Solange Knowles Finally Gets A Hit...Is That Funny?

I wrote this post title and flinched a little, because it make me guilty of the same thing I'm about to talk about. As of yesterday I've seen headline after headline about the alleged physical altercation in the elevator at the Met, wherein Solange Knowles looks like she's kicking the shit out of Jay-Z while Beyonce stands idly by. Most of the stories address the story with humor. There are already a ton of memes out there. Perhaps you've seen this

Beyonce was in the elevator like... pic.twitter.com/1eLVNhhury
— Chubby Theo Huxtable (@SouthShotYa) May 12, 2014

or this

They are legion, and most at his expense. Here's the thing: the internet is full of trolls and folks who will find humor in some pretty unsavory things. People are finding it hilarious that this woman (a little woman it seems) wailed on this big hip-hop star. The big question on everyone's mind is: What did he do/say? Even major news outlets are asking this.

Come one now. Let's play the ol' "Situation Reversed" game. Let's say those elevator doors closed and Jay went HAM on Solange. Yeah, you'd still have your idiots out there laughing and talking about "What did she do to him?", as if there's something she (or he) could have done to warrant that kind of behavior, but you'd have a very loud majority screaming for his head. "Put him in jail!" "You don't put your hands on a woman!" Anyone asking what she did to provoke him would have been the victim of an online tongue-lashing. Your friends on Facebook would never share a meme that joked about the incident.

But it's a dude. It's Jay-Z. So, you know, it's okay. Instead we can talk about her behavior in tones that border on impressed ("Man, did you see how she went hard on him?") and talk about his misfortune in a manner that's almost gleeful. Instead of shaking our head in wonder and being proud of his ability to stand there and not physically retaliate (because many of us wonder if we could have done that), we're mocking him and calling into question his manhood. Really? What a double standard we have. I mean, I know that we know about the double standard, that this isn't the first or last thing to ever happen that will be subject to it, but it's just so blatant. I was reading this "article" on The Daily Beast about the incident. It I quote:

(There is nothing more insufferable, in this writer’s opinion, than the vaunting of Jay Z as some sort of celebrity god. How quickly we forget that Jay Z stabbed someone! In 1999 he pleaded guilty to stabbing a record producer outside a Manhattan nightclub. He pleaded guilty to literally driving a knife into a human. Ugh, and then there was that pompous “I’m retired…just kidding! I’m not retired.” nonsense. Slap away, Solange!)

Are you kidding me? Do we really think this author would have been bold enough to make this kind of statement not only condoning but calling for violence if this had been a man attacking a woman? If it had been, say, some dude smacking Miley Cyrus (who is arguably just as polarizing)? I get that Jay-Z isn't a saint, but dude!

And for the record, when I see the photo of the the three of them leaving afterwards, I don't get "Stepford Wives" from Beyonce's expression as many have said. I get a woman seething inside and tired of her sister's antics but trying to hold it together and not act a fool in front of a crowd that would love nothing better than to start slinging dirt. I'm not a Beyonce fan in particular, not a Jay-Z fan in particular, but Solange has problems. Clearly.

Good luck to Bey and her family as they try and work through whatever this nonsense is. 

Why I Ditched the Nexus 5

I wanted the Nexus 5. I wanted it so badly. I had finally paid off my Samsung S3 and decided to go for it. Over the years I've learned a little something about being a consumer though so I did my due diligence before dropping $350 plus shipping and some accessories on Google Play. There were a few things that gave me pause about the device.

• 16GB internal storage with no microSD slot. (I know I could buy the 32GB version, but still)
• Non-replaceable battery
• Reportedly inferior camera/video, especially the front-facing camera (although I typically don't even use the front-facing camera, so...)
• Reports of low volume on playback

Despite these concerns I was really drawn by the prospect of having a vanilla Android install to do with as I please, so I went for it. I ordered it and waited for its arrival eagerly. Of course, a day after ordering it I checked on its status and realized I had mistakenly ordered the white version instead of the black one. Whoops. No worries; a case would cover that up anyway. 

I got the device and it was as glorious as I'd anticipated. It felt light and thin in my hands, despite being taller than my S3. Startup was a cinch. My apps downloaded from the Play store, I used a 3rd party app to pull over some other apps and files from old phone, and enjoyed exploring the new version of Android. I really dug the ability to say "Okay Google" and have it ready to do my bidding. "Okay, Google, make me dinner!" That didn't work obviously, but it was still a lot of fun to play with. I never use Siri on my iPad but I could see myself using this feature a lot. 

I was about 3 days in to my exploration when the bottom dropped out. Lying in bed, I decided to set up Spotify and give it a listen. I played a song that's been on repeat for me for a few days now, "Sweet Nothing" by Calvin Harris feat. Florence Welch.  It was, without question, awful. The high end was incredibly present, the sound overall tinny and weak. I played with the equalizer in Spotify and set it to exactly the same as my S3 and was blown away by the difference in sound quality. That alone was a deal breaker for me. I'm sure I could have looked around online for some software to tweak the sound, but that was more trouble than I wanted to go through for something that I think should have been better out of the box. I even had Wifey listen to it—she's not known for having a particularly discriminating ear—and even she was shocked by how bad it was. I made the decision then and there to box it up and go get an S5. 

Overall I'm happy enough with the S5, but setting it up made me miss the simplicity of the Nexus 5. The most stand-out differences:

• The S5 is huge in comparison. Hell, it's huge compared to the S3. I actually struggle a little to get my thumb across the width of it.
• The EULAs. So many legal agreements about the software. I felt like I was selling my soul off with the agreements to not alter my phone, and to let Samsung or T-Mobile collect data for "performance purposes". Sure. 
• So much included software that I neither want nor care about, and no way to uninstall it. At best I can disable the stuff. That's better than before I suppose, but I can't remove/disable all of it, so there're still background processes running that I don't need or want. That's as frustrating as it ever was. 

If Google could throw a better audio processor in there, I'd have been happy as shit. As it is, I use my phone for listening to music a lot, so there was no compromising on this front.