I listen to K-Rock 89.3 a lot now, but a few days ago, I was getting goddamned tired of the ACE Insulators adverts, so I switched to RixFM. I use their web player within Prism so I can see the little scrolling banner that shows what’s playing. The song was “Radio” by Danny, and I sort of dimly recalled that I liked something else of his. Not liked as in “this is a classic to which I will still be listening in ten years” (I won’t), but liked as in, “that’s cute and rather catchy.” Though I will cheerfully cough up cash for something I’ll listen to a lot, I’m somewhat less enthusiastic if it’s something I’ll listen to often for a few days and then probably not again for….probably never. Off I went to E******s (the first rule of u****t is that you do not talk about u****t) to look for the song. Couldn’t find it in the four brazillion results, but I wasn’t surprised because the title contains a very common word (“radio edit”, anyone?) and Danny is a fairly common name, so I filtered results for videos, thinking that if it was a new release, the music video would be in one of the multimedia groups. It was, and that was fine because all I needed was a video with high quality audio; this didn’t need to be archive quality, and mplayer can rip audio in seconds with “mplayer -dumpaudio myfile.avi -dumpfile myfile.mp3”. For that matter, so can ffmpeg, but I remember the command for mplayer, so I use that. I did watch the video to check audio quality, and Danny is a cute little 20-something blond-ish, which didn’t really surprise me since I sort of dimly recalled he’s from Sweden. I couldn’t remember his surname, and I was curious, so off I went to Google. Turns out that it’s…Saucedo. I thought to myself, “Saucedo? That’s rather a strange Swedish name…maybe he’s Sicilian or something?” Nope. He’s a half-breed, and his actual name is Daniel Gabriel Alessandro Saucedo….Grzechowski. The Saucedo bit isn’t Italian, it’s Bolivian, just like his mother. I think, though, that he strongly favours his Polish father. Cute little thing, too. I didn’t do the Jesus-glow to the photo; I “liberated” it that way. 🙂

I like half-breeds. They’re interesting. I am one, but I’m the kind like Danny–the kind you’d never tag as a half-breed unless you already know. If I look at him, knowing that one parent is Bolivian, and seeing the strong bone structure, I would not be surprised if his mother is not only Bolivian, but native Bolivian. Not knowing, I’d guessed him for maybe Sicilian. Looking at me, Canadian is no surprise, but you’d guess European background. You’d be half right, too, since my father is from England, but my mother is native Canadian. My curls, blue eyes and fair skin come from Dad, and if you didn’t know what a Mohawk looks like (the tribe, not the haircut, so I guess Kanienkehaka is more accurate), you’d probably not know my mother was anything but Caucasian. If you do know, though, you’ll recognise the sharp features because they are hers. Back home, I knew a young woman called Bonnie. I don’t know that I’d say we were “friends”, but we did hang out fairly often, and I did like her. Her mother was white and her father was black (if I remember correctly). Looking at her, you’d see an absolutely beautiful black woman. Not like “Angola purple-black”, but a black Canadian woman with black hair, fantastic dark brown eyes and gorgeous dark skin…coffee with milk instead of cream. If you didn’t know her hair wasn’t chemically straightened and her nose not surgically altered, you’d never know she was biracial. Bonnie, though, got the “good” of both races. Her unfortunate sister, Robin, got the worst of the “biracial” look; the kinky red hair, broad nose and sallow, heavily freckled skin. Interesting how genes can combine to sometimes produce a “product” that looks like one half of the union, or an attractive mix of both, or an unattractive mix.

Interesting photo…apparently, this little girl was the daughter of a European minister, but was kidnapped during a raid in the early 18th century and adopted by a Mohawk family. I wonder whether she grew up and married a Mohawk, and if she did, what did her kids look like?