Sir mix-a-lot

“Baby ain’t got no back:” Sir Mix a-lot Shuns Moldova

Hip Hop star Sir Mix a-lot, most famous for his 1991 smash hit “Baby got Back,” declined an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to perform in Moldova over what his manager called “weighty cultural differences.”
While his representative didn't elaborate further, one can speculate that Sir Mix A-lot's well known bias for large bottomed woman, as well as his harsh critiques of Eastern European diets, factored into the declination. “When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a flat butt in your face you don't get sprung,” Sir Mix lamented in an interview for this magazine last year during which he also characterized Moldovan culture as “rearcist.”
Sir Mix's condemnations of Moldovan eating habits have been no less severe. When asked about the vegetable rich diet preferred by Moldovans at a charity event last fall the rapper replied that, “I wouldn't feed my ladies borsh for the same reason I wouldn't pour it into the gas tank of my Hummer.”
Sir Mix's manager, well not exactly specifying what it would take to entice Sir Mix-a-lot to come to Moldova, did say that a nationwide ban on exercise, as well as the construction of more Mexican fast food restaurants, could help ease tensions between Moldova and the famous rapper.

I didn't light it but I tried to fight it

My Odyssey of the Mind team, pictured below during our skit, was a heavy favorite to win the competition in Chisinau and then enter the European finals in Berlin this spring. I hand selected the smartest kids I could find for the competition during an assiduous 4 week tryout but as it turns out it was all in vain. The chosen few spent a lot of time on the play, as you can see from their costumes, but a fire during our performance sparked, amongst other things, a debate between the judges over rather or not it violated competition rules. Before our presentation one judge told us that the contained fire, an important part of our plot, fell within the guidelines. Other judges, however, didn’t agree. As it turns out we came in second place, or second last, depending on which judge you ask. As I told me kids after the scores were in; they’re damn lucky I was just in Berlin.

Odyseey of the Mind

February

My host Mom, a good cook and eager to please, has been pestering me for recipe suggestions lately. One morning I told her about corn flake chicken before rushing off to work. She didn’t seem to understand and, consequently, I didn’t expect her to try it.

Upon my return from work that day host Mom brought a frying pan into my room with the dreaded “see what I did” look on her face. Peeking sheepishly inside the simmering pan, for something didn’t quite smell right, I saw fried chicken patties next to a overflowing pile of oily corn flakes. “Usually we fry the corn flakes on the chicken but lets give it a try.”

After diner I went outside to find the cat because it was cold and I still felt bad about the corn flakes, and was welcomed by curds of snow pelting the muddy ground. I’m don’t think I’ve ever had to wait until February to see my first snow.

That night I started reading, “The Emperor’s Children.” I had heard something about this book being a post-September 11th “end of irony” type of novel. I’ve also made an effort to read notable contemporary writers. It turns out that the book reminds me of this reoccurring nightmare I have.

The thing is that being constantly surrounded by other Peace Corps volunteers has me kind of freaked out about my generation. I think that having our coming of age party during the information revolution must have really screwed us up. It’s as if being turned loose at the same time the world really was shrinking knocked everything out of whack for us: expectations disproportionate to opportunities, trophies disproportionate to accomplishments. We’re like a band of maverick explorers oblivious to the million other ships flanking our search.

The two main characters in “The Emperor’s Children” are confined with the same egotistical brand of wanderlust that’s identifiable in almost everyone I know. At first the characters seem like a modern incarnation of the dangerous nihilist, you know the dudes Turgenov and Dostoyevski wrote about, but in “Emperor’s” they’re rendered harmless by the fact that everyone else in the book is just as faithless as they are. September 11th happens, suddenly, but seems to only slightly magnify their atrophying.

As my flight flew over the Atlantic and approached JFK airport outside of New York last month on my way back here I was shocked to hear the lady in front of me mistakenly tell her daughter that the foam from the waves was debris left over from September 11th. Does that girl realize how dumb her mother is?

It seems that September 11th could have been the moment my wandering cohort came to grips with reality. After growing up during a winning streak, maybe the longest in our history (cold war, world wide web, gulf war, record economic expansion, dot-com), that was the day when we should have felt that invisible tide of human muck pulling us down.

My reoccurring nightmare starts with me waiting for a job interview. While staring blankly at some toothless Rockwell girl on wall I overhear snippits: “Well, I helped facilitate victory in cold war by participating in air-raid drills” and “As you can see from my travels I have a lot of experience teaching people how to smile.” My competitors in the waiting room are busy shining their faces with some kind of polish. “So what if that guy helped win the cold war?” I snide to no one in particular, “I fell in love once.” Now that I've gotten their attention I keep going...“she looked good in green. She loved Martinis if you added enough Sprite. I mean it’s all I could afford that she would drink. So what are you in for?”

Finally they call me in. The perturbed interviewer is already gazing at my blank resume, “are you sure you’ve never done anything?” he starts to probe as I sit down. An awkward clock ticks five or ten times. “Nothing?” he tries again.

“Nope. Not a god damn thing.”