Those who know me know that i love my food and wine. Being able to locate a cheap bottle (cheap being defined as under $15) without traveling too far is my forte. Contrary to popular belief, the key is making sure the wine is very drinkable on its own, not the cost at the counter.

I’ve been a frugal chick for much of my adult hood, and finding new bottles at a low price point has been easy. Trust me, I’ve spent well over $40 on a bottle before and still been disappointed, so I’ve become accustomed to trying new wines that only disappoint my wallet on a way smaller level. The following are some great bottles that retail at your local grocery store for less than $15.

Cupcake Chardonnay, California

This wine has a rich buttery flavor (one of my favorite attributes in a chardonnay) and goes very well with a garlicky, creamy, or olive oil, based pasta. Its great just to settle down on the couch for a movie or at the table playing a game of cards. I’ve served it several times and never had a complaint.

Yellow Tail Cabernet Savignon, Australia

Those who know Yellow Tail know that the bottle retails for anywhere between $5 and $8 at any grocery store and is color coded for easy selection. This one is the red label. A deep, bold taste and is my go to bottle for any dish where red wine is mentioned in the recipe. I almost always cook any meat dish with it. From basic spaghetti to a crock pot roast, it gives the meat a kick that everyone loves.

Oak Grove Viognier (vee-OH-neeay), California

A hint of crispness just right for spicy dishes. Another drinkable bottle on its own as well. I love to just sit on the porch on a warm night, sipping this and looking at the sky.

Alamos Malbec, Argentina

One of those wines that are very bold. Some may not appreciate it on its own as much but grill up some lamb chops and you will be in heaven. The heaviness of the meat cuts right through the tannins of the wine and leaves you with a great sense of comfort.

Although some seem to think that the key is spending a lot money on your wine, the truth is, if you can find a drinkable bottle for less, go for it. Unless your friends are total wine snobs, you will not regret it. Even if they don’t appreciate what you appreciate, you still come out on top as you can secure a good bottle for yourself without spending more than you are willing. Those are the ones well worth keeping as a staple in your house

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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Hate is an International habit but I swear that we of the internet have it mastered over everyone else. Whenever a celebrity crosses over into a different realm of entertainment (yes this includes sports), the first thing people look forward to is their failing – hard. It’s this attitude of “how dare they try and be good at more than one thing” which confuses me.

The news of Serena Williams making a rap song hit Facebook and Twitter like a storm and blogs everywhere quickly jumped on it to offer up a critique “it’s aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight” seemed to be the consensus, corny, cliché but not necessarily terrible. Why did Serena do this? Well if you follow the tennis legend you would realize that her being young, single and richer than hell allows her to do what she likes off-season, including dabbling in fashion, modeling, making naughty commercials and yes having fun via whatever avenue she so chooses. Who wouldn’t?

I recall the rumblings when Will Smith first made a move towards acting, since it was not an acceptable thing for rappers to branch out. Since Will made it in the movie business and blazed a path in his wake for other rappers to make the switch (if they so choose), we have seen other celebrities bounce around between their chosen craft and the cinema. So why the hate?

Not to say that Serena Williams will retire her tennis racket to colab with 2 Chainz anytime soon, but why should she have to negate trying? Why do we fear so much that a gifted person who applies themselves may actually be good at something else? Why did fans want Michael Jordan to fail so badly when he switched to baseball? Do we really believe that people should only get paid for being good at one single, solitary thing?

Leonardo Da Vinci was a celebrity in his day; a gifted artist, an inventor and somewhat of a scientist who pioneered many techniques that we use even today. I wonder if the ancient Italians threw hate at the genius by telling him he should just paint and throw those stupid inventions away…

What makes Serena Williams rapping badly and laughed at any different than a popular YouTUBE kid making a bad rap song? Both warrant a listen right? And both will probably either be dissed and laughed at by their audience, or spread on social networks with props as “the next best thing”. Look, Shaquille Oneal made a pretty damn good run with the rap thing back in the 90’s, Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) is doing the hybrid rap/acting thing like a champion, and Lil Wayne is now skateboarding.

Believe it or not, some people have different interests!

When a person “hates”, it tends to be reflective of their self-esteem, self-image, and willingness to be a crab in a bucket. We all can do better at listening, or watching before passing judgment (myself included) and we ought to realize that celebs can try any other venue a lot easier than we can. So calm down already and allow people to shine. If you haven’t heard it yet, here’s what all the fuss is about...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D9kFgiaAaQ

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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Don’t you hate nosy people? I know I do. Many of us men come up being extremely private to the point where we turn off family members and friends just by the amount of silence we keep about our love lives. Oft times this code of silence comes from being burnt one too many times by big-mouthed people who make us feel uncomfortable for our preferences and choices throughout our dating lives. Having dated a number of different women from across the spectrum of race, style and class – I know all too well the comments and hurtful jokes that gets thrown at single men for their choices.

When I was in college I dated a number of light-skinned black girls, not because that was my thing, but because they were the ones who were talking back to me. You know the game denizens, hell if you read my articles enough, you know why this is. No matter how much we like to think that we are in control – women choose to be with men, not the other way around. Light-skinned birds were choosing, and man did I catch hell for it.

I had friends calling me all sorts of nonsense, not to mention my being in martial arts lead to people assuming that I was going to fly out to Korea and bag any woman that made the mistake of smiling at me. Drove me absolutely nuts and I could not live it down.

Being young at the time and guilty of actually giving a damn, I started to hide my girlfriends opting to not introduce them to the boys and if she so happened to be of Asian descent – no way would they ever know. See us guys break each others balls HARD, and if you show any form of weakness they do more than break em, they completely crush them.

I have a buddy who we used to clown a lot that he had a thing for Latin women… we’re in Florida so it’s not as if that’s a far-fetched notion. But still he took it as an offense, the same way I did about the girls I was with in school. One particular girl used to flirt with him at our get-togethers and since they were both single, it was natural to everyone that something was going to come of it. But when the women in attendance started to break his balls about her to him, it became too much – he was done. The cute flirtatious banter that used to occur between them ceased as he chose instead to ignore her; his dating life became a mystery as the nosy married people would press for answers and he would shrug it off or flat out lie. It was a bit sad but having been there I understood, they had broken him like so many other single men whose lives became the talk of the mostly married party.

“I think its the kind of thing though with people in established marriages or relationships when they have the ‘single’ friend. It can be a very uncomfortable environment because they make you feel like you have to cater your dating to ‘their’ expectations” – Dan

This is one of the reasons why single people tend to avoid a lot of married fellowships that involve the token chatty wife, or the frat-boy husband. Dating is tough enough without the judgment and sadly the women in our lives suffer for it without even knowing the real cause. Our friends are to blame sometimes for us cutting a potential love interest off. Especially for men who have close family units and care what they think.

It makes me wonder how many men have learnt supreme privacy from situations like ours, when you have the ignorant roommate saying “look Greg it’s Chun-Li!” loudly at a house-party, or nosy friend’s wife trying to hook you up with the pretty latina at work because she thinks that’s your type. People should just leave well enough alone and be happy for us when we find love, irregardless of marital status, temperament and jokes. That’s all a single man can ask for, but time and time again it has been proven that friends can and will ruin the process of being an open-book about our relationships.

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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“A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” – Rayburn, Man on Fire

It’s peculiar how we can fear death yet applaud it’s dealers so heavily in movies, books and videogames. Think about it, the crowd cheers in The Expendables when Terry Crews comes marching down a hallway offloading an Atchisson Assault Shotgun into a crowd of invaders leaving a road of death in his wake. The crowd also roared when little Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl was cutting up adults as if they were paper mache in Kick-Ass.

Fact of the matter is that we love our fictional, professional killers. So who are they and who did we decide to list? Well we sorted through the hundreds from cinema to pick out the people who dealt death as their duty, as opposed to situational killers and super spies like James Bond. Hopefully your favorite assassin made the list – check it out:

10. Ghost Dog - Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai

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An orphaned boy that is bullied by kids in the inner city projects is found shot and left for dead by a member of the Italian Mafia. The man helps the boy who swears a life oath to the mobster based on the code of the Samurai which he follows from a book called Hagakure. Beyond the silly premise, Ghost Dog was a righteous assassin and a man with a code. How can you not love that?

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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Why would a man hate on a cute, friendly, and well-meaning customer service girl? Well they send men confusing signals which potentially leads to misunderstanding, embarrassment and worst of all – reminders that we’re losers.

As we all know, men expect pretty girls to be mean, judgmental witches that don’t smile. Blame it on the defense mechanism that most pretty girls have when a guy gawks at them, you lot get all serious and evasive, so men come up believing that part of the pretty girl package is to have a permanent scowl on the face accompanied by a bit of attitude. But here you have this customer service hawte breaking the rules, she’s smiling, being all good at her job and polite, so we think:

“What’s your deal anyway? What’s a man really to think!? Are you trying to earn extra tips? Wait… but you don’t take tips so… oh I know, you probably like me, no you love me! No wonder you always fill my soda till it’s overflowing and give me way more fries than you should. I bet if I ask you out, you would completely lose your mind and jump me!”

Next thing you know we are returning to your counter weekly, then daily, then we are texting our buddies, taking stalker pics of you dispensing onion rings and before long we cook up the urge to ask you out… then you realize too late, that men are weirdos who mistake smiles for an invitation.

So what do you do about it when we ask you out? You throw the typical nice girl defense up to hopefully stop our advances “I’m sorry, but I already have a boyfriend!” No you don’t customer service girl, no you DON’T! You just want us to buy something and leave – and why wouldn’t you? It’s your job, you’re doing it well, and it isn’t your fault that you’re cute, and it isn’t your fault that some confused man mistook your smile for an invite. But… we still hate you for it.

Cute customer service girl, guess what? Everybody hates you (except me, please keep giving good service so that I am not frustrated when I visit your Starbucks, or Barnes and Nobles, or wherever you reside). Everybody hates you because you are a source of embarrassment for insecure men who don’t know enough about women to take your niceties for… well, just a job well done. I’m going to need you to do better and scowl at us and have an attitude, come on, it is what we expect! How about it?

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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If a beautiful woman stays with a bunch of guys and she wants to know which one of them is madly in love with her, all she has to do is take note of which guy is trying a little too hard to be aloof, or mean to her for absolutely no reason. Welcome to Simpin’ 101, come on in and take a seat as I school you ladies and gentlemen on one of the main reasons why men are so resentful of beautiful women.

There’s an interesting occurrence that comes up whenever you mix one part single, pretty girl with a few non-confident guys that like her and an oblivious confident guy who merely sees her has dating potential. See, the confident guy will have sex with some effort and attention given, while the other lot will sit back and become both resentful and hateful of them both. What makes this even more interesting is that 60% of the guys will never have said a word to her, 10% tried some corny game and failed and the other 30% will pretend as if they didn’t care either way.

It starts in school when us boys finally figure out that girls are pretty and that having a pretty one as our girlfriend will make us more like our uncles or our Alpha Male heroes that are shown on TV. Little boys being naturally shy will write notes to the girl, send a friend to ask her out, or any number of formal things to avoid rejection in hopes that she will check “yes” on the like box and fulfill their fantasies. At that time it’s innocent, but as we get older and more cognizant of how rejection works, the resentment factor seeps it’s way in to the point where many men assume that pretty women are stuck up divas.

What many adult men will do upon seeing a beauty is to immediately go on the defensive about their feelings. They play the background, avoid eye-contact, never engage in conversation and some will even become aggressively violent, just to force an engagement which doesn’t start with them making the introduction. Sad, I know… if you’re a woman reading this I am quite sure that I am not telling you anything new, now am I? We men do this, and if you’re wondering as to why, I will tell you. Men do this in hopes that you will go out of your way to win their attention since we all believe that you want every single male’s attention within your aura.

Dumbass Russell and His Advice on “Hoes”

Coming up I knew this kid named Russell who tried to impart some knowledge on me about pretty women just because he managed to score one of the better looking girls in my High School and thought himself the expert.

His advice went something like this “See Greg the reason why you don’t have a girl as bad as mine is because you’re too nice to them. When you walk up to girls you say shit like ‘how you ladies doing’, when I walk up to them I say ‘how yall hoes doing?’ and that’s why I get so much pussy” – I wish I could say that I followed Russell’s advice but I didn’t, he just struck me as a loser who was full of it, living out what would be the best years of his entire life so I let him have that. What Russell does show us however is that men are actually encouraged to treat pretty girls like crap in order to get ahead with them. Imagine that.

The problem is that unlike Russell who found the right pretty girl with the right amount of low self-esteem, most women will ignore the guy pouting in the background, pretending to not give a damn about her. If this is supposed to be game then it’s a terrible one. If you talk to every single girl in a room except the beautiful one, she will automatically know that you are a herb. If you take a beautiful woman out and pretend as if you don’t notice that she’s hot as hell, then she knows that you are trying way too hard to normalize her.  It doesn’t work!

If you want to talk to beautiful women, take a page from the Wolf handbook and treat them just like every other woman that you’ve liked. Engage her, impress her, then bag her and call it a night. Ignoring someone will not force them to win you over to their side unless they are running for governor. Check your game fellas! We are better than these grade-school antics and the game does not favor us with this passive-aggressive tactic.

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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Men all agree that going after a woman for romance only to wind up in her friend zone absolutely sucks. Many times it is due to our lack of game, terrible timing, or fear of asking (for you guys who think that a woman will just get the hint by you hanging out with her). There is a subset of guys however who think that they are in the friend zone but in reality are in a “holding cell”. This creates a complex dilemma for the woman because she does not want that guy to be in her friend zone but is too shy to upgrade him, fears he will reject her, or fears the chance of losing him altogether.

Who are these guys?

Many times these are the childhood friends who became handsome winners as they got older. Some of these men may have been put in the friend zone during courtship because the woman was going through the harshest of times when he asked, but now she finds that she can’t live without him. It’s a complex dilemma because the latter guy may be a bit disheartened by being placed in the zone to begin with and has already mentally moved on past the girl. When a man mentally moves past you as a woman, you may be good for sex (which is why he keeps your number) but anything romantically may never happen with him. A lot of guys find it easier to put you out of their mind as a romantic interest, instead of sitting in the bleachers waiting because of the mental strife involved.

No man wants to have weekly chats on the phone with a girl he is in love with, knowing that he will never be anything other than a guy friend. Women do this all the time and men become resentful of it, but if you look it up statistically, the childhood friends, the girls next door, and the longtime admirers are the lovers that last in a relationship. It happens this way because the 2 people became friends, learned how to deal with each other’s annoyances, learned how to joke with one another without crossing lines – or crossing lines because it’s the right time to. Being friends has the benefit of people actually learning one another in a deep way prior to bumping uglies and complicating the bond.

“I married my best friend”

Many married couples are full of shit, let me get that out there. They fake the funk to outsiders, secretly hate their spouse, all the while saying cliche crap like ” he is my best friend”, or “I married my best friend”, just because it makes for a good soundbyte. You did not marry your best friend liar, you married some dude who knocked you up early, learned to deal with his crap while keeping your cool, and have made up your mind that you will tolerate him as a lifelong roommate for the sake of your kids, your church and your nosy parents. When a married couple are truly “best friends”, they don’t ever need to say it – people know, so imagine the beauty of actually marrying your best friend… doesn’t happen always since most of our best friends as men, are other men.

On the flip side there are people who should probably hook up but are afraid of destroying what they have by crossing the lines into relationship . If you are one of these people and know you are, consider this – if you are friends before a relationship, there is a chance that you will remain friends mutually after things don’t work out. I see it all the time, and it doesn’t seem to be that complicated. The only difference when best friends break up and revert back to the friendly act is that at any time they can have sex and consider it to be as naturally as eating together. This sucks for their future boyfriends, husbands, whatever, so it ends up better for the world if they stay together.

The one complex of the friend zone is that true friends can make for the best lovers and spouses.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to push up on someone that you grew up with, or a working colleague who seems perfect for you? What’s stopping you?

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jovsxh8FeYo

There’s always people covering Hip Hop songs through another genre all together but this one by Neneh Cherry covering the mighty MF DOOM’s song Accordion is just… well… amazing. If you are a jazz and blues man or woman like I am and you’re a Hip Hop head, check this video out and if you need context the original MF DOOM version is below the lyrics. Enjoy and support real music, please…

Livin’ off borrowed time… the clock tick faster
That’d be the hour they knock the slick blaster
Dick Dastardly and Muttley with slick laughter
A gun fight and they come to cut the mix-master
I.C.E cold…nice to be old
Y2G stee twice to threefold
He sold scrolls, lo and behold
Know who’s the illest ever like the greatest story told
Keep your glory, gold and glitter
For half, half of his niggaz’ll take him out the picture
The other half is rich and they don’t mean shit ta
Villain a mixture between both with a twist of liquor -
Chase it with more beer, taste it like truth or dare
When he have the mic it’s like the place get like… Ahhhhhh yeah!’
It’s like they know what’s ’bout to happen
Just keep ya eye out, like “aye, aye captain”
Is he still a fly guy clappin’ if nobody ain’t hear it
And can they testify from inner spirit

In living, the true gods
Givin’ y’all nothing but the lick like two broads
Got more lyrics than the church got “Ooh Lords”
And he hold the mic and your attention like two swords
Or even one with two blades on it
Hey you! Don’t touch the mic like it’s AIDS on it
It’s like the end to the means
Fuck type of message that sends to the fiends?
That’s why he bring his own needles
And get more cheese than Doritos, Cheetos or Fritos…
Slip like Freudian
Your first and last step to playin’ yourself like accordion

* * * *

When he had the mic you don’t go next
Leaving pussy cats like wild hoes need Kotex
Exercise index won’t need Boflex
And won’t take the one with no skinny legs like Joe Tex

Neneh Cherry’s album which features songs like this  one is due out folks… give her some love on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nenehcherryofficial. DOOM is a legend, but if you’ve never heard of him, this is your introduction…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpaonSDPw7Y

Originally posted at: HalloftheBlackDragon.com

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