makin me sad

Seeing how nice and talented T-Pain comes across in this video makes me even sadder than I was before about how awful other people in music reportedly treat him.

(Source: nprmusic, via brookehatfield)

(via cord jefferson)

got to give it up

NEVER REALIZED THIS WAS MARVIN GAYE [SHOCKED EMOJI]

love that he gets down in the audience and totally has good/wooden/dad dance moves.

i was flat obsessed with marvin gaye in 5th grade after his dad shot him. used a school project to send him a farewell note via balloon (think it was a kind of “message in bottle” experiment. did they know i was writing to marvin gaye? trying to get a message to him in the afterworld? via balloon?).

another sad story:

Frankie (Marvin Gaye’s brother) ran to the house and carefully walked into the hallway to his brother’s room, not knowing if his father still had the gun, whether his father was still in the room, or if his brother was dead. After walking into Marvin’s bedroom, an emotional Frankie held him as Marvin lay there, dying and bleeding rapidly. According to Frankie, Marvin, barely speaking above a whisper, told him, “I got what I wanted… I couldn’t do it myself, so I had him do it… it’s good, I ran my race, there’s no more left in me.”

stuffed with hundreds of bananas

from the review of elephant company, a biography of Lt. Col. James Howard Williams, known as Elephant Bill:

Calves born to domesticated mothers began school at 5 years of age (Williams referred to them as “my babies”), along with the 12-year-old boys who would grow up with them and become their lifelong uzis. After a short confinement in a pen greased with pig fat to protect the young elephants’ skin, the curriculum was all about bribery. By sundown, class was dismissed and the babies reunited with their mothers, “having been stuffed with hundreds of bananas.”

also did you know this about elephants:

They have six sets of teeth throughout their lives that move into place “not from underneath, but as if moved forward along on a slow conveyor belt,” and once they’ve used up their sixth set, they starve to death.