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Michelle
Aug 15, 05 - 7:12 PM |
Bling Bling by Minya Oh (aka Miss Info)
Okay, my dears. If you live in NYC, you may know her as a radio personality on Hot 97. If you watch VH1, you may know her from Best Week Ever. Now you'll know her as the author of the fabu book Bling Bling : Hip Hop's Crown Jewels. I've pulled together some places where you can read more about her and see some pictures of Minya Oh who also goes by Miss Info.
Well, I like the description at the VH1 site so I'm going to quote it here (but it is out of date - you can hear her giving you news and gossip during the week and during her show on Saturdays from 8-noon):
Miss Info
Admittedly misleading in appearance, Miss Info brews a sometimes-caustic always-opinionated blend of wit, news, and gossip for the highly-rated Hot97 morning radio show with MTV's Sway. As a long-time entertainment journalist, she has also bled-sweat-and-teared for the likes of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, Glamour, MTV News, and VH1. In stark contrast to her celebrity subjects, Miss Info does not bathe in Cristal or smoke "sticky icky" with reformed pimps, but she's careful enough to "never say never." Miss Info has, on occasion, overpaid for shoes.
If you scroll to end of this blog entry, there is a picture of Miss Info with Jin.
There is a also picture at Miss Info's Hot 97 profile.
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Michelle
Aug 20th, 2005 - 4:51 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) on MTV Overdrive
Look out for Minya Oh talking about her new book Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels on MTV Overdrive. I'll let you know when the segment is airing.
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Michelle
Aug 21st, 2005 - 8:33 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) on MTV VMAs 8/28/05
So you can watch Minya Oh (Miss Info)talk about her book Bling Bling during the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, August 28th.
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M
Aug 24th, 2005 - 9:59 AM |
Re: Bling Bling by Minya Oh (aka Miss Info)
Hip-Hop's Royalty Show Off Their Crown Jewels In 'Bling Bling' reported by Jennifer Vineyard at mtv news online (8/18/05)
First note: "'Bling Bling' author Minya Oh interviews Mike Jones, Paul Wall and others, and gives a sneak peek at what the stars will be wearing on the VMAs carpet. Look for it August 28 on Overdrive."
Next, here's an excerpt from the article:
[begin quote]...
Former MTV News scribe Minya Oh (also known as Hot 97's Miss Info) chats up rappers from 50 Cent and Lil Jon to Chuck D and Slick Rick in her book, "Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels" (out next week via Wenner Books), which explores the bling phenomenon from back in the day to present day, with everyone rocking their most choice ice.
"People want to sparkle," Oh said. "Everyone wants to stand out, none more so than rappers. They were struggling to find their place in both music and the larger American culture, and went from struggling minority to legit millionaires. They're living out champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and then we follow suit by getting our own little personal piece of glamour. There's never been more rhinestones on the least jewelry-related products. We're seeing bling bling in banking ads, chewing gum ads, hundreds of products. It now translates to all types of people, because it makes you more glamorous than you were."
...
But other approaches work too. Ghostface relates how he told his label to give him the marketing budget for his album, and he would market himself — but ended up blowing it all on a huge gold eagle to wear on his wrist. "For any normal person, that is the stupidest thing you could do," Oh said. "But you can't argue that his strategy didn't work. Everyone talked about it, and no one will forget it."
[end quote]
Hip-Hop's Royalty Show Off Their Crown Jewels In 'Bling Bling' reported by Jennifer Vineyard at mtv news online (8/18/05)
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Michelle
Aug 28th, 2005 - 11:44 PM |
Re: Bling Report by Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) on MTV Overdrive
It was great! Here's the link if you missed it:
Watch the Bling Report by Minya at the VMA's.
And be sure to pick up her book: Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels.
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Michelle
Sep 2nd, 2005 - 10:46 AM |
Re: Bling Bling by Minya Oh (aka Miss Info)
So I didn't really specify that there is a picture of Minya Oh/Miss Info on the VH1 site: scroll down. The main picture she uses is on the Hot 97 site and at the Wenner Books site. And as mentioned above, if you scroll down on this page, there is a picture of Miss Info with rapper Jin. And don't forget to check out her book, Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels.
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M
Oct 13th, 2005 - 11:10 AM |
Miss Info's video blog
Well, it's more like a collection of things she thinks are interesting and that she thinks you'll find interesting.
Miss Info's Video Blog.
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Michelle
Oct 16th, 2005 - 1:16 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in the NYT 10/16/05
Read about Miss Info in the Sunday Style Section of the New York Times. There's a picture of her at a fund-raiser. It was a Project By Project event. She was the emcee. As an attendee, I can attest to her charm and wit throughout the night!
Here's the segment about her:
Item: Sisters Think Parents Did O.K.
by Alex Williams
Published: October 16, 2005
Without even considering the psychic costs, American readers might find the book's narrow definition of success myopic in a country with such a vast plate of career options to sample from. Even some first-generation Asian-Americans do.
One such person is Minya Oh, a host for the New York radio station Hot 97 who goes by the on-air name Miss Info. Ms. Oh grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where her Korean-born parents owned a toy store. Like the Kims, the Oh parents pushed their daughter relentlessly and hoped that the academic intensity found at the nearby University of Chicago would rub off on her. They tirelessly attempted to steer her toward a career as an architect, she said, even though she had no interest in math or buildings.
Unfortunately for her parents, it was the rap music she heard around the neighborhood, not the hushed conversation on the campus, that made Ms. Oh ***** up her ears. Her parents, she said, were gravely concerned when she decided to pursue her love of hip-hop as a career. They still are. After a decade of writing for magazines and appearing on radio and television, Ms. Oh still must endure her mother's reminders that it is not too late for, say, law school. The needling still rankles Ms. Oh, who said she considers herself a rebel against the old-world Asian success ethic.
But she is not sure her voice would be heard daily by 2.2 million listeners without it.
"Even when you rebel as a Korean-American child, you can only rebel so much," Ms. Oh said. "You have no option of absolutely falling off the overachiever wagon and being a schlump."
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M
Oct 17th, 2005 - 12:12 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in the NYT 10/16/05
I did want to follow up with my comments on this article:
1) That picture was an odd choice considering I saw the photographer following her around all night. I find it hard to believe that was the best out of the lot.
2) Also, I don't know why the picture wasn't captioned more appropriately, i.e., identifying that she was at a charity cook-off.
3) It is too bad there was no mention of her book Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels.
4) I think her point was that she did benefit in her career choice from the values instilled in her by her parents despite their disagreement over her career path. But the way the article was written and the quotes used, this message was only clear after a few re-readings.
5) I could nitpick a bit more but I'll stop and just say, I found it more impressive in concept than in actual content. But hey, at least it's exposure!
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M
Oct 18th, 2005 - 3:24 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in King
For those of you asking for pix of Miss Info, the upcoming issue of King should have some. If you are familiar with King, you'll know what to expect (not much...in the way of attirement).
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Michelle
Oct 21st, 2005 - 2:05 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in King Magazine December 2005 issue
Miss Info is a fellow Pop Culture Addict (or PCA as I like to say) so she isn't unfamiliar to me, but even my reaction was, me oh my!
Peep a pic of a lavishly photographed, though scantily clad, Miss Info and pick up the magazine for the full interview!
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Michelle
Oct 26th, 2005 - 9:29 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in XXL
Check out the latest issue of XXL for a story about Minya Oh/Miss Info's book Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels.
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Michelle
Nov 26th, 2005 - 12:38 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in the Source
I just read a smear piece of Minya Oh/Miss Info in the most recent Source. It is something about "a Radio Vixen." It is a sidebar piece to a longer article about Funkmaster Flex. She even gets a little, murky black and white-ish picture. I know what I think about the piece. You can read it for yourself and decide.
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Michelle
Jan 13th, 2006 - 10:24 PM |
Miss Info on MySpace
This is self-explanatory:
http://www.myspace.com/missinfo
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Michelle
Apr 13th, 2006 - 10:52 PM |
Another NYT article quoting Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) 4/13/06, Part I
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/fashion/thursdaystyles/13nicknames.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Part I (She's actually towards the end so not in this section.)
April 13, 2006
Mi, a Name I Call Myself. And You Are?
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
THEIR real names are Jared Feldman, Jeffrey Hatton and Rebecca Pridmore. But they are known to the world as Jafeldma, Haffro and VandanaZoe.
Jafeldma is derived from Mr. Feldman's funky sounding college e-mail handle. Haffro was inspired by a childhood drawing of a woman with an Afro and is the only name Mr. Hatton goes by. VandanaZoe, or V.Z., was one of the first screen names Ms. Pridmore created and one that became an off-line nickname, though she has multiple monikers, including MacGoddess and Tribecca.
"It really has just become a common name for me," said Mr. Feldman, a 27-year-old digital technology manager in Manhattan whose friends are known by nicknames like Pumpkin, Jlauer and Abburger. "There are people who only know me as Jafeldma," he said.
Nicknames have been around for centuries, long before the digital age and even before Shakespeare was scribbling iambic pentameter with an inky quill. They have been the province of schoolchildren, athletes, crooners and mobsters, and have described everyone from Queen Elizabeth I (the Virgin Queen) to Loretta Swit's Hot Lips Houlihan character on the "M*A*S*H" television series.
But the process of acquiring a nickname was changed by the advent of e-mail in the 1980's, when users had to create their e-mail handles. It occurred to many people that a nickname did not have to be earned or conferred. Rather, people could christen themselves.
Today e-mail handles and screen names often evolve into users' off-line nicknames, and the saucy turns of phrase prevalent in blogs and online forums easily catch fire and leap from computer screen to tongue. Practically everyone and everything now has a nickname, it seems, whether they like it or not. Starbucks is Fourbucks, Anderson Cooper is the Coop, and Mandisa, the big-voiced contestant voted off "American Idol" last week, is Mandiva. That President Bush has a penchant for nicknames has only made them more prevalent. It is an abbreviated world.
"It's your personal brand," said Andy Walker, a technology journalist in Toronto. To many he is known as Cyberwalker (also the name of his technology Web site). College friends know him as Splash. (Pranksters doused him with a 40-gallon bucket of water during his freshman year.)
"It's precision in language, which is exactly what we need in an age of too much information," he said. "How do you get around time and too much information? You create nicknames."
The word nickname is a variant of "eke-name" ("eke" meant an addition or increase), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. No data shows whether there are more nicknames floating around now than in other periods in history, said Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, whose students sometimes greet him with a "Hi, Debaron," his e-mail handle. "As far as we know nicknames have always been with us," he said. "But one of the differences is self-nicknaming."
Mr. Hatton, 29, always introduces himself as Haffro. (His nickname really stuck during his college years in Charlotte, N.C., where his peers enjoyed jam sessions and an impressive beer bong at his off-campus house.) He does so internationally too, on backpacking trips across Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, where he gives strangers he encounters his Haffro e-mail address and the promise of a place to stay in the United States should they ever visit.
"It's my alter ego," said Mr. Hatton, who works for a nonprofit organization in the Bronx. "I appreciate people that call me that, and I often call people by their nicknames."
Names have meaning and are imbued with varying degrees of potency.
Countless people have changed their names for reasons more significant than linguistic cacophony. Mr. Walker, who has written about hackers, drew an analogy to them: "They don't say, 'I'm Jim Smith,' " Mr. Walker said. "They say 'I am the Evil One.' Their whole reputation exists around this very powerful nickname."
Grant Barrett, project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, pointed out that the ability to track and recognize nicknames may have increased, but that renaming oneself is not a new phenomenon.
"We all have a choice," he said, explaining that there have always been people who tweaked their names.
Only now, slang and nicknames have the potential to reach a broader group much faster, said Dave Wilton, the author of "Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends."
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Michelle
Apr 13th, 2006 - 10:55 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) in another NYT article 4/13/06, Part II
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/fashion/thursdaystyles/13nicknames.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Part II (She's quoted in this section so read carefully.)
Ms. Pridmore, 36, who is a troubleshooter specializing in Apple computers (hence the MacGoddess name), has a nickname for each circle she moves in. "Tribecca," as in the Manhattan neighborhood, was given to her by friends at a Burning Man arts festival in Nevada.
"The name you were given when you were born has nothing to do with you really," she said.
No one knows that better than rappers and D.J.'s, who have not only been creating unique nicknames for decades but who also appropriate the names of the famous and infamous who have come before them.
"A lot of people take nicknames to give them cool points," said the Memphis rapper Al Kapone, who produced and wrote the title track to the film "Hustle & Flow."
Born Alphonzo Bailey, his moniker is a twist on a grandmother's playful name for him (Al Capone). It is a fittingly macho nickname, he said, for a man who decided to immerse himself in underground street rap.
"It was a hood thing, I guess, to remember certain people," he said of nicknames, adding that a short man might come to be known, say, as Carl Shorty. "It became cool to call that person that."
Just as important as the cool factor, though, is the idea that a nickname can convey something about a person's demeanor that a birth name cannot. "A lot of times it's closer to your personality," Al Kapone said.
Minya Oh, who has written about hip-hop for Vibe and The Source and is known as the radio personality Miss Info on Hot 97 in New York, said that sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com have enabled everyone to feel like celebrities.
"Now more than ever the regular person is a star in their own mind, and in their own circle of friends," she said. "It's all about the Everyman becoming the Superman."
As Dr. Baron put it: "People take great pride in crafting a persona."
Perhaps it is not surprising then that people have taken to naming their inanimate objects as well. After all, the world is littered with iPods, and there are only so many case covers to distinguish them.
Jennifer Doll, a publicist in Los Angeles, has a nickname for her iPod (Sherman), as well as her computer (Hank) and her BlackBerry (Bubba, because it reminds her of a blankie, and like a blankie, the BlackBerry goes everywhere).
"You tend to like things better when you name them," she said.
Self-branding through the personalization of tangible objects is the rule rather than the exception these days, where everything from cologne to sneakers is customizable.
"Look how we personalize our cellphone ring tones," Dr. Baron said. "It's not just that we want to know whose phone is ringing when it rings," he said, adding that his plays Erik Satie. "But everybody I know takes very special care to get just the right song or tonal phrase."
Ms. Oh pointed out that her T-Mobile Sidekick, like most media nowadays, has a designated space to enter nicknames.
The Internet has several nickname generators, where one can acquire all manner of monikers, from Western-theme to porn-star-worthy. But the most beloved are those that are organic, that spring from an event, a physical trait or a hobby.
In the 1980's, before e-mail was de rigueur, Darryl Hooker spent much of his time overseas among a group of brokers in the foreign exchange business with nicknames like Box, E. T. and Fingers. One was named Barney because he looked like Barney Rubble of "The Flintstones" cartoon series. Then there was Streaky Person, who was long and lean, like streaky bacon.
"It was high profile voice brokers in their heyday," said Mr. Hooker, who lives in London and is known in some circles as Murdoch. "If you were any good, you got a nickname."
Or perhaps your nickname got a nickname. Al Kapone is also known as Al Kapeezy. Ms. Oh is Miss Info or Info or Inf.
Elizabeth Kullen, 34, of Naples, Fla., and an owner of American Colors, which custom paints motorcycles, is tall and blonde. She was called Barbie by the pre-kindergarten students she used to teach. Her friends started calling her Malibu Barbie and, eventually, just Malibu. Now it is her e-mail handle.
"I like it because its not your standard nickname," she said. "It's not just an e-mail address. It has some personality to it."
And as millions of people continue to express themselves with instant messaging, e-mail, blogs, forums and Web sites, they will continue to create what Dr. Baron calls new literary genres. Unlike the novel and the lyric poem, these digital forms are being formed in our lifetimes, he said, and we are in the unique position of being able to see how they unfold.
"It's a fantastic opportunity to see how a genre comes into being," Dr. Baron said. "It's like being present at the birt
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Michelle
Aug 25th, 2006 - 8:58 AM |
MTV VMA's and Minya Oh (aka Miss Info)
It's that time again. The MTV VMA's are live on Thursday, August 31st. Check online at MTV Overdrive for a brand new bling report by Minya Oh/Miss Info. She looks her fantastic self as she interviews Jacob the Jeweler and comments on the ongoing bling culture.
http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?name=features
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Michelle
Aug 30th, 2006 - 12:01 AM |
Bling Report on MTV Overdrive
Here's the link: http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1539484.
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Michelle
Nov 24th, 2006 - 4:30 PM |
Minya Oh (aka Miss Info) on VH1 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s
I was happy to see Miss Info back on VH1 on this countdown of songs of the 80s. And she was on the same show as Jason Mraz and Colin Hay although the latter didn't seem to be on as much as M-R-A-Z. Anyway, Miss Info was cute and funny as always.
http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/the_greatest/106856/episode.jhtml
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