that pesky collarbone - pic

I was cleaning my desk and found the CD they gave me at the hospital, back in October, when I broke my collarbone.


The break is clear enough, but what's interesting to me is that it looks like it broke on the edge of the healed portion from the previous break. You can sort of see how, from the first break, it didn't heal straight, but with a big lumpy ball of bone...and in this picture that big lumpy ball of bone is just hanging out, there, in the great void of flesh that is my shoulder.

Funky.

...

I watched Obama's inauguration address yesterday. I liked it...yet couldn't help but notice that a lot of the tough-talk rhetoric seemed straight out of Bush's playbook. Last night I caught the first bit of The Daily Show and apparently they picked up on the same thing.

Still, there's no doubt that it felt different coming from the Prophet of Hope than it has coming from the Master of Disaster. Proof, I suppose, that who you hear a message from and how you hear it are just as much a part of the text of the message as the words themselves. Context is everything.

My favorite part of the hoopla, hands down, was this bit near the tail end of Rev. Lowery's benediction:

....help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.

I am also fond of the triple "amen" conclusion...how the enthusiasm of the crowd built with each sucessive amen.

Black preacher, as an oratorical style, has a corner on delivery effectiveness (a conclusion I first reached after hearing Cornel West speak at Vandy).

Good stuff.

You can watch the whole prayer here.