Adventures of Nefertiti

Ok, so everyone is familiar with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a mess down there, and unfortunately, as bad as this oil spill is, there are other spills happening right now around the world. Take Nigeria for example, according to a recent New York Times article, that country has dealt with an oil spill as bad as the Exxon Valdez spill every year for the past 50 years, and currently the children of this African nation swim in oil polluted waters, and unlike Gulf Coast residents, Nigerian people don’t receive much support or relief from their national government. It’s sad to see where greed can lead, and I’m not just talking about Big Oil and corrupt governments. It’s unbelievable to me that Gulf Coast residents are eager to begin new offshore deepwater drilling when their outcry regarding what BP has done to our ecosystem and our wildlife and wetlands has been so loud. It’s also amazing to me that Governor Bobby Jindal can decry that President Obama has a disconnect with the...

I am so glad my parents decided to do their homework before they named me after a huge powerful figure such as Queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti was known for her beauty and her influence over her kingdom in Egypt and her pharaoh Akhenaton. Although there’s speculation of her birth place, evidence from an archeological dig back in December 1912, when her bust was unearthed, shows that Nefertiti was definitely a deep brown beauty. But not all of her successors have that trait in common. More than a thousand years later, another powerful woman ruled Egypt. Her name was Cleopatra. Cleopatra was of Greek origin and ruled during a period of Greek occupation of Egypt. She was very fair skinned and there is no evidence that there is a direct link to African Ancestry. You can find more details from the blog, BlackInCairo that I follow here... http://blackincairo.blogspot.com/2010/06/cleopatra-aint-black-noise-in-cairo-and.html . So all the folks in the Black community crying because Angelina Jolie is...

She’s beautiful and plays a Desperate Housewife on TV, and not too long ago this Mexican-American actress took a DNA test and discovered on the PBS series Faces of America, that she has African ancestry. Her name is Eva Longoria Parker, and while some viewers may have been surprised at what was revealed, I wasn’t one of them. Eight years ago a friend and I vacationed in Acapulco, Mexico. There, we had the time of our lives. We did all the touristy stuff like sightseeing and taking loads of pictures, but what captivated me the most, was the connection I discovered we had with the Mexican people. My friend Sanquetta and I stayed at the Mayan Palace Resort. The resort itself was a luxury that I had never before encountered. The lobby complete with marble floors and Mayan themes with a temple entrance was simply breathtaking. Combined with nightly entertainment, open air buffet restaurants and the longest lazy river pool in Mexico, this beach front property more than exceeded our wildest e...

She lay on the chaise lounge face down on the deck of the pool, a few feet from the edge of the water. It was mid-day and the sun bore down on her intensely, baking her skin into a light golden bronze. Casually, she slid her spaghetti strap down her left shoulder to the side of her bikini bra. She didn ’t want a tan line there. She wanted her upper body nice and even. Not too far away, a dark-skinned woman looked out the window of the clubhouse overlooking the resort’s lazy river pool and noticed the middle-aged woman baking in the sun. The dark-skinned lady thought about how she would love to catch a few sun rays herself, since it was good for her body in it’s conversion of Vitamin D. But, she didn ’t understand the point of sun bathing to the point of obsession. She recalled back one time while in Acapulco, while relaxing out by the pool with a good book in hand, noticing an elderly gentleman laying out next to her, covered in what looked like lesions of melanoma. Of course, her dark...

For most of my adult life, I’ve completely been against subscribing to premium movie channels. In the past, I’ve felt that if I really wanted to see a good movie and if I failed to see it in the movie theatre, well then I should just visit Blockbuster and rent it. This mindset changed for me a few years ago. Upon my relocation to South Carolina, I decided to invest my money in a little at home entertainment. Now with my basic cable and internet package, I also have one group of premium movie channels, and that is with HBO. HBO has been good to me, although my monthly bill is a bit too high, I’m still pretty content with their selection of movie choices and original shows. True Blood and Entourage are can’t miss summer thrills. And very recently, I’ve been really impressed with what HBO has had to offer. Within the past few days, I’ve watched three fantastic shows that have been educational, enlightening, and entertaining. Those three are... Something the Lord Made Sugar Treme Something...

Sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in this small town that I reside in. Although most of the time, I think it’s just me. Over the past few years I’ve become a bit paranoid and feel sometimes that pairs of eyes are trying to get a hold of me. Now it doesn’t help here that South Carolina is a conservative red state and that from time to time I’ve seen a confederate flag hanging over the balcony of the apartment across the parking lot from me. Nor does it help that at one time my office was so charged politically that I called in sick the day after President Obama was elected. Still despite all of this, I have felt relatively safe in my surroundings, albeit a bit uncomfortable. But tonight I experienced something so unsettling that I’m just not sure how I should label it. Lately it seems I’ve had a taste for barbeque. A few weeks ago I was intrigued by a quick conversation on identity with the cashier in the drive-thru at Jim N-Nick’s BBQ and today, I decided to visit a new barbeque resta...

There’s not much to do here in Bluffton , South Carolina, but there sure can be loads of picture taking moments. I moved here a few years ago when my job relocated my office to the resort town of Hilton Head Island. Hilton Head is a sea island off the tip of south eastern South Carolina. And Bluffton is a tiny historic town on the mainland across the bridge from Hilton Head. It takes me maybe twenty minutes to drive from Bluffton to Hilton Head for my office hours. Since I moved to this area, which is also known as the low country, I just haven’t ventured out much. I’ ve hit all the sightseeing spots back on the island, but haven’t had a desire to check out the historic district of my new home community in Bluffton . So today, on this fine Easter Sunday, I decided to drive around the corner with my Canon SX 120 and park the car and take a walk. Only five minutes away from my apartment, what I found here, is a photographer’s dream come true. Of course I took lots of pictures and I...