I’ve been grilling and chilling aplenty this last week so I’m putting the grill grub on display. Just about all of these ingredients were purchased at Trader Joe’s so everything is definitely within your reach.

Tangy BBQ Chicken – Use your favorite BBQ sauce and add a good deal of lemon juice (you can just cut off a third of a lemon and squeeze) into a plastic freezer bag w/chicken and let it marinade an hour or 2. If you want a very full and robust tangy flavor, let it marinade overnight or at least 5-10 hours.

Grilled Mexican Blue shrimp – Wow! You can get a 1lb bag of this shrimp at Trader Joe’s for $5.99. It’s an absolute pain in the ass to devein and shell but well worth the labor. Best tasting shrimp you can get at a normal market and makes the farmed stuff an atrocity. Brush with an easy mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. Chesapeake Bay seasoning mixed with olive oil is a very good substitute as well.

Grilled broccolini – Not mentioned much in the “vegetables you can grill” lists but broccolini (aka baby broccoli) is excellent, really damn healthy and did I mention it was excellent. Simple work too. Brush broccolini with simplistic mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic and you’re good to go. Grill a few minutes on each side until it’s cooked through. You definitely won’t be disappointed with this.

Before

After

Grilled Swordfish & Eggplant – It’s hard to find a piece of fish out there that tastes better or gives you a meatier texture than swordfish. It’s not one of those fish you mess with too much as overdoing it on the seasoning or marinade could overwhelm how naturally flavorful it is. Give it a brush of olive oil, salt and pepper and you’re good to go.

I wish I could give you a great review of grilled eggplant but my wife and I realized it’s just not our vegetable. We gave it a whirl on the grill to see if it’d help make a veggie we normally wouldn’t eat more edible. While it definitely enhanced the flavor and allowed us to at least digest a small bite, I’m too disgusted by eggplant to go any further. However, if you’re an eggplant lover, grilling it only makes matters better as the thickness of the vegetable allows for it to very compatible with a BBQ.

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All the furry, lovable creatures in the animal kingdom get the most love but they’re also a little boring do to overexposure in popular culture. Below, I’ve listed a number of animals that are remarkable in many different ways but these aren’t your standard zoo animals, folks. These animals are from the other side of the tracks.

Touch Me and It Might Be the Last Thing You Do

Poison Dart Frog

There are some things on this planet so deadly, you’d never want to come across one, no matter how beautiful or stunning it may look. This would be the quintessential animal that looks gorgeous but has a secret for you: it’s the most dangerous animal on land. There’s a poison it secretes out of its skin that’s so deadly, the amount of a pinhead can send 20,000 mice and 10 fully grown men to the morgue. Another interesting little tidbit: these frogs gain their potency from the poisonous ants that consist of their diet. Even more interesting is that if you took one of these out of the wild and kept it as a pet, it wouldn’t be as poisonous since it wouldn’t be feeding on those same potent little ants.

Belcher’s Sea Snake

It lives in the ocean, doesn’t bother anybody and it’s one of the most docile snakes in the world. But hold your horses, buddy, this ain’t just a nice, timid snake. No, the Belcher’s sea snake happens to be the most venomous snake on the planet. Yes, more toxic than the black mamba, any taipan or the Indian krait. It is even more poisonous than another snake of the ocean, the beaked sea snake. Luckily for us all, it doesn’t like to bite and even when it does, it rarely injects enough of its venom to kill a man. However, if it was provoked more than it liked, you’d be a dead man.

Buggin’ Out

Rhinocerous Beetle

Ever seen that World’s Strongest Man competition on ESPN with the gargantuan men from another planet competing by showing how strong they are? Well, in the animal kingdom, those guys ain’t squat! Elephants, gorillas, rhinos, they don’t even have anything on the rhinocerous beetle which can carry 850 times its own weight. But rhino beetles also have another cool little fact about them: they’re part of the famous scarabidae family of beetles. This is the exact species the ancient Egyptians were known to worship.

Army Ant

There’s something you should immediately know about ants: our military mimics many of the organizational tactics that ants use since they’ve been so effective for millions of years. And, the ultimate army of ants is none other than the aptly named army ant which lives for annihilating the ever-loving crap out of any living creature in its path. Not only that, but the ants are fricken blind! Here’s a list of animals army ants are known to kill: insects, tarantulas, scorpions, lizards, snakes, frogs, and chickens.

We’ve Got Superpowers

Spitting Cobra

Everyone knows a cobra is super venomous and the spitting cobra is no different as a bite from one of these guys will earn you an emergency room visit. But, let’s say you happen upon one in the wild and do the right thing by keeping your distance. The cobra, having a bad morning, spits out a nice dosage of venom right into your retinas, sending you into skull-splitting pain. You may also be blinded for life. In the world of animals, this snake has a double-fisted arsenal of venom.

Electric Eel

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: electric eels aren’t eels, they’re knifefishes, which is sort of related to catfish. Aside from that fact, there’s this one: this fricken thing is electric! Should you be barefoot in the Amazon or Orinico Rivers in South America and decide to grab one of these, it’s capable of zapping your ass with up to 500 volts! That’s AWESOME. I mean, if you touch one, you’re a fool and deserve to get shocked but either way, a fish that can electrocute something sporadically for over an hour is a bad ass creature.

The Things I Can Do Will Blow Your Mind

Peregrine Falcon

When an animal can literally go faster than a really fast sports car, it deserves some props. At 200 miles an hour, the peregrine falcon dives after its prey, going faster than any other animal in the world. In fact, it’s going so fast, that it would normally damage a bird’s lungs if not for special tubercles in their nostrils that do something scientific that’s hard to explain that prevents this from happening. It swoops down and stuns the bird in mid-air and then spins around to catch it in mid-air. Cool, huh? If it’s too heavy to hold, it’ll just drop its victim from the sky and lets the ground do the rest of the damage.

Mimic Octopus

Perhaps one of my favorite invertebrates ever, the mimic octopus is the closest thing to living animation you’ll find on this earth. It’s as if you’re watching a cartoon creature do things only seen on television. The mimic octopus is the only octopus that impersonates other creatures, often using disguises of venomous sea creatures to fend off predators such as sharks and barracuda. There isn’t much more I can personally do to explain how awesome these things are unless I put that damn youtube video of one up. So here you go:

Didn’t Think We Could Get This Big, Did You?

Goliath Frog

We’ve all seen frogs and usually, for the most part, they’re small in nature, able to fit inside our hands. Sure, there are some exceptions but the goliath frog is the biggest exception of them all. It’s huge! Look how that thing sits in the girl’s lap above as if it was the pet dog, rather than a giant fricken frog. Strangely, the frog looks like it doesn’t know what the hell is going one while the two younger brothers seem to have other things on their mind, like getting the hell away from the giant frog. Living in the rivers of West Africa, goliath frogs are so big they’re able to feed on crabs and other frogs!

Mekong Giant Catfish

Anybody up for some fried catfish? If you are, bring the entire family and friends and, hell, bring the whole fricken neighborhood because we’re going to have plenty of fish to fry after we’re through with this big boy. Actually, there’s not much of a chance we’d be allowed to catch one since they’re highly endangered and heavily protected. However, there are some things you look at and can’t believe you’re looking at: this is definitely one of them. I’ve seen many different kinds of catfish but none are this size. This thing is so enormous, in fact, there are local legends of these giant fish swallowing people whole. I even saw a special on Animal Planet where a renown biologist said he would not be surprised if that were true. YIKES!

Me & My Homey Go Way Back

Cockroach

Before you vomit, understand one thing about this creature that’s awesome: THEY CAN SURVIVE ANYTHING!!! I hate cockroaches just as much as the next person, maybe even more if that’s possible, but their statistics are phenomenal against all other living creatures in the animal kingdom. They’ve been on the planet for a good 350 million years. Their resilience is what’s so incredible as they’re capable of going a month without food, over 40 minutes without air and one of the most radiation resistant animals on earth (the fruit fly is even more so, believe it or not). They’re disgusting, filthy, repulsive and downright nasty but you can’t knock their incredible ability to overcome just about anything over 350 million years.

Sharks

While the roach goes back 350 million years, the shark has it beat at more than 400 million years roaming the planet’s waters. Hell, sharks are so old, they’ve got the dinosaurs beat on age and they’re the ones still on earth. There are species that can swim in freshwater (bull sharks) and some that can tolerate conditions at close to 10,000 feet below the water. Their smell is ridiculous, having the ability to smell a drop of blood from over a mile away. So, even if you entered the water with a paper cut, a shark might drop by to say hello. There are species of sharks all over the world, and yes, even in the arctic regions. They are known to have hearing that can pick up prey from a few miles away. One last fact: whale sharks and spiny dogfish have been known to live over 100 years.

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A recent Stop Pop Culture feature, “Best Rappers You Probably Never Heard Of” got a lot of feedback, some totally disagreeing while the majority of the comments seemed to be positive. Many hip hop fans suggested other MC’s, some which were forgotten, some a little too mainstream and some that were downright terrible (some of them will be listed here).

*In no particular order

Immortal Technique

I could really care less about Immortal Technique’s following. It’s all political rap that gets so boring, I’d rather just listen to the people who started that trend: Public Enemy and NWA. Immortal Technique is a good rapper, no doubt about it. But he’s not the be all, end all of MC’s. In fact, he’s not even in the top 20. If any of his die hard fans are steaming after reading this, fire away. His subject matter is similar to Nas, OC, and some other East Coast rappers of the 90′s. There was also a rapper from L.A. named Ras Kass who was spitting these kinds of rhymes before IT was. Check out his lyrics and there’s a resemblance although Ras Kass has the edge in skills.

Diddy/Puff Daddy/Puffy/Whatever

It would have been nice for Puffy to have kept his musical talent confined to making beats and producing but instead, he had to rap because that’s a better way to grab the spotlight. Great beats and horrible lyrics galore, Diddy always put out big hits but people were swinging their hips to his musical beats and laughing at how elementary many of his lyrics were. I always point the finger at Puffy for killing hip hop as he’s to blame after his greatest project, Notorious, was murdered. In the early days, when Biggie was around, Puff didn’t rap all that much. I miss Notorious.

L.L. Cool J

You could split LL’s rap career in half and any MC would take his first half, skills wise. It’s fascinating that he’s been in the game so long, and it’s well deserved. However, he’s totally fallen off as a rapper, mostly since he wanted to be a movie star that can’t act very well. Go way back to one of his first songs ever, Radio, and hear how hard LL slams the beats with his delivery. He does it with a New York style f**k you and you can hear the authority in his voice. LL also did way too many love songs that don’t stand so well with the hip hop faithful.

Kanye West

True hip hop heads will tell you Kanye is a hell of a talent in the producer’s circle, not so much so as a rapper. If you disagree, you probably don’t understand the MC craft that much. Lyrically, he’s good. Not the best, but worthy. In no way am I saying West sucks as a rapper but he’s mediocre, not the next coming of Common. The fact that Kanye himself acts as if he’s the greatest thing to walk the planet makes him even worse. There are 20 rappers in the last 10 years who would burn Kanye even if they had bronchitis. West needs to check his ego at the door. True hip hop fans know that quote well.

50 Cent

How about this: rather than me creating an argument about how overrated 50 Cent is, how about someone explain to me why he’s held in such high regard? It’s called MTV, a force in music that will blow up anyone for the right amount of money. If you don’t think producers, record companies and even artists themselves don’t pay MTV for massive exposure, you’re wrong. MTV hasn’t treated hip hop right since they canceled Yo! MTV Raps. Get a clue, MTV. In fact, shut down and leave music!

Anticon (Sole & Alias)

This is for all you underground/indie hip hop fans still swinging on this group’s ball sack: FUCK ANTICON. Just because you listen to Anticon doesn’t make you hip hop either. It makes you a self righteous jerk off who thinks they know hip hop. People responded to another post I wrote claiming Sole was great. Sole sounds like a typical white rapper trying to be incredible but falls into a category more along the lines of decent. Maybe Anticon and Immortal Technique can tour together for the MOST OVERRATED RAPPERS TOUR 2010. By the way, does anyone know why Atmosphere left Anticon? It’s because they suck balls. For Anticon fans who will write me hate mail, I hope you enjoy writing it as much as I’ll enjoy reading it.

Lil Wayne

Most people who ride Lil Wayne’s jock are below the age of 21. He’s a decent rapper but he’s listed here simply because he’s getting way too much recognition during a time when hip hop is at a low point. Because there’s such a terrible pool of MC’s at right now in mainstream rap, Lil Wayne gets by as an above-average artist. Declaring himself the greatest rapper of all time made his teenage brethren defend him even more. Sometimes it’s fun to watch nonsense manifests itself and tries to act as if it’s making sense.

Young Jeezy

I wonder if Jeezy walks around with a bucket of hooks just in case he has to stop in the studio on short notice. It feels as if he half-asses his verses just to reach the hook where he puts in an effort. There’s much too much hoopla around Jeezy, a rapper that hasn’t made true hip hop heads blink an eye. With our ADD attention span these days, a decent hook is all it takes to get a hot single that the MTV generation will buy. There’s always a rapper like this but there’s too many of these guys in hip hop right now. It makes me sick to my stomach.

RAPPERS WHO HAVE BEEN CALLED OVERRATED BUT AREN’T

Tupac

Don’t be a fool. I’ve read many arguments against Tupac and not one made a decent point. Most of his critics think he only rapped about drugs and guns but this isn’t the case. Another thing missing from today’s MC’s is passion. It’s not coming out int he rhymes as much as it used to. Tupac was a master of this. He’d step up to the mic and let it all out, even if the beat sucked, even if it wasn’t his best lyrics, Tupac always gave you 100%. Rappers these days seem like they’re giving you 50% most of the time.

Eminem

I’m as against mainstream and pop music as any underground head would be but no matter how many records Eminem has sold, it’s downright silly to deny his skills. He can rhyme fast, slow, in harmony, hard, and off beat, an arsenal of rapping tools not many MC’s can boast of. Dr. Dre is no idiot and has hand picked two of the most recognized rappers of all time in Snoop and Eminem. That’s not a flue. You can hate what he raps about and represents, but don’t call him overrated. That’s just plain wrong.

Jay Z

Same situation and I’m not a big fan. Jay Z can pretty much do it all except drop a verse super, super hard. For those of you who don’t understand what that means, listen to Tupac, Biggie, Gift of Gab, Common or Chuck D. But Jay Z is as smooth as it gets with his skills, keeping you with the beat the whole time. Part of the reason I think some people consider him overrated is because he makes some difficult things in his songs seem easy.

Snoop Dogg

Hip hop experts can make a good argument for Snoop being overrated, I won’t take that away from anyone who feels that way. However, let’s be honest, who’s the smoothest MC you’ve ever heard? When Snoop hits the mic, everyone feels like passing a joint and kicking back, in a great mood to enjoy some melodious west coast hip hop. Lyrically, Snoop is definitely not the best nor is he even in the discussion, but when he came onto the scene in the early 90s, everyone heard something different. That hasn’t changed. A lot of MC’s still try to be like Snoop, not the other way around.

Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G.

Those that call Biggie overrated are probably the same that claim Eminem isn’t a great rapper either. It’s almost not worth mentioning since the rationale behind calling Notorious overrated is about as far fetched as it gets. Listen to his catalogue and you’ll notice one of his best skills is coming hard on beats with his delivery. Not many MC’s can do this as I believe it’s one of the rarest qualities in hip hop today. Biggie was one of the best at this, as well as his west coast foe, Tupac. They died and some of hip hop died with them. True story.

The Game

People try to hate on the Game but they have no clue about what makes up a great MC. For a gangster rapper, The Game is as good as they game. He’s got that raspy, tough delivery and a clever way with thug lyrics. Some hip hop critics put too much emphasis on vocabulary and don’t focus on wordplay, a trick that seems to deteriorate as the years go on in popular rap. You have to respect Game for what he does in his niche, a world that isn’t true hip hop but we’re forced to listen to anyways. Dr. Dre and Snoop turned gangster rap into a fun time and The Game carries on the tradition.

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It’s always about Lil Wayne or Kanye West. Jay-Z or 50 Cent. Eminem or Ja Rule. But what about those artists that remain in the underground or have been mainstays in the independent hip hop scene for over 10 years? Most are better than all mainstream rappers. In fact, Eminem and Jay-Z are the only big time guys with great skills. The others are good rappers, not great.

6 Rappers You Probably Never Heard Of

#6 Slug – Atmosphere

Straight out of Minneapolis, Slug is at the helm of his group, Atmosphere, and holds fort with a very melancholy authority. If you like positive hip hop, Atmosphere is not for you as Slug mainly focuses on bad relationships and other depressing subject matter and can sometimes take it too far, but that’s also what makes him great. He stretches the limits and doesn’t care what you think.

#5 Pharaohe Monch & Prince Poetry – Organized Konfusion

In my opinion, this is the greatest MC duo the hip hop world has ever witnessed. If you look back over the history of hip hop, there weren’t many groups with just two rappers. Tribe Called Quest is another good one but compared to the lyrical and verbal deliveries of both rappers from Organized Konfusion, it’s not close. Don’t believe me? Download “Bring It On”, the remix, and tell me these two aren’t ridiculous rappers.

#4 Aceyalone – Freestyle Fellowship

Ask anyone who likes west coast indie hip hop about Aceyalone and they’ll tell you he’s one of the biggest reasons they were put on the map. Aceyalone has tons of songs, some solo, some with his buddies in Freestyle Fellowship, all showing a unique ability of style, substance and skills. He’s completely west coast, has some classic underground songs and remains an Los Angeles hip hop legend to this day.

#3 Del tha Funkee Homosapien – Hieroglyphics

The name says it all. He’s not funky, he’s funkee. Came on to the scene in the very early 90′s with “Mr. Dobalina” and “Dr. Bombay” from his frist album, I Wish My Brother George Was Here. It’s one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time in the same way 2001: Space Odyssey is one of the best movies of all time. It’s far, far out, unlike anything in rap anyone had heard at the time and showcased a talent that would never be duplicated.

#2 Lyrics Born – Quannum

Quannum is the most phenomenal group of hip hop talent in assembly today. Two incredible beat makers and 3 spectacular rappers. They’ve added more people in the last few years but the first five remain the only true talents. One MC is Lyrics Born, one of the few asian MC’s in hip hop and an amazing and completely different breed. He can rap fast, hard, and change his delivery so frequently in one song, it’s hard to fathom one guy doing it all.

#1 Gift of Gab – Blackalicious & Quannum

Also from Quannum, the best rapper of all time, in my opinion, is Gift of Gab out of Oakland, California. Listening to him rap is as beautiful as a song sung by a tenor. What makes him so awesome is his ability to marry his lyrics and flow to the music of his longtime DJ/Producer, Chief Xcel. It’s usually a very cool, harmonious tune that feels more like a great song than a great hip hop track. He’s been featured on many songs and has some excellent albums with Blackalicious. A classic hip hop song he did with DJ Shadow, “Swan Lake”, is worth a download.

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The Descent is about as good as a horror movie can get, freaky, thrilling, horrifying and bloody all at the same time. From beginning to end you’re never allowed to rest or get up or even scratch yourself since your eyes and ears are completely fixed on the screen.

I’m fascinated with horror movies the same way we’re all interested in that car crash on the freeway. We don’t want to look but we do anyways. That’s how I am with horror movies so, I guess, I’m a victim to its ability to grab you even if you’re not willing to be grabbed.

But here’s a movie that doesn’t exactly give you traditional horror with all the campy tongue-in-cheek cliches an d lines that most of us have become accustomed to. No, The Descent gives you everything you were hoping it wouldn’t in the best way possible. 

Mainly, it will give you nightmares and make you dwell on it long after you’ve finished with it. That’s a good thing for the sake of the movie. It’s not such a good thing for you because it will make you feel uncomfortable but only a truly good film can evoke those feelings well.

The movie follows six girlfriends, all of them tough and spunky, each with their own characteristics (a rare find for women in the horror genre). Most of them are adrenaline junkies pulled together in a cabin for a cave exploring adventure in the Appalachians.

It’s an idea hitched by the toughest lady of the group, Juno (Natalie Mendoza), sort of in the mold of a Lara Croft/Ellen Ripley/tough girl role. She’s got a plan for them to explore a particular cave and she’s got the maps for it, or so we think.

In the opening minutes, we’re presented with a situation that feels so horrific you’re unable to figure out how the movie can really get much worse from there. It’s about the main character, Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), who suffers through an absolutely traumatic experience that alters her life.

Juno’s reasoning for pulling together the six girls for cave exploring is to help reinvigorate Sarah from her turmoil and distress, hoping a thrilling adventure with friends will bring her back to normalcy, or at least close to it.

The six girls venture into the cave only to find themselves stuck when a rock blocks their path back out. Oops! Now they’re trapped inside a cave that was previously thought to be discovered when, in fact, it had never been.

What ensues is pure terror beyond your worst imagination, those things that go bump in the night come right back to bite you hard in the ass. The situation these girls are in gets worse and worse, never letting up, keeping your heart pounding to the very end.

British writer/director Neil Marshall really gives it to you hard in this movie, using the women (maybe purposely) to get your nerves riled up even more than had it been six men instead. That he made these women tough, gritty but very human, made it even easier to relate to them and to root for them during their inescapable feat.

One of the most brutal things about this film is how the six women bond together to fight the forces of inevitable claustrophobia and, while that’s hard enough, there’s something lurking beneath, a creature that makes the mountain mutants of The Hills Have Eyes look like Sesame Street.

It’s this kind of constant drama and excitement that drives the movie forward, seemingly never pausing for a breath, pounding you over the head with one harsh moment after another until you feel you can’t take it anymore. Unfortunately, you have to and it doesn’t get any better.

Fighting to escape the cave is difficult enough but when their next obstacle stands in their way, the audience knows they’re truly screwed and in a virtually impossible dilemma to escape from.

One thing to note here about this movie: watch everything and try to keep your ears perked up for the sounds of the film are just as important as the visuals. The noises their opposition makes in the caves are haunting and jarring.

There’s also the notion of the creatures living in the cave being realistic, something I believe truly turns this movie into a gem. At first, you’re only hearing their sounds but when the creatures are revealed and explained, it’s something you can completely fathom.

I saw Neil Marshall’s director’s cut and read online how the American version ended, giving it two endings on DVD that you can choose from. My suggestion is to go ahead and watch Marshall’s version since it’s his vision and the difference in the endings are pretty slim, however, significant enough for the viewer to leave the movie feeling a different way.

For me, although Marshall’s cut was nothing short of exceptional, I prefer the American ending. But this is more due to the fact that I’m a sucker for that kind of ending, one where there’s a slight ray of hope (although not much). The original ending is extremely tough to swallow but maybe more realistic so choose what you feel fits you better.

All in all, I can’t think of one thing this movie does wrong other than having a different preference for the ending than most. Again, I’m probably in the minority there. Other than that, this is as good of a horror movie as I’ve ever seen, never letting up, never letting you come up for air and never letting you believe for one second that it’s a good idea to explore caves ever in your life time. 

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