Legend Rakim, the infamous Roots band and a small intimate setting at the legendary Blue Note jazz lounge will forever be remembered how the Hip-Hop classic Paid In Full album was honored last night in New York City. The original god MC was a special guest of the Philadelphia band who’s been putting on a series of shows at the lower Manhattan venue.
With lines snaked around the corner from the hotspot waiting to be a part of history, Ra didn’t dissapoint his fans peforming the album in it’s entirety.
Rakim is an MC who hails from the era of hip-hop when samples were the source of most of rap music's booming sounds. Wednesday night, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the iconic and influential MC's debut album, Paid in Full, Rakim performed his seminal classic in its entirety with The Roots providing all the backing instrumentation.
Has it been TWENTY-FIVE years since this album dropped? It's been a long time...
Today April 29th, marks the 19th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the cyclone of that struck the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh with winds of around 155 mph. Killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as 10 million homeless.
April 20th, marked the first anniversary of the BP Oil spill that killed 11, dumped 210,000,000 US gallon of oil into 68,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way destroying wildlife and the livelihood of thousands of fishermen. You can read more here
April 20th is the 12th anniversary of The Columbine High School that left 12 dead and 21 injured after two disgruntled students lashed out with semi-automatic weaponry on their High School in 1999.
April 20th 1889 Adolf Hitler was born.
April 19th, 1995 the Oklahoma City bombing claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius.
April 18th, 1906 a 8.25 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco in the early hours.
April 16th, marks the 4th anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, a student killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide.
And this is all I care to remember.
However saying that today's wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton helped to show that some nice things do happen in April too.
More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.
The message is, "Expect the unexpected."
"It's uncanny," says Ed Stone of Caltech, Voyager Project Scientist since 1972. "Voyager 1 and 2 have a knack for making discoveries."
Yesterday (4/28), NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished, and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself.
The adventure began in the late 1970s when the probes took advantage of a rare alignment of outer planets for an unprecedented Grand Tour. Voyager 1 visited Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. (Voyager 2 is still the only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune.)
When pressed to name the top discoveries from those encounters, Stone pauses, not for lack of material, but rather an embarrassment of riches. "It's so hard to choose," he says.
Stone's partial list includes the discovery of volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io; evidence for an ocean beneath the icy surface of Europa; hints of methane rain on Saturn's moon Titan; the crazily-tipped magnetic poles of Uranus and Neptune; icy geysers on Neptune's moon Triton; planetary winds that blow faster and faster with increasing distance from the sun.
