Last week I celebrated my 35th birthday. Man, once you hit 30 the years just fly by so quickly. I didn’t want to do too much except spend some time with my family, so we spent the day in downtown Los Angeles (the fashion district to be exact). I had some business to take care of in the area so we decided to make a day of it.

If you want to see commerce in action, the fashion district is a good theater to watch it in action. One side of the district is nothing but distributors of all types. The other side is all retail (no chains). You will see people from all over the world doing one thing–hustlin’!

I LOVE IT!!!

I’ll talk about some things regarding this outing in the near future that I think you will find interesting.

My wife picked up a new purse and some glasses and my kids got their 24hr toys (24hr toys are cheap toys that your kids will destroy in 24hrs). As for me, I didn’t need to buy anything. I’m a man that has a beautiful wife and kids that love me dearly. I know it may sound corny, but the love from my family is the best birthday present I could ever want.

On the night before, we walked around Beverly Hills to do some window shopping. I picked out things I though my wife would wear and I was about 97% correct (that is good for me). I saw more black folk in Beverly Hills that night than I have ever seen in all the times I have been down there (brothas sitting at an outdoor cafe on Rodeo, a few sistahs attending what appeared to be some kind of party for an upcoming show). Now these folks may not have had a dime to their name, but it was still good to see us in an environment that was considered off limits to us for so many years.

Switching gears a little bit now—

#In the very near future (I’m hoping sometime next week), I will be adding another column to blackinformant.com that will highlight the state of our educational system here in the US. In addition to articles and commentaries, there are about 3 public school employees that I know that will hopefuly provide you with some insight on how this system has been consistently failing our kids. You will hopefully be hearing from them in the very near future (to protect their identities, I will withhold the names and locations of these individuals–If you are a public school employee and wish to contribute, you will be treated the same way. Just shoot me an e-mail).

Too many of our tax dollars have been dumped into this system with mediocre results. I’m not against public schools, just public waste. I want the school system to work for all of our kids, not just a few of them. Stay tuned.

#The “Commentary” section will be renamed to “News & Commentary”. I am doing this because there are some interesting news pieces out there that I want to post that are not considered commentary.

New Links

I came across these links that you might find both interesting and useful.

blackprof.com – A blog that features the thoughts of 9 black law professors from across the country.

TopBlacks.com – A website that features what it says–top blacks in various fields of expertise.

Charles S. Mombo is the President/CIO of the company Burnedbrass Technologies, Inc. — Chicago based MBE certified IT & Business consulting company. His company website can be found here. He also just launched an online yellow pages for small businesses [link].