I just got Pitbull’s new album from Napster, and I love it!  Perhaps it is just because I live in Miami and speak Spanish, but I can’t help but love the way he raps in Spanish and English over beats that could be described as electronic, dance, crunk, African, or reggaeton.  I think his lyrics are the perfect combination of violent, dirty, sexy, and funny.  Besides Jay-Z, Pitbull is probably my favorite rapper, even if he does stick to what seem like Cuban clichés and repetitive lyrics.  I’ve heard him described as a “wannabe crunk star”, but I don’t care.  His raps are laced with the unique cultural flavor of Miami to the point that you can almost taste the arroz con pollo or chuletas de cerdo y maduros.  Ok, I’m just kidding.  Pitbull is probably my guiltiest of guilty pleasures.  I highly recommend this album and all its cheezy goodness.

It was pretty hard to ignore the music video for Crash Into Me if you ever watched MTV during the 1990s.  The grainy still frames of geishas and muses who looked like they had been splashed with watercolors were captivating, yet I was not a Dave Matthews Band fan at the time.  Then I met my best friend, who reintroduced me to Crash Into Me.  As I sat on his bed in his college dorm, it was perhaps the first time I really listened to the song, or any music by DMB.  That night I fell in love. 

For the next two years I was obsessed with Dave Matthews Band.  I had a Diamond Rio MP3 player that held almost no music, and I’d fill it with DMB until it overflowed with falsetto love songs punctuated by acoustic guitar.  I would sit outside the gym and write in my journals for hours, blasting DMB so as to drown out the sound of the rest of the world.  Then my best friend and I broke up, and from that point forward I could no longer force myself to listen to that music.  All I could think of every time I heard any song by DMB was all of the hours I had spent with him. 

It seemed like for the next few years I couldn’t escape DMB playing everywhere.  The last staw was when I was working out in the gym and Crash Into Me was blasting so loud that I couldn’t turn my newly purchased iPod up loud enough to mask the music that suddenly made me want to slit my wrists.  I left the gym angry and vowed never again to stay anywhere that would play such horrible music.  My first week of work at my first real job I went to happy hour on Friday and met the person who would be the greatest lawyer I’d ever meet.  Unfortunately, he was having a drunken discussion about the merits of the Dave Matthews Band, so it would be about two years until we’d become friends.  I didn’t think I’d ever change my mind about the music of Dave Matthews Band.

Yesterday Manchester and I were talking about DMB for some reason, and I realized, I really miss the music.  As much as that music used to make me feel sad or angry about breaking up with my former best friend, I realized I can listen to it now without even thinking about him.  Plus, with my new Napster account, I can get lots of DMB for a flat monthly fee.  The only problem, is that my green 4th generation 4 GB iPod that was once filled to the brim was stolen in a recent burglary, so for now it’s only my computer that’s filled with musical storytelling about friends who become lovers for a night, unrequited love, and snapshots of life.  But I must admit, sometimes I miss the way things used to be when I lived that simple life where I wrote in my journal outside of the gym.

In Broward we’ve recently had a few cases about masturbating in jail, and while I thought those cases were embarrassing enough for defendants, they don’t seem nearly as embarrassing as this case.  The South Dakota Supreme Court overturned a conviction for indecent exposure where a 19 year old attempted to have sex with a mannequin behind closed doors.  The Court ruled that because the boy turned off the lights, shut the door, and moved behind a desk, his actions did not constitute indecent exposure.  Poor guy said at the time that he hadn’t seen his girlfriend in a year.  And now the story’s on CNN.  It almost sounds like something from the American Pie movies, only more embarrassing.

I want to start making my own lighting fixtures/chandeliers.  Here are some cool designs by other people that I’ve run into throughout the Internet:

Zettle’z by Ingo Maurer via.  Made of wire, bear clips, and rice paper.  Approximate price tag: $1,000.

    
Tide by Stuart Haygarth via.  Made of man-made items that washed up on the beach.  Approximate price tag: $10,000+.

Free as a Bird by Eva Menz via.  Made of Origami cranes.  Approximate price tag: $1,000.

Flowerball by Heath Nash via.  Made of recycled plastics.  Approximate price tag: ???

 
DIY Sparkleball via.  Made of plastic cups and Christmas lights.  Approximate price tag: less than $10.

Granted, some of these are cheaper looking and/or tackier than others, but I think one of the neat parts about making any lighting fixture similar to these would be the process of getting all the parts, either by collecting, making, or buying.  Plus, I think deciding how to engineer such a fixture would be interesting.  I think I’d never get tired of having such an interesting lighting fixture to look at.

So far I’ve bought some plastic hoops which have been spray painted white.  My plan is to drill into these and attach them together to make a sphere.  Eventually I want to try an old trick that a friend taught me.  You see, when I was in college, I was a bit of a nerd and didn’t have much of a social life.  A friend taught me how to make paper flowers, and perhaps due to my lack of social life, I made a lot of them.  ^_^  See below:

So, what I want to do is make some flowers like the ones above, although probably out of recycled plastic, and attach them to the sphere I will make.  I think it would be great to have green viney tendrils curling around and hanging from the sphere, too.  I just need to pop in a low-heat lightbulb, and hopefully I’ll have a one-of-a-kind very cool lighting fixture.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.