Busta Rhymes is enormous in person, a Michelin Man made of muscles and neck. A tub of whey protein takes up a good deal of space in the studio where he's set up, as does his diamond-encrusted globe of a pinkie ring, which looks like it could break a windshield. He's here, at Premier Studios in Midtown, to talk about his new single "Twerk It" – produced by Pharrell, rapped in patois, and expected to tear clubs up this summer. But we mostly don't do that. Instead, we talk about how a man of his size fits into YMCMB, and whether or not pineapple pizza fits in his stomach. Read more...

Tax-season gripes regarding the Internal Revenue Service are about as American as baseball and apple pie. But we bet you've never expressed your frustration quite like NFL player Evan Mathis did on Wednesday. The Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman posted the photo you see below to Instagram. As one can't help but notice, he appears to be taking a leak on something that's obviously IRS property. Please take special note of the "audit this" caption. Read more...

For 86-year-old Bill "Brother Beans" Becker, it was three years and $300 well spent. In his own words, that's how long it took the life long Yankees fan from Toms River, N.J. to create a Yankee Stadium replica using only matchsticks, and that's how much it cost him to burn through — literally — all 75,000 matches that were required to complete his unique, extensive and completely awesome project. Read more...

Last June, the famous comedian, actor and pro-marijuana legalization advocate, Tommy Chong, reported to the world that he had been diagnosed with stage 1 prostate cancer and that he was seeking unconventional treatment using Cannabis Oil. Almost one year later, Tommy is feeling better than ever and is cancer free. Tommy’s recent announcement, in a blog post, about his successful battle with cancer is a huge boon to those battling this illness and many others, and also for those fighting for the common-sensical liberation of this promising natural medicine. Read more...

Something summery every day, from now until Labor Day. Read more...

A blockbuster auction of Contemporary art in New York, including a record $58.4 million for a Jackson Pollock drip painting, fetched nearly half a billion dollars -- the biggest haul ever at an art auction. Christie's said Wednesday's sale raised a "staggering" total of $495,021,500, with 94 percent of lots finding buyers. Nine of the works sold went for more than $10 million and 23 for more than $5 million. It wasn't just the most successful auction of Contemporary art at Christie's, but the biggest haul from an art auction anywhere at all, the auction house said. Read more...

Michael Eisele of Kiel, Germany appears to have broken a 44-year-old record while on a fishing trip to Norway. According to the Daily Mail, Eisele and his fishing party were returning to shore 10 miles off the island of Soroya when his line caught a bite. It was a cod, and Eisele’s sonar told him it was a large one. “So I concentrated from that moment on,” Eisele said. “It felt like ground contact. I took it very slowly and carefully.” The fish was in fact so large that the ship’s equipment pinged the cod as not one animal, but two. The battle took slightly over 30 minutes before the anglers were able to haul the catch on board. “When we saw the fish my knees was starting shaking. It was so big,” the angler recalled. “I needed the help from both boys staying in my boat to get it landed.” Read more...

Festival season is almost here! From neighborhood newbies to suburban classics, check out our preliminary list of what to expect. This is a first look! We’ll be updating this list all season long. Cheers! Read more...

Raise your hand if you own any type of basketball art. It could be an old school wall poster or even a bobble head. Ok, you can put your hand down now. I like many of you also raised my hand and take great pride in the different pieces of basketball art that I own. The art has given me more of an appreciation of the game that I already love so much. The basketball art blog Double Scribble created by Nick Kastner, has helped to spread the gospel of basketball art since their inception two years ago. After putting on a gallery show in D.S.’s home base of Cleveland, Kastner was looking to take the show on the road. After some gentle nudging by me, Kastner decided that Boston would be the site for Double Scribble’s next gallery show. Read more...

This is Jay Harris. He's one of the top high school wide receiver prospects out of Pennsylvania this year. He's 5-foot-11, 170 pounds, and until last month, was headed to Michigan State University this fall on a football scholarship after graduating Downingtown East High School. Not anymore. Instead, Jay Harris dropped college football to pursue a rap career. Read more...

R Kelly is about to break out of the closet and into a new realm entirely – country. In a new interview with Vibe magazine, the 46-year-old R&B crooner gave a hint of the next phase in a career that has already seen him push the boundaries of genre several times. "I've been writing a lot of country songs. I used to get criticised for doing a bump and grind then turning around and doing a gospel song. But the truth is I'm glad I have a gift that allows me to switch lanes." Kelly insisted that this is no Snoop Lion-style reinvention, pointing out that he has always striven to be diverse. "My talent is more than just sexual songs," he said. "There was a time when I desperately needed the world to know that I was no category guy. My whole goal in life was to reach that certain level of success where people will say, 'Hey, that guy can do anything. He's the Evel Knievel of music. He's jumping over 15 buses!" Read more...

The most spirited sports debates never quite get settled. Mays and Mantle, Palmer and Nicklaus, Russell and Chamberlain -- there's so much evidence on either side, there's really no closure to the arguments. Here's something that's beyond question: In the history of women's tennis, nobody has crushed the notion of "rivalry" quite like Serena Williams. We find her now, at 31, without a single adversary of equal worth. When presented a serious challenge from the tour's top players, she seems to be more fearsome than ever. We saw it just last weekend when, in Madrid, she scored her 12th straight win over Maria Sharapova (13-2 overall) with a convincing 6-1, 6-4 victory in the final. Read More...

Marley knew the drill – in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule and, as Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA’s “pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy.” “Destabilization,” Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, “is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence.” In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger “vampires” descending upon the island. Read more...

Cancer. Just the mention of the word causes an immediate wave of fear through young and old, rich and poor, men and women. The disease is no respecter of persons. How far would you go to lower your risk of cancer? If you are one of a growing number of women, you might go as far as to have a preventative double mastectomy. Today the media is applauding the “medical choice” of Angelina Jolie, who has joined celebrities Sharon Osbourne and Miss America contestant Allyn Rose in having both of her healthy breasts removed. Much is being discussed about her “bravery” in undergoing this procedure “proactively”. Read more...

Let's raise a glass to Bob Koester, the single-minded Chicagoan who this weekend celebrates a remarkable anniversary: 60 years of producing jazz and blues recordings. Koester's Delmark Records may not be the biggest indie in the country – or even in Chicago – but it's widely acknowledged as the longest continually running jazz-blues label in the country. Beyond this feat of endurance, Delmark has had an outsized impact on music across Chicago and around the world. If you've ever listened to Junior Wells' "Hoodoo Man Blues" or Magic Sam's "West Side Soul," landmark albums of the mid-1960s, you owe a thank-you to Koester, who recorded them. At about the same time, Delmark began to cut groundbreaking recordings by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Chicago collective that altered the course of jazz. Read more...

Increasingly it is becoming clear that the Obama administration in preparation for its change in its Latin American policy has been using Hip-Hop millionaires as pawns to cover some of its most unsavory actions. Only a few astute old activists recognized early that Obama was using Pop-culture like Richard Nixon used Ping Pong diplomacy in opening up China to a new US diplomacy. The recent visit of Millionaire Rap Mogul Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé to Cuba served as a cover for unofficial back-door communications to the Cuban government conveying the Obama’s intentions to modify or lift the four decade old illegal embargo/blockade of Cuba and that the presence of former Black Panther, and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur could hinder or derail this diplomacy. Jay-Z’s delegation included a State-Department “reliable” personage who transmitted the Obama’s administration’s position. Once the Republican/Right got wind of this overture they screamed bloody murder, but could do little about it as lifting the Cuban Blockade is now crucial to the US reasserting dominance in a post Castro-Chavez Latin America as the geo-economic center for Latin American nations. So Assata is a pawn in the chess game of US imperial diplomacy. Read more...

Yes, the New York Public Library swears, the old photo of the guy who looks scarily like Jay-Z really is an unretouched, un-Photoshopped image from 1939. “We’re 100 percent certain it’s legitimate,” Adenike Olanrewaju, a library spokeswoman, said on Friday. Here’s the original: Read more...

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' " The above verse written by 19th century American poet John Greenleaf Whittier has often been quoted in reference to an opportunity that was not seized, or to a love that was unrequited. In Chicago, the famous line of iambic tetrameter seems to apply most often to sports, and, too often, to our hapless, titleless Cubs. Yet right now, in the middle of the NBA's championship playoffs, Whittier's plaintive observation seems most lyrically apt for our Bulls' Derrick Rose. It is, indeed, an epic conflict for the superstar: Does he play it safe, sitting out the playoffs in order to return at 100 percent readiness next year? Or does he make a sudden and dramatic entrance onto the TV stage, like Achilles in Homer's "The Iliad," returning to the battlefront after a long absence, to lead and inspire his battered Greek comrades to victory over the Trojans? Read more...

Far and away the best Collaboraction Theatre show I've seen, "Crime Scene" is a true call for collaborative action. The ensemble piece probes the current epidemic of violent crime in this city, offering a plethora of problems and solutions. It was created by members of the theater company and by community activists, and to the great credit of director Anthony Moseley, it avoids the usual trap of just being worthy. It works as a piece of theater primarily because it brings up enough contributing factors to make your head reel, and because it feels real. Read more...

Spike Lee’s Crooklyn debuted in cinemas in May of 1994. Changing tact from the combustible racial commentary of Do the Right Thing and his political biopic of Malcolm X, Lee presented Crooklyn as a nostalgia-steeped series of familial vignettes centered on the Carmichael clan in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the early ’70s. The movie’s soundtrack reflected this vibe with songs by Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone and The Staple Singers. The sole musical nod to Crooklyn’s era of release came from a rap track credited to The Crooklyn Dodgers, an impromptu super-group consisting of the Brooklyn-born rappers Buckshot, Masta Ace and Special Ed. (Production for the song came courtesy of A Tribe Called Quest’s Brooklyn-raised Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Queens ambassador Q-Tip.) Read more...