If you know someone is in an exclusive relationship but have a huge, unforgettable crush on them, do you tell them?(online surveys)

Today’s video of the day also double as our Embarrassing Negro Moment. Apparently, the local Popeyes ran out of chicken and your cousins started acting the fool. Racist media representation? Outgrowth of the recession? The result of “food deserts” in urban neighborhoods? Bad behavior? Probably a combination of all four, but this looks hella ignant.

After 100 days, Obama’s shiny-new dream for our cities is looking more like a bureaucratic nightmare.

What Happened to the Office of Urban Policy
By Dayo Olopade

In November 2008, less than one week after winning the votes of city dwellers by a margin of 28 points, President-elect Barack Obama announced he would reward them by creating the first-ever “White House Office of Urban Policy.” Like other new aspects of Obama’s executive branch, appointing a city czar was intended to fast-track communications among city governments, federal agencies and the White House. With great fanfare, Obama dispatched his friend and fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett to tell America that he was making good on his campaign pledge to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution.”

When the office was officially formed in mid-February, urbanists rejoiced: “It’s past time,” said Elnora Watson, president of the Urban League in Jersey City, N.J., as she walked the halls of Congress recently. “Way past time,” added Ella Teal, another Urban League president from the neighboring city of Elizabeth. “Cities will lead America,” Newark Mayor Cory Booker said at an April speech on city government in Washington. “When it comes to industry, innovation, education and the arts … cities are where it’s at.”

But celebrations about the potential triumph of urban policy may be premature. In recent weeks, the Obama administration has begun referring to the office as “urban affairs,” rather than “urban policy,” a small but notable downgrade. And while other offices and Cabinet agencies have been staffing up—the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships has representation in 12 government agencies—100 days in, urban affairs has announced only two senior staffers: Derek Douglas, who was special adviser to New York Gov. David Paterson, and former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Jr., who faces allegations of mismanaging campaign donations and development projects in New York City.

As money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act started going out to cash-strapped states and municipalities, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Pikeville, N.C., this month to specifically address how the stimulus would affect rural America. “As we write a new chapter in our history, the small towns of America … will have to be some of the most prominent of its authors,” he said.

The comparative silence from urban affairs has not gone unnoticed. Diana Lind, editor of Next American City, a journal that covers urban policy, frets that “this isn’t going to be as serious and as powerful a role as many urbanists had hoped.”

For the rest of the story, click here.

What is it with those men on cusp of middle age who see their masculine identity threatened by the act of fathering a child?

Note to Nervous Would-Be Dads: Having Kids Doesn’t Look ‘Gay’
By Vanessa Richmond

“Having a kid is so gay,” a man told me recently. How’s that for irony? Especially given that the guy is pushing 40.

It’s the kind of juvenile language that only makes sense when you understand the near-hysteria about family life that exists in a new tribe of middle aged, North American males: the Baby Bailers.

Clearly, there are rational reasons to have kids and rational reasons not to, whether you’re a man or a woman. And from the amount of column inches devoted to the topic lately, you might even get the idea that people like arguing about the question of to breed or not to breed more than doing it.

What we’re discussing here, however, is a lot of men on cusp of middle age who, at some sub-rational and visceral level, see their masculine identity threatened by the act of fathering a child. They understand babies to be enemies of what makes it great to be a straight man. Thus, having one is “gay.”

The joke may be on them. Research shows married, child-rearing fathers, relatively speaking, tend to be pretty darn happy (more on that later). And of the dozens of Baby Bailers I’ve heard about from friends who do “cave” (to use the word of a male friend), most tend to be glad. (I’ve also heard of many who didn’t have kids for rational reasons and are glad they didn’t). The problem is that because gender identity is involved, the struggle over “giving in” (another male friend’s term) can be excruciating for both the man and the woman, and based on anything but reason.

For the rest of the story, click here.

Indian Business Students Into ‘Mein Kampf’

The Daily Telegraph of London reports that Indian business students are buying Adolf Hitler’s autobiography as a sort of management guide. What do you think?

Anne Barrett,
Systems Analyst
“Well, they sure don’t want to follow Gandhi’s model. All that guy ever did was lose money.”

Albert Zimmerman,
Gift Wrapper
“I guess that makes sense if you take the Jews to represent scheduling conflicts.”

Fred Wistow,
Field Assembly Supervisor
“Who better to give management advice than a guy who couldn’t get into art school?”