints and home-spuns of Manchester.”

55. The recently discovered 9th century Nigerian city of Eredo was found to be surrounded by a wall that was 100 miles long and seventy feet high in places. The internal area was a staggering 400 square miles.

56. On the subject of cloth, Kongolese textiles were also distinguished. Various European writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote of the delicate crafts of the peoples living in eastern Kongo and adjacent regions who manufactured damasks, sarcenets, satins, taffeta, cloth of tissue and velvet. Professor DeGraft-Johnson made the curious observation that: “Their brocades, both high and low, were far more valuable than the Italian.”

57. On Kongolese metallurgy of the Middle Ages, one modern scholar wrote that: “There is no doubting . . . the existence of an expert metallurgical art in the ancient Kongo . . . The Bakongo were aware of the toxicity of lead vapours. They devised preventative and curative methods, both pharmacological (massive doses of pawpaw and palm oil) and mechanical (exerting of pressure to free the digestive tract), for combating lead poisoning.”

58. In Nigeria, the royal palace in the city of Kano dates back to the fifteenth century. Begun by Muhammad Rumfa (ruled 1463-99) it has gradually evolved over generations into a very imposing complex. A colonial report of the city from 1902, described it as “a network of buildings covering an area of 33 acres and surrounded by a wall 20 to 30 feet high outside and 15 feet inside . . . in itself no mean citadel”.

59. A sixteenth century traveller visited the central African civilisation of Kanem-Borno and commented that the emperor’s cavalry had golden “stirrups, spurs, bits and buckles.” Even the ruler’s dogs had “chains of the finest gold”.

60. One of the government positions in mediaeval Kanem-Borno was Astronomer Royal.

61. Ngazargamu, the capital city of Kanem-Borno, became one of the largest cities in the seventeenth century world. By 1658 AD, the metropolis, according to an architectural scholar housed “about quarter of a million people”. It had 660 streets. Many were wide and unbending, reflective of town planning.

62. The Nigerian city of Surame flourished in the sixteenth century. Even in ruin it was an impressive sight, built on a horizontal vertical grid. A modern scholar describes it thus: “The walls of Surame are about 10 miles in circumference and include many large bastions or walled suburbs running out at right angles to the main wall. The large compound at Kanta is still visible in the centre, with ruins of many buildings, one of which is said to have been two-storied. The striking feature of the walls and whole ruins is the extensive use of stone and tsokuwa (laterite gravel) or very hard red building mud, evidently brought from a distance. There is a big mound of this near the north gate about 8 feet in height. The walls show regular courses of masonry to a height of 20 feet and more in several places. The best preserved portion is that known as sirati (the bridge) a little north of the eastern gate . . . The main city walls here appear to have provided a very strongly guarded entrance about 30 feet wide.”

63. The Nigerian city of Kano in 1851 produced an estimated 10 million pairs of sandals and 5 million hides each year for export.

64. In 1246 AD Dunama II of Kanem-Borno exchanged embassies with Al-Mustansir, the king of Tunis. He sent the North African court a costly present, which apparently included a giraffe. An old chronicle noted that the rare animal “created a sensation in Tunis”.

65. By the third century BC the city of Carthage on the coast of Tunisia was opulent and impressive. It had a population of 700,000 and may even have approached a million. Lining both sides of three streets were rows of tall houses six storeys high.

66. The Ethiopian city of Axum has a series of 7 giant obelisks that date from perhaps 300 BC to 300 AD. They have details carved into them that represent windows and doorways of several storeys. The largest obelisk, now fallen, is in fact “the largest monolith ever made anywhere in the world”. It is 108 feet long, weighs a staggering 500 tons, and represents a thirteen-storey building.

67. Ethiopia minted its own coins over 1,500 years ago. One scholar wrote that: “Almost no other contemporary state anywhere in the world could issue in gold, a statement of sovereignty achieved only by Rome, Persia, and the Kushan kingdom in northern India at the time.”

68. The Ethiopian script of the 4th century AD influenced the writing script of Armenia. A Russian historian noted that: “Soon after its creation, the Ethiopic vocalised script began to influence the scripts of Armenia and Georgia. D. A. Olderogge suggested that Mesrop Mashtotz used the vocalised Ethiopic script when he invented the Armenian alphabet.”

69. “In the first half of the first millennium CE,” says a modern scholar, Ethiopia “was ranked as one of the world’s greatest empires”. A Persian cleric of the third century AD identified it as the third most important state in the world after Persia and Rome.

70. Ethiopia has 11 underground mediaeval churches built by being carved out of the ground. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, Roha became the new capital of the Ethiopians. Conceived as a New Jerusalem by its founder, Emperor Lalibela (c.1150-1230), it contains 11 churches, all carved out of the rock of the mountains by hammer and chisel. All of the temples were carved to a depth of 11 metres or so below ground level. The largest is the House of the Redeemer, a staggering 33.7 metres long, 23.7 metres wide and 11.5 metres deep.

71. Lalibela is not the only place in Ethiopia to have such wonders. A cotemporary archaeologist reports research that was conducted in the region in the early 1970’s when: “startling numbers of churches built in caves or partially or completely cut from the living rock were revealed not only in Tigre and Lalibela but as far south as Addis Ababa. Soon at least 1,500 were known. At least as many more probably await revelation.”

72. In 1209 AD Emperor Lalibela of Ethiopia sent an embassy to Cairo bringing the sultan unusual gifts including an elephant, a hyena, a zebra, and a giraffe.

73. In Southern Africa, there are at least 600 stone built ruins in the regions of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. These ruins are called Mazimbabwe in Shona, the Bantu language of the builders, and means great revered house and “signifies court”.

74. The Great Zimbabwe was the largest of these ruins. It consists of 12 clusters of buildings, spread over 3 square miles. Its outer walls were made from 100,000 tons of granite bricks. In the fourteenth century, the city housed 18,000 people, comparable in size to that of London of the same period.

75. Bling culture existed in this region. At the time of our last visit, the Horniman Museum in London had exhibits of headrests with the caption: “Headrests have been used in Africa since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. Remains of some headrests, once covered in gold foil, have been found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and burial sites like Mapungubwe dating to the twelfth century after Christ.”

76. Dr Albert Churchward, author of Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, pointed out that writing was found in one of the stone built ruins: “Lt.-Col. E. L. de Cordes . . . who was in South Africa for three years, informed the writer that in one of the ‘Ruins’ there is a ‘stone-chamber,’ with a vast quantity of Papyri, covered with old Egyptian hieroglyphics. A Boer hunter discovered this, and a large quantity was used to light a fire with, and yet still a larger quantity remained there now.”

77. On bling culture, one seventeenth century visitor to southern African empire of Monomotapa, that ruled over this vast region, wrote that: “The people dress in various ways: at court of the Kings their grandees wear cloths of rich silk, damask, satin, gold and silk cloth; these are three widths of satin, each width four covados [2.64m], each sewn to the next, sometimes with gold lace in between, trimmed on two sides, like a carpet, with a gold and silk fringe, sewn in place with a two fingers’ wide ribbon, woven with gold roses on silk.”

78. Southern Africans mined gold on an epic scale. One modern writer tells us that: “The estimated amount of gold ore mined from the entire region by the ancients was staggering, exceeding 43 million tons. The ore yielded nearly 700 tons of pure gold which today would be valued at over $******7.5 billion.”

79. Apparently the Monomotapan royal palace at Mount Fura had chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. An eighteenth century geography book provided the following data: “The inside consists of a great variety of sumptuous apartments, spacious and lofty halls, all adorned with a magnificent cotton tapestry, the manufacture of the country. The floors, cielings [sic], beams and rafters are all either gilt or plated with gold curiously wrought, as are also the chairs of state, tables, benches &c. The candle-sticks and branches are made of ivory inlaid with gold, and hang from the cieling by chains of the same metal, or of silver gilt.”

80. Monomotapa had a social welfare system. Antonio Bocarro, a Portuguese contemporary, informs us that the Emperor: “shows great charity to the blind and maimed, for these are called the king’s poor, and have land and revenues for their subsistence, and when they wish to pass through the kingdoms, wherever they come food and drinks are given to them at the public cost as long as they remain there, and when they leave that place to go to another they are provided with what is necessary for their journey, and a guide, and some one to carry their wallet to the next village. In every place where they come there is the same obligation.”

81. Many southern Africans have indigenous and pre-colonial words for ‘gun’. Scholars have generally been reluctant to investigate or explain this fact.

82. Evidence discovered in 1978 showed that East Africans were making steel for more than 1,500 years: “Assistant Professor of Anthropology Peter Schmidt and Professor of Engineering Donald H. Avery have found as long as 2,000 years ago Africans living on the western shores of Lake Victoria had produced carbon steel in preheated forced draft furnaces, a method that was technologically more sophisticated than any developed in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century.”

83. Ruins of a 300 BC astronomical observatory was found at Namoratunga in Kenya. Africans were mapping the movements of stars such as Triangulum, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Central Orion, etcetera, as well as the moon, in order to create a lunar calendar of 354 days.

84. Autopsies and caesarean operations were routinely and effectively carried out by surgeons in pre-colonial Uganda. The surgeons routinely used antiseptics, anaesthetics and cautery iron. Commenting on a Ugandan caesarean operation that appeared in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1884, one author wrote: “The whole conduct of the operation . . . suggests a skilled long-practiced surgical team at work conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth efficiency.”

85. Sudan in the mediaeval period had churches, cathedrals, monasteries and castles. Their ruins still exist today.

86. The mediaeval Nubian Kingdoms kept archives. From the site of Qasr Ibrim legal texts, documents and correspondence were discovered. An archaeologist informs us that: “On the site are preserved thousands of documents in Meroitic, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, Arabic and Turkish.”

87. Glass windows existed in mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found evidence of window glass at the Sudanese cities of Old Dongola and Hambukol.

88. Bling culture existed in the mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found an individual buried at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in the city of Old Dongola. He was clad in an extremely elaborate garb consisting of costly textiles of various fabrics including gold thread. At the city of Soba East, there were individuals buried in fine clothing, including items with golden thread.

89. Style and fashion existed in mediaeval Sudan. A dignitary at Jebel Adda in the late thirteenth century AD was interned with a long coat of red and yellow patterned damask folded over his body. Underneath, he wore plain cotton trousers of long and baggy cut. A pair of red leather slippers with turned up toes lay at the foot of the coffin. The body was wrapped in enormous pieces of gold brocaded striped silk.

90. Sudan in the ninth century AD had housing complexes with bath rooms and piped water. An archaeologist wrote that Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria, had: “a[n] . . . eighth to . . . ninth century housing complex. The houses discovered here differ in their hitherto unencountered spatial layout as well as their functional programme (water supply installation, bathroom with heating system) and interiors decorated with murals.”

91. In 619 AD, the Nubians sent a gift of a giraffe to the Persians.

92. The East Coast, from Somalia to Mozambique, has ruins of well over 50 towns and cities. They flourished from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries AD.

93. Chinese records of the fifteenth century AD note that Mogadishu had houses of “four or five storeys high”.

94. Gedi, near the coast of Kenya, is one of the East African ghost towns. Its ruins, dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, include the city walls, the palace, private houses, the Great Mosque, seven smaller mosques, and three pillar tombs.

95. The ruined mosque in the Kenyan city of Gedi had a water purifier made of limestone for recycling water.

96. The palace in the Kenyan city of Gedi contains evidence of piped water controlled by taps. In addition it had bathrooms and indoor toilets.

97. A visitor in 1331 AD considered the Tanzanian city of Kilwa to be of world class. He wrote that it was the “principal city on the coast the greater part of whose inhabitants are Zanj of very black complexion.” Later on he says that: “Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well-constructed cities in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built.”

98. Bling culture existed in early Tanzania. A Portuguese chronicler of the sixteenth century wrote that: “[T]hey are finely clad in many rich garments of gold and silk and cotton, and the women as well; also with much gold and silver chains and bracelets, which they wear on their legs and arms, and many jewelled earrings in their ears”.

99. In 1961 a British archaeologist, found the ruins of Husuni Kubwa, the royal palace of the Tanzanian city of Kilwa. It had over a hundred rooms, including a reception hall, galleries, courtyards, terraces and an octagonal swimming pool.

100. In 1414 the Kenyan city of Malindi sent ambassadors to China carrying a gift that created a sensation at the Imperial Court. It was, of course, a giraffe.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus???

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A high school senior's 14-foot banner proclaiming "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" gave the Supreme Court a provocative prop for a lively argument Monday about the extent of schools' control over student speech.

If the justices conclude Joseph Frederick's homemade sign was a pro-drug message, they are likely to side with principal Deborah Morse. She suspended Frederick in 2002 when he unfurled the banner across the street from the school in Juneau, Alaska.

"I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including the character formation and not to use drugs," Chief Justice Roberts said Monday. (Watch why "bong hits" are on the court's plate Video)

But the court could rule for Frederick if it determines that he was, as he has contended, conducting a free-speech experiment using a nonsensical message that contained no pitch for drug use.

"It sounds like just a kid's provocative statement to me," Justice David Souter said.

Students in public schools don't have the same rights as adults, but neither do they leave their constitutional protections at the schoolhouse gate, as the court said in a landmark speech-rights ruling from Vietnam era.

Morse, now a Juneau schools' administrator, was at the court Monday. Frederick, teaching and studying in China, was not.

Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose Kirkland and Ellis law firm is representing Morse for free, argued that the justices should defer to the judgment of the principal. Morse reasonably interpreted the banner as a pro-drug message, despite what Frederick intended, Starr said.

School officials are perfectly within their rights to curtail student speech that advocates drug use, he said. "The message here is, in fact, critical," Starr said.

Starr, joined by the Bush administration, also asked the court to adopt a broad rule that could essentially give public schools the right to clamp down on any speech with which they disagree. That argument did not appear to have widespread support among the justices.

Douglas Mertz of Juneau, Frederick's lawyer, struggled to keep the focus away from drugs. "This is a case about free speech. It is not a case about drugs," Mertz said.

Conservative groups that often are allied with the administration are backing Frederick out of concern that a ruling for Morse would let schools clamp down on religious expression, including speech that might oppose homosexuality or abortion.

The outcome also could stray from the conservative-liberal split that often characterizes controversial cases.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote several opinions in favor of student speech rights while a federal appeals court judge, seemed more concerned by the administration's broad argument in favor of schools than did his fellow conservatives.

"I find that a very, a very disturbing argument," Alito told Justice Department lawyer Edwin Kneedler, "because schools have ... defined their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech that's inconsistent with educational missions."

Justice Stephen Breyer, in the court's liberal wing, said he was troubled a ruling in favor of Frederick, even if he was making a joke, would make it harder to principals to run their schools.

"We'll suddenly see people testing limits all over the place in the high schools," Breyer said.

On the other hand, he said, a decision favorable to the schools "may really limit people's rights on free speech. That's what I'm struggling with."

After the arguments, two dozen sign-carrying demonstrators chanted, "Teachers should teach, not limit free speech."

Scores of students waited outside the court early Monday for a chance to listen to the arguments.

Ninth graders on a class trip from Mosinee, Wisconsin, were in general agreement on the issue. Cari Kemp, 15, said Frederick's protest was "just a joke" but that "the school took it too far."

The justices, as they often do, sought to probe the limits of each side's argument by altering the facts one way or another.

What if, Souter asked, a student held a small sign in a Shakespeare class with the same message Frederick used. "If the kids look around and they say, well, so and so has got his bong sign again," Souter said, as laughter filled the courtroom. "They then return to Macbeth. Does the teacher have to, does the school have to tolerate that sign in the Shakespeare class?"

Justice Antonin Scalia, ridiculing the notion that schools should have to tolerate speech that seems to support illegal activities, asked about a button that says, "Smoke Pot, It's Fun."

Or, he wondered, should the court conclude that only speech in support of violent crime can be censored. "'Extortion Is Profitable,' that's okay?" Scalia asked.

A clear majority seemed to side with Morse on one point, that she shouldn't have to compensate Frederick. A federal appeals court said Morse would have to pay Frederick because she should have known her actions violated the Constitution.

A decision is expected by July.

Tears Dry On Their Own...

This is my favorite Amy Winehouse song right now (I love so many of them). It's got Motown ALL OVER IT. Good stuff. Here it is live & organic.

"Hell" By Talib Kweli

We Made It.

Spoken word artistry at its best.

Miss Jamaica....A Patois Translation.

Miss Jamaica? What She Say?