It only happens in Macondo!

One of the three wisemen of Juana Diaz has been acused of child molestation. Oh my!

James Brown is dead!

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured "Godfather of Soul," whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73.

Brown was hospitalized with pneumonia at Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Sunday and died around 1:45 a.m. Monday, said his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, he said.

Copsidas said Brown's family was being notified of his death and that the cause was still uncertain. "We really don't know at this point what he died of," he said.

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him.

His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie's "Fame," Prince's "Kiss," George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and Sly and the Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

"James presented obviously the best grooves," rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. "To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close."

His hit singles include such classics as "Out of Sight," "(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "Say It Out Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud," a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

"I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black," Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. "The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society."

He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (best R&B recording) and for "Living In America" in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to "try to straighten out" rock music.

From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, "Please, Please, Please" in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business."

With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.

In 1986, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.

Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. "The music out there is only as good as my last record," Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

"Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 percent of their music is me," he told the AP in 2003.

Born in poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1933, he was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Georgia, in an "ill-repute area," as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.

"I wanted to be somebody," Brown said.

By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served 3 1/2 years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia, for breaking into cars.

While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.

In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later "Please, Please, Please" was in the R&B Top Ten.

While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.

In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.

Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tires of his truck.

Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.

Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three-hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.

More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.

Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers. Brown's attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, said singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

The Star Wars Holiday Special!

Yikes i've never imagined a Star Wars christmas special have ever existed, well it is. And it looks like taken from a bad script. Thank goodness i'm a fan of Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Robert Heinlein.

Part 1
Part 2

In some other news...

Finally the holiday recess at my tae kwon do academy has started until january 9th so i'll have enough time to do like go to the gym and do all the stuff everyone do. Also i've heard that one of my uncles from Pennsylvania is arriving and staying at the hotel i work. Over and out!

Photos of ysterday's black belt graduation

Yesterday was my tae kwon doa cademy's christmas party and also was held the graduation of studentes receiving their black belts. From the graduates were also my instructor who received fifth dan black belt. Here are some pictures.





















Next year will be my turn!

My next promotional exam is today!

And i'm ready. This year i've taken four promotional exams from gren, green point blue and blue. Next will be purple belt. And also a very happy birthday to my nephew Alejandro who is now one year old!

I'm so excited!

Die Hard 4 teaser trailer!

link here

Coming july 4th 2007 and it looks awesome!

Now burn in hell Mr. Pinochet!

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile's democratically elected Marxist president in a bloody coup and ruled the Andean nation for 17 years, died Sunday, dashing hopes of victims of his regime's abuses that he would be brought to justice. He was 91.

Pinochet suffered a heart attack a week ago and underwent an angioplasty, and the brief announcement by the Santiago Military hospital said his condition worsened suddenly on Sunday.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, spokesman for the medical team that had been treating him, said his family was with him when he died.

Police ringed the hospital, but a small group of Pinochet supporters remained at the entrance, shouting insults at people in passing cars. The supporters, including some weeping women, repeatedly called out "Long Live Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem.

Chile's government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during his rule, but after leaving the presidency in 1990 Pinochet escaped hundreds of criminal complaints because of his declining physical and mental health.

Pinochet took power on September 11, 1973, demanding an unconditional surrender from President Salvador Allende as warplanes bombed the presidential palace in downtown Santiago. Instead, Allende committed suicide with a submachine gun he had received as a gift from Fidel Castro.

As the mustachioed Pinochet crushed dissent during his 1973-90 rule, he left little doubt about who was in charge. "Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it," he once said.

But when it came to his regime's abuses, Pinochet refused for years to take responsibility, saying any murders of political prisoners were the work of subordinates. Then on his 91st birthday -- just last month -- he took "full political responsibility for everything that happened" during his long rule. The statement read by his wife, however, made no reference to the rights abuses.

Pinochet, born November 25, 1915, as the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, was commander of the army at the time of the 1973 coup, appointed 19 days earlier by the president he toppled.

The CIA tried for months to destabilize the Allende government, including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup.

In the days following Pinochet's seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital.

Many detainees, including Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention center. The Americans were among those executed by the Chilean military, their deaths chronicled in the 1982 film "Missing."

Other leftists were rounded up by a death squad known as the "Caravan of Death." Victims were buried in unmarked mass graves in the northern Atacama desert, in the coastal city of La Serena and in the southern city of Cauquenes.

Pinochet pledged to stay in power "only as long as circumstances demand it," but soon after seizing the presidency, he said he had "goals, not deadlines."

He disbanded Congress, banned political activity and started a harsh anti-leftist repression. At least 3,197 people were killed, more than 1,000 others are unaccounted for, and thousands more were arrested, tortured and forced into exile.

Within years, Chile and other South American countries with right-wing governments launched Operation Condor to eliminate leftist dissidents abroad. One of Operation Condor's victims was former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who was killed along with his American aide, Ronni Moffitt, when a bomb shattered their car in Washington in 1976.

In May 2005, some of the strongest evidence against Pinochet emerged, when Gen. Manuel Contreras, the imprisoned head of the former dictatorship's secret police, gave Chile's Supreme Court a list describing the fate of more than 500 dissidents who disappeared after being arrested by the secret police. Most were killed, their bodies flung into the sea.

Contreras, who is serving a 12-year sentence for the disappearance of a young dissident in 1975, said Pinochet was responsible. Pinochet blamed all the abuses on subordinates.

"Justice has been too generous with Pinochet," said Viviana Diaz, whose father was among the disappeared. She said the fact that Pinochet was never punished "is the impotence that we have, and the reason for the fight we have waged all these years to eliminate impunity in our country."

Pinochet defended his authoritarian rule as a bulwark against communism -- and even claimed part of the credit for the collapse of communism. He repeatedly said he had nothing to ask forgiveness for.

"I see myself as a good angel," he told a Miami Spanish-language television station in 2004.

With his raspy voice, he often spoke in a lower-class vernacular that comedians delighted in mimicking. But his off-the-cuff comments sometimes got him into trouble.

Once, he embarrassed the government by saying that the German army was made up of "marijuana smokers, homosexuals, long-haired unionists." On another occasion, he drew criticism by saying the discovery of coffins that each contained the bodies of two victims of his regime's repression was a show of "a good cemetery space-saving measure."

Shrewd and firmly in command of his army, Pinochet saw himself as the leader of a crusade to build a society free of communism. Amid the upheaval in 1973, the economy was in near ruins, partly due to the CIA's covert destabilization efforts.

Pinochet launched a radical free-market economic program that, coupled with heavy foreign borrowing and an overvalued peso, triggered a financial collapse and unprecedented joblessness in the early 1980s. Eventually, the economy recovered and since 1984 Chile has posted growth averaging 5 percent to 7 percent a year.

Key to the economic recovery was a group of mostly young economists known as the "Chicago Boys" for their studies under University of Chicago professor and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. They lifted most state controls over the economy, privatized many sectors and strongly encouraged foreign investment with tax and other guarantees.

Pinochet tried to remain in control of the nation of 15 million people, but Latin America was gravitating toward civilian rule. On October 5, 1988, he lost a national referendum on a proposal to extend his rule until 1997. He was forced to call a presidential election, which was won by center-left coalition candidate Patricio Aylwin.

Pinochet handed over power to Aylwin in March 1990 but remained army commander for eight more years and then was a senator-for-life, a position guaranteed under the constitution written by his regime.

In 1998, Pinochet traveled to London to undergo back surgery, but was placed under house arrest after a Spanish judge issued a warrant seeking to try him for human rights violations. British authorities decided he was too ill to stand trial and sent him home in March 2000.

Back in Chile, ghosts of the past dogged the retired general. More than 200 criminal complaints were filed against him, one involving the Caravan of Death.

But on July 9, 2001, a court ruled that Pinochet could not face trial because of his poor physical and mental health after court-appointed doctors diagnosed him with a mild case of dementia. A 2004 case against Pinochet was also stopped because he was found unfit to stand trial.

Still, his foes and relatives of his regime's victims kept trying to bring him to trial, successfully having him indicted and held under house arrest several times. But chances of any case reaching trial always appeared dim.

In 2004, a U.S. Senate investigative committee found Pinochet kept multimillion-dollar secret accounts at the Riggs Bank in Washington. In all, investigators said he had up to $17 million in foreign accounts, and Chilean courts charged Pinochet with owing $9.8 million in back taxes. He was also indicted on tax evasion charges, along with his wife and three children.

While many of his military and civilian followers staunchly supported him throughout his legal battle against human rights accusations, he was isolated and almost abandoned as the money dealings became public. Many expressed frustration and disappointment.

"We deserve an explanation for this," said retired Gen. Rafael Villarroel, once one of Pinochet's closest aides.

Since the mid-1990s, Pinochet led a mostly secluded life between his heavily guarded Santiago mansion and his countryside residence. He rarely appeared in public other than for checkups at the Santiago army hospital.

Associates said he lost interest in politics and rarely paid attention to news. During family gatherings he would remain mostly silent, looking frail and tired.

His health declined steadily. In 1992 he received a pacemaker. He suffered from diabetes and arthritis and had at least three mild strokes beginning in 1998.

He is survived by his wife, Lucia, who headed a volunteer women's organization dedicated to helping the poor, two sons and three daughters.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Otakumania still hits at large in Macondo!

Today i went to the YMCA in Santurce where it was helt its infamous collectors fair selling from Star Wars collectibes, anime, old video games cartridges, sports trading cards, comic books and of course...


Cosplay!

In some other news...

Last night i've found out at the academy that my next promotional exam will be on december 16th, Alejandro's brithday and also the academy christmas party that night. It's gonna be a long day. And also i have a new toy...



No more listening to alfa cock lame music they play!

And finally happy birtyday to my dad!