#tourescousin should get a Ph.D in WTF

"Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?" -- Lyrics to a song that may have been truer than we imagined

How come none of you fruits told me Toure pulled a John Mayer on Twitter this week?

It could be that you just weren't aware. After all, this is XXL. I don't mean to suggest that the audience here is a bit less savvy than the people I would normally associate with, which might be bad for XXL's "brand," but suffice it to say that I probably wouldn't be here, if there wasn't $8 to be made. I happen to know at least one of the artists featured in XXL (one of the original Freshman 10, as I recall) had to hire Julia Beverly to operate his Twitter for him. No Boutros? For what it's worth, Twitter is somewhat complicated. An empty box that says "What are you doing?" could mean so many different things. And who are all of those other people? Is Diddy trying to tell me something? Why is he so excited?

I actually caught some of Toure's John Mayer incident as it was unfolding the other day, but I didn't realize the potential lulz for a couple of reasons. (1) I didn't catch the initial, ridonkulous comment from which the rest of this kerfuffle blossomed, like one of those deep fried onions they sell at Outback Steakhouse - supposedly one of the most unhealthy - and hence delicious - things you can possibly order in a restaurant, right up there with the chicken wings at Hooters. (Fun Fact: Did you know the wing sauce at Hooters consists almost entirely of butter? It's true. If you order them mild, it's literally just deep fried chicken wings tossed in butter.) (2) I might be a little bit impartial when it comes to Toure, because we come from similar backgrounds. Otherwise, I would have been realized he's as crazy as catshit. I can probably relate to him more than most people (no homo), because I understand what it's like to be surrounded by cracka-ass crackas. Would I have pledged an all-white fraternity in college? No, but then I wouldn't have turned around and went all afrocentric either. I keep my whiteness like Toure keeps his shirts. Extra smedium.

Before we go any further, we should probably have a look at said initial, ridonkulous comment. If you're heroic enough to still be reading this mess, you probably have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. Blossoming onions? White fraternities? The fuck? Though even if you do know what Toure has been up to this week, you might be a little bit lost at this point, I'll admit.

[Note: I've edited it some to make it more readable, and I probably fucked some of it up, because it's a Friday afternoon, and it's getting dangerously close to Miller time.]

If you're black and dislike seeing black men with white women, does it give you pause to know that the Klan agrees with you? I understand and respect the nationalistic dating perspective and abhor the Klan's segregative impulse. But politics is making strange bedfellows. Many, many, many of our great-grandmothers were raped in slavery. But surely a few of them were loved and surely some were cunning and brilliant enough to use their bodies to gain liberation, thus fooling massa. Of course most were raped, we know that, but some were sharp enough to trade that good-good for status or liberation. They are absolutely not hoes. They're sexually heroic. They're self-liberating by any means necessary.

Um, yikes!

But here's the crazy part: Some angry black chick called him on it, and he copped a plea. He claimed that he'd been in yoga class [||], and his cousin, an insane Ph.D student (the black unabomber?), tweeted that shit. Even though, if you follow Toure on Twitter, you'd know that that little history lesson was in the same style he always uses, which was the dead giveaway. Then he started retweeting updates from an account called @tourescousin, in which his alleged cousin took responsibility for the offending tweets, then started saying some more crazy shit. That's when I picked up on it. But I didn't bother to try to figure out what was going on, because Toure has been known to use his Twitter as an outlet for his logorrhea (rather than just getting a blog, like the rest of us), and its usually just banal PC bullshit.

If only I'd been aware at the time of the emerging pattern of incidents in which Toure says some crazy shit and then tries to pretend that he didn't. I'd been aware of a couple of previous such incidents, but I only just now realized they were related. Last year, there was the legendary sackbeast incident, in which he apparently broke into dream hampton's Twitter account and touted his own sexual prowess. I screencapped it and posted it on my own site, and then someone went and edited dream hampton's Wikipedia to note that Toure was her best lay evar. Which, for what it's worth, she never officially denied. Then there was the incident where he quoted someone on Martha's Island calling Michelle Obama a hoodrat. It's never been revealed who that was, or how Toure got into contact with them - but it's a journalist's responsibility to protect his sources, and I wouldn't want someone accusing me of some shit like that, if I operated under any pretense of journalistic credibility. So... um, yeah.