Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Disaster in Haiti
Last week on January 13, 2010 I remember watching CNN with the tv muted with headlines reading, Disaster in Haiti , or something to that effect. From what I could see there had been some kind of earthquake but I thought it wasn't that bad just an average earthquake probably a few dozen injured some buildings torn down right?
Wrong.
As I continued to surf the web that day at work the stories began to roll in. Thousands and thousands were reported dead. I witnessed a young girl trapped under buliding cry out for her mother and father who were probably dead. I saw a three day old baby with part of his scalp falling off. People were frantic and crying.
That's when it hit me...this was more serious than I thought it was.
That evening as I watched CNN my tears served as glue and my eyes were stuck to the screen. I couldn't believe what had happened. This was a tragedy worse than Katrina. I thought about all of the orphans crying, the parents who clung to dead children, and the hundreds of dead bodies that were thrownin the back of trucks to be transported.
And for a second I thought just like millions of other people, how could God allow something like this to happen to his children. It wasn't until the reverend from the 700 club, Pat Robertson, put his foot in his mouth by saying that the Haitians were cursed, that I realized that we as humans really need to stop trying to find an explanation for why things like this happened. I think when we do that it gives us a reason not to help others. I have actually heard people say thatthe Haitians shouldn't be helped because they practice voodoo and are devil worshipers.
This is inhumane.
First who are we to decide who deserves to live or die? Just because someone doesn't believe in the same things we do means that they deserved for the earth to swallow them whole? God didn't teach anyone to choose who we love and don't. Just as God loves all of his children and we should to. What part of religion does it say that children should go without proper medical attention, food, clothing, and water?
The worst part about it is that the aftershocks from these earthquake's will last for years and years.
So I have decided to do whatever I possibly can to help the Haiti in it's time of need.
Below I have compiled a list of ways that you personally can help to donate also before you read the methods I have compiled a list of statistics so those of you who don't believe that this is serious cn see for yourselves how serious this is!!!!!
People please do whatever you can to help these people.
WWJD
Statistics
A Haitian official at the United Nation's said on Wednesday that 100,000 of his countrymen had died in the earthquake.
Some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster
About 609,000 people are homeless in the capital's metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million could leave Haiti's destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.
Here's What We Can Do To Help
Text YELE to 501501 to make a $5.00 donation to YELE Haiti, Wyclef's organization
Text Haiti to 90999 to make a $10.00 donation to the Red Cross which will be added to your next phone bill
Gather all unused clothing, medical supplies and food and take them to your local Salvation Army or Red Cross donation center.
Shop with ICSY Beautiful 50% of all proceeds until the end of February will go to YELE Haiti
http://www.icsybeautiful.webs.com/
For every new subscription to True Link Magazine's digital editions until the end of February, one dollar will be donated to YELE Haiti.
http://www.truelinkmagazine.webs.com/
If you know any other ways to help please leave a comment or send to mzknowitallblog@yahoo.com
Wrong.
As I continued to surf the web that day at work the stories began to roll in. Thousands and thousands were reported dead. I witnessed a young girl trapped under buliding cry out for her mother and father who were probably dead. I saw a three day old baby with part of his scalp falling off. People were frantic and crying.
That's when it hit me...this was more serious than I thought it was.
That evening as I watched CNN my tears served as glue and my eyes were stuck to the screen. I couldn't believe what had happened. This was a tragedy worse than Katrina. I thought about all of the orphans crying, the parents who clung to dead children, and the hundreds of dead bodies that were thrownin the back of trucks to be transported.
And for a second I thought just like millions of other people, how could God allow something like this to happen to his children. It wasn't until the reverend from the 700 club, Pat Robertson, put his foot in his mouth by saying that the Haitians were cursed, that I realized that we as humans really need to stop trying to find an explanation for why things like this happened. I think when we do that it gives us a reason not to help others. I have actually heard people say thatthe Haitians shouldn't be helped because they practice voodoo and are devil worshipers.
This is inhumane.
The worst part about it is that the aftershocks from these earthquake's will last for years and years.
So I have decided to do whatever I possibly can to help the Haiti in it's time of need.
Below I have compiled a list of ways that you personally can help to donate also before you read the methods I have compiled a list of statistics so those of you who don't believe that this is serious cn see for yourselves how serious this is!!!!!
People please do whatever you can to help these people.
Statistics
A Haitian official at the United Nation's said on Wednesday that 100,000 of his countrymen had died in the earthquake.
Some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster
About 609,000 people are homeless in the capital's metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million could leave Haiti's destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.
Here's What We Can Do To Help
Text YELE to 501501 to make a $5.00 donation to YELE Haiti, Wyclef's organization
Text Haiti to 90999 to make a $10.00 donation to the Red Cross which will be added to your next phone bill
Gather all unused clothing, medical supplies and food and take them to your local Salvation Army or Red Cross donation center.
Shop with ICSY Beautiful 50% of all proceeds until the end of February will go to YELE Haiti
http://www.icsybeautiful.webs.com/
For every new subscription to True Link Magazine's digital editions until the end of February, one dollar will be donated to YELE Haiti.
http://www.truelinkmagazine.webs.com/
If you know any other ways to help please leave a comment or send to mzknowitallblog@yahoo.com
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
BARBIES-Basic Ass Ridiculous Bitches Imitating Everyones Swag
Are you a barbie? Check out the new blogpost...mz-knowitall.blogspot.com
Are you a barbie? Check out the new blogpost...mz-knowitall.blogspot.com
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Barbies and Queens
Recently thanks to the new female rapper on the scene, Nikki Minaj, everrytime I turn around I hear some young girl talking about how much of a Barbie she is. It's driving me crazy!!! What is it about being a Barbie that is so intriguing?
What is a Barbie?
Plastic.
So if you are trying to be a Barbie then you are trying to be a big chuk of fake plastic right?
That means fake hair, fake lashes, fake nails, and most of all fake personalities.
Being a Barbie doesn't represent beauty, it represents trying to fit a mold. So when you say that you are a Barbie you are basically saying that I am not good enough so I have to change myself into something that I have been taught all of my life to think is the image of perfect.
As a young girl I used to pop the heads off of my Barbies, disgusted to find out that they had no brains on the inside.
Now as a grown woman I'm popping the heads off all of the fake plastic Barbies to expose your emptiness.
Not only that how can we take Barbie and relate her to some one who raps about having sex for money or having threesomes? Come on ladies let's get it together and realize that when you idolize a hooker you act like a hooker? What happend to the days of Lauryn Hill, MC Lyte, and Yo Yo when women rapped about uplifting themselves and being queens and divas?
So all the real women let's make this the new motto....
I'm not a barbie I'm a queen.
Plastic.
So if you are trying to be a Barbie then you are trying to be a big chuk of fake plastic right?
That means fake hair, fake lashes, fake nails, and most of all fake personalities.
Being a Barbie doesn't represent beauty, it represents trying to fit a mold. So when you say that you are a Barbie you are basically saying that I am not good enough so I have to change myself into something that I have been taught all of my life to think is the image of perfect.
Now as a grown woman I'm popping the heads off all of the fake plastic Barbies to expose your emptiness.
Not only that how can we take Barbie and relate her to some one who raps about having sex for money or having threesomes? Come on ladies let's get it together and realize that when you idolize a hooker you act like a hooker? What happend to the days of Lauryn Hill, MC Lyte, and Yo Yo when women rapped about uplifting themselves and being queens and divas?
So all the real women let's make this the new motto....
I'm not a barbie I'm a queen.
CHECK OUT MY COLUMN IN TRUE LINK MAGAZINE...FOR A COMPLIMENTARY ISSUE SEND AN EMAIL TO MZKNOWITALLBLOG@YAHOO.COM!!!!!
Get Linked In http://www.truelinkmagazine.webs.com/
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Smell of Oppression
Sunday I walked out of my door and was greeted by the most awful stench. Not the normal city smell of garbage and pollution, but it was more of a stale musty smell as if Detroit was in desperate need of a bath. I shook it off thinking "Man this city stinks literally" and got in my car and drove to work laughing at the little joke I made. I grabbed a newspaper from the girl selling them on the corner on the way for my dad, who is currently working in Afghanistan and has no way to get a local paper, so that I could send it to him. Since I had tons of time on my hands (we get next to no business for hours on Sundays at my job) I decided to take a look at the paper. I don't want it to seem as if I detest reading the paper but it seems as if everytime you open it there's never anything positive. I'm not saying that the good things about Detroit never get printed but it does seem as if the negative makes the headlines, which probably says something about us as a city but I'm not sure what yet. Every issue seems to get more and more like the tabloids with constant coverage of our city's scandals and downfalls. It makes it very hard to see the silver lining when the black and white tells you that there isn't one. But fortunately I, like many other of our cities residents, have mastered the art of making myself numb to the negativity.
But not this week. This week I allowed all of my built up emotions over ride my brick wall that I was trying to build. I may seem a bit over emotional but that's what happens when you love your city and you have to watch it fail. It's like loving someone knowing everyday that you will probably have to leave them. It's a sad feeling sometimes. So I look at the front page and I read in big bold letters, "It's ok,mommy...don't cry" and there's this picture of a woman hugging her little boy. I stared at the picture for awhile, all the time halfway listening to my co-worker talk about someone's wedding. I tried hard to show that I was paying attention by chiming in with a "yeah", "no way", or "I hear ya' " every now and then at the appropriate times as I read the article. There were stories about various families who have become victims of Detroit's economic crisis, all of whom never knew where their next meal was coming from. A father who sacrificed eating a good meal for his children, a mother who had no choice but to depend on the free lunch and breakfast programs to feed her son, parents who had to figure out how to tell their young children that there would be no Christmas. How do you tell a 5 year old that Santa was affected by the recession? I'm sure that's a confusing bed time story.
These stories moved me. I looked at my medium coffee and breakfast sandwich from Dunkin Donuts and felt sick. My hunger suddenly disappeared knowing that some little kid would love the luxury of being able to grab a quick morning breakfast, but the thought of wasting food when there were so many hungry out there made it return quickly. I gobbled down my breakfast appreciating every bite as I never had before. I felt guilty for having enough as if I didn't deserve to eat until I was satisfied anymore. I threw the remains of my crime in the garbage and covered it with a paper towel as if to hide the evidence of my greed.
By the time I finished the article I was grief-stricken. I had never really thought about how scarce food was for other people and I thought about the many ways I had taken food for granted. It was then that I realized that the stench I smelled that morning was the smell of an oppressed city full of people filled with hopelessness. And I decided that I couldn't be numb anymore. I couldn't just pretend that it wasn't happening just because it wasn't directly affecting me. I decided that I had to do something and soon. But what?
My first step is this blog post.
I want people to understand how serious this hunger issue is.
Here are some statistics from soundvision.com:
-According to the Bread for the World Institute 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.
-America's Second Harvest (http://www.secondharvest.org/), the nation's largest network of food banks, reports that 23.3 million people turned to the agencies they serve in 2001, an increase of over 2 million since 1997. Forty percent were from working families.
33 million Americans continue to live in households that did not have an adequate supply of food. Nearly one-third of these households contain adults or children who went hungry at some point in 2000
-According to America’s Second Harvest, over 41 billion pounds of food have been wasted this year.
-According to a 2004 study from the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, on average, American households waste 14 percent of their food purchases.
Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology who led the study, estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.
Nationwide, Jones says, household food waste alone adds up to $43 billion, making it a serious economic problem.
- Official surveys indicate that every year more than 350 billion pounds of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States. Of that total, nearly 100 billion pounds - including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products - are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers.
Isn't that bad?
So here's how to help...
First thing is to absolutely make sure that you cut down on food waste. Think about hungry children every time you are about to.
Here's a list of website sthat you can go to if you want to go a step further and donate time or money.
http://thefoodpantry.org/
http://foodpantries.org/
http://www.cofchrist.org/hunger/pantry/default.asp
http://www.lssco.org/lsspantry.html
Also Detroit's Ultimate Fashion week will be giving a portion of the proceed directly to feed the hungry. To become a sponsor visit here.
If you or your business support charities please let me know by sending an email to mzknowitallblog@yahoo.com and I will post a link to your website on the blog.
Read the entire article by Jeff Seidel by clicking here.
But not this week. This week I allowed all of my built up emotions over ride my brick wall that I was trying to build. I may seem a bit over emotional but that's what happens when you love your city and you have to watch it fail. It's like loving someone knowing everyday that you will probably have to leave them. It's a sad feeling sometimes. So I look at the front page and I read in big bold letters, "It's ok,mommy...don't cry" and there's this picture of a woman hugging her little boy. I stared at the picture for awhile, all the time halfway listening to my co-worker talk about someone's wedding. I tried hard to show that I was paying attention by chiming in with a "yeah", "no way", or "I hear ya' " every now and then at the appropriate times as I read the article. There were stories about various families who have become victims of Detroit's economic crisis, all of whom never knew where their next meal was coming from. A father who sacrificed eating a good meal for his children, a mother who had no choice but to depend on the free lunch and breakfast programs to feed her son, parents who had to figure out how to tell their young children that there would be no Christmas. How do you tell a 5 year old that Santa was affected by the recession? I'm sure that's a confusing bed time story.
These stories moved me. I looked at my medium coffee and breakfast sandwich from Dunkin Donuts and felt sick. My hunger suddenly disappeared knowing that some little kid would love the luxury of being able to grab a quick morning breakfast, but the thought of wasting food when there were so many hungry out there made it return quickly. I gobbled down my breakfast appreciating every bite as I never had before. I felt guilty for having enough as if I didn't deserve to eat until I was satisfied anymore. I threw the remains of my crime in the garbage and covered it with a paper towel as if to hide the evidence of my greed.
By the time I finished the article I was grief-stricken. I had never really thought about how scarce food was for other people and I thought about the many ways I had taken food for granted. It was then that I realized that the stench I smelled that morning was the smell of an oppressed city full of people filled with hopelessness. And I decided that I couldn't be numb anymore. I couldn't just pretend that it wasn't happening just because it wasn't directly affecting me. I decided that I had to do something and soon. But what?
My first step is this blog post.
I want people to understand how serious this hunger issue is.
Here are some statistics from soundvision.com:
-According to the Bread for the World Institute 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.
-America's Second Harvest (http://www.secondharvest.org/), the nation's largest network of food banks, reports that 23.3 million people turned to the agencies they serve in 2001, an increase of over 2 million since 1997. Forty percent were from working families.
33 million Americans continue to live in households that did not have an adequate supply of food. Nearly one-third of these households contain adults or children who went hungry at some point in 2000
-According to America’s Second Harvest, over 41 billion pounds of food have been wasted this year.
-According to a 2004 study from the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, on average, American households waste 14 percent of their food purchases.
Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology who led the study, estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.
Nationwide, Jones says, household food waste alone adds up to $43 billion, making it a serious economic problem.
- Official surveys indicate that every year more than 350 billion pounds of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States. Of that total, nearly 100 billion pounds - including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products - are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers.
Isn't that bad?
So here's how to help...
First thing is to absolutely make sure that you cut down on food waste. Think about hungry children every time you are about to.
Here's a list of website sthat you can go to if you want to go a step further and donate time or money.
http://thefoodpantry.org/
http://foodpantries.org/
http://www.cofchrist.org/hunger/pantry/default.asp
http://www.lssco.org/lsspantry.html
Also Detroit's Ultimate Fashion week will be giving a portion of the proceed directly to feed the hungry. To become a sponsor visit here.
If you or your business support charities please let me know by sending an email to mzknowitallblog@yahoo.com and I will post a link to your website on the blog.
Read the entire article by Jeff Seidel by clicking here.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Celebrity Infidelities
What is it that makes a man think that just because he makes millions that he has the right or the privelege to cheat on his wife? And what is it that makes a woman think that money is a good enough reason to forgive a man for his infidelities?
Is it true what they say? Can money really buy happiness? I'm not sure. I mean I am a woman who loves money but think about this. When your man is famous that makes you semi-famous. So that means everywhere you go you will be known as the dummy who stayed with him. And I'm not saying that if a woman goes back to her man after he has cheated then she is a dummy. What I am saying is that this world is full of nay sayers. Don't forget to check out your's truly in the first issue of True Link Magazine. Visit the website to sign up for your subscription.
Don't forget to register for the ICSY Beautiful contest. Visit some of my previous post for more info.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Skinny Jeans : A Not So New Trend
It's amazing how many times in life as I grow up and had one of those moments when I realized that the things I thought my parents were absolutely crazy for saying when I was younger come true when I get older. I think about moments like these everytime I slide myself into my skinny jeans, throw on some bangles, and decorate myself with neon make-up and glitter. I look at todays music videos and think " so this is what it looked like back in the day".
Even the founder's of hip-hop Run DMC used to wear skinny jeans and Adidas back in the day? So why is it that now wearing skinny jeans for a male raises unneccesary questions about sexuality?
Come on guys baggy jeans can't last forever. I can't believe rappers such as Jay-Z have actually went as far as to criticize the New Boyz for wearing skinny jeans. Come on they're just kids doing something different.
I'm glad that they are confident enough to go against the grain and try something new. Besides I think skinny jeans are cool and a part of true hip hop.
*******************************
It's That Time!
ICSY Beautiful Jewelry and Clothing has joined forces with Mz. Know It All to bring you the first Mz. Know It All giveaway contest!!!!!Enter for your chance to win a free item of your choice from ICSY Beautiful!!!
Here are the rules...
Must be a blog follower...if you're not already then become one today!
Send your name address and telephone number to mzknowitallblog@yahoo.com
If you are the winner you must send a picture of yourself wearing the item that you won which will be displayed on the ICSY Beautiful website!!!
Winner will be randomely chosen!!!
Winner will be contacted by email and their name will also be posted on the site.
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