In the Ghetto

It used to be that you were raised on Elvis, but now it's a lot more complicated. While as a song, Presley's version of "In the Ghetto" is pretty, I think it might be too romantic. It helps people focus more on his singing and less on what he's singing about.

Whereas Sammy Davis Jr. keeps a right amount of harmony and discordance that seems apt for the "ghetto" itself. His version forces the listener to really focus on the lyrics and the lyrics, for being fifty years old, are horribly modern and contemporary. They could have been written yesterday and that's an incredibly sad commentary on our society.

Presley' version was recorded ten months before Davis Jr.'s.

Please disregard the visual. It has very little to do with the audio.

Small Factual Errors, Big Picture

Earlier this month, Jon Stewart made a mistake. He listed a victim of police brutality where the medical examiner had exonerated the police involved.

It was a small mistake but large when your show reaches millions and Stewart apologized for his mistake allowing people to focus on that instead of the "big picture" of some police over-stepping their authority.

http://www.myfoxla.com/story/27565974/jon-stewart-apologizes-to-san-bernardino-da

I thought of this when the Rolling Stone article on UVA that was ripped apart from the media. They found all the mistakes in the narrative while missing the whole point of the narrative that is correct.

She was sexually assaulted and so are millions of other women and men every year.

The fact that the victim was abused and derided for details that she may have made up to help herself heal when she couldn't remember every detail accurately was abominable and only serves to make other victims keep silent. This is a quite common tactic to find one or several insignificant details to void an entire point of view. Life is not a true or false test where one false part makes the whole point invalid.

This article actually compares the two mistakes and how they were both handled:

http://www.sorrywatch.com/2014/12/10/compare-n-contrast-rolling-stone-jon-stewart-apologies/

Christmas