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This is not the Loch Ness Monster. There is nothing to suggest that it is any kind of living organism at all. People, you're seeing what you want to believe. Stop it.
Best line in the article: "I couldn't believe it. It's just like the descriptions of Nessie."
Security guards shouldn't be smoking that stuff.
I am overwhelmed.
I wanted to write something witty, incisive, and entertaining about a bill going before American lawmakers this year, which would give musicians more money. Aaaaand... I think I failed. But it's at least interesting. Well, to me, anyway. Maybe to you too. Good luck.
On the one hand, the musicians to which I am referring are recording artists that get radio air time, and who get a lot of money already. On the other hand, this new money wouldn't come from me. But back on that first hand, it would come from radio stations, which would hurt radio, and they're already hurting. On the other hand again, apparently the recording artists are also hurting.
Who are we kidding here? It's a huge money industry and the artists are not hurting nearly as much as the radio stations. The big money artists normally given radio air time aren't closing their studio doors and finding jobs as coders or music teachers. They're still working as artists, even with an income that is more and more from concerts and paraphernalia with their names on it. Radio stations are tanking if they don't do the smart thing and broadcast over the internet, where an increasing number of people are getting their music these days. With that in mind, perhaps broadcast radio stations are a dying breed anyway.
But radio stations have paid royalties to the songwriters for a long, long time now. Just not to the musicians.
However, many of the musicians are also the songwriters. Not in every case, but in many. Those people will clean up. It will encourage more musicians to write their own songs. But they don't write their own songs now because they are musicians and performers, not songwriters, and a virtuoso performance of a bad song is just a very accurate rendition of terrible music. Do we really want to encourage that?
Some radio stations may just say to Hells with it and start playing Rush Limbaugh and other talk shows. True it sucks, but at least they don't have to pay as much.
It's a complicated issue, and one about which I don't have enough knowledge to give any writeup a really proper analysis. I don't even yet know on whose side I am in the debate.
I can sort of doomsay it this way, though. If the artists win, the radio stations will have even worse financial woes and we'll probably lose even more great stations to the financial vortex. If the radio stations win, then the artists will not receive what they, by all rights, should be receiving based on the fact the songwriters have been receiving it. This could result in bad songwriting and worse music. It could also result in a musical revolution in which we find we had another group like The Beatles all along, but nobody knew because they didn't write their own songs.
There's pretty much no way to determine exactly what will happen. It's likely, though, that whichever side wins, the music listeners will lose. They'll just listen to whatever they already have on CD or iTunes. Then the radio stations will lose, the artists will lose, and the songwriters will lose too. It's pretty likely that everyone will lose, no matter how it goes.
Which begs the question: why didn't the radio stations just pay the musicians the same royalties as the writers in the first place? Some blame racism. I blame greed.
Here... google this stuff. If you listen to music at all, you want to be informed. I did a search for "artists receive pay for radio play" and came up with this set of links. None of them are more recent than July 31, and I wanted to provide something newer. But, for some reason, that's the most recent information available. And one would think that Variety would keep up with this sort of thing. But even their most recent article, which does not show up in that Google search, is from August 4. If you search in the Variety web site for "radio royalties," you'll see articles going back a long time. This is not a new development.
I can't tell you what to think or believe about it. I'm not sure yet even what I think and believe about it.
But I do think that, if music is important to you, then it's something of which you need to be aware and follow.
But that's just my opinion. I'm not an artist. I'm a listener and consumer... you know, one of the people that give the radio stations, songwriters, and musicians a reason to do what they do.
Sometimes, a product comes along that you know will be so massively useful, that is so simple and yet so brilliant, that just have to wonder how mankind got along without it. We're talking about something that should be placed in the same category as the wheel and the lever.
And then there's this. This is not one of those things.
Many people have read the words "non sequitur" and wondered what it means, exactly. Well, exactly it means "it does not follow." That means that it's a phrase that contains elements that are, normally, completely unrelated. Not to say mutually exclusive.
And I like non sequiturs. They make me pause, and cause my brain to do that high-gear-to-reverse-all-at-once thing. My brain needs exercise. Everyone's does. A good non sequitur might also cause a laugh that comes far too rarely.
Some people are graphically-minded, though, and need a good visual reference to match up with what they happen to be hearing. An example is the concept to which I'm alluding. And just in case you're that kind of thinker, I present to you this link. Prepare yourself. Here it is.
Well? Did your brain stop functioning for a moment there? Did it send your mind a "WTF?!" moment?
They kind of grow on you, don't they? There's two separate items there. They're not expensive.
I have a bare spot on my shelf... right next to my Cthulhu plushie.
See? I like non sequiturs.
Recently, we had our stock service switch us to a paperless system, so that we could be notified via electronic, paperless means of changes and actions taken, without the usage of paper or paper products for these notifications. All thanks to a paperless service system. That doesn't use paper.
'Cause it's paperless.
Today we got a letter in the regular, "snail mail" postal service in a large envelope on a standard A4 sheet, from our stock service, thanking us for switching to a paperless service system.
That's it. There's nothing more that I could add to that to make it more ironic or funny than it already is.
hungryI missed a day there. Sorry about that. I've had something I've been doing. It had all my attention, although I did make sure I made time for my wife. Aside from that, though, it was busy, busy, busy. Trying a lot of new things, seeing how old things worked, dealing with severe delays, and so on. It was a huge time suck.
And now my work week begins.
Yawn. Not enough sleep and I have a headache.
In other news, Champions Online's open beta started two days ago.
I wonder what that's like?
incredulousMarilyn Monroe died.
This is not news.
This is olds.
However.
The crypt above hers is available for purchase.
This is a good story. Go get a stiff drink, 'cause I got some 'splainin' to do.
Back?
Good.
Way back in the days where men were men, women were women, and most of the time it was pretty obvious which was which, there was a guy named Joe DiMaggio that married a woman named Marilyn Monroe. They were very happy, until they got divorced, and Joe sold his crypt location to a guy that we'll call "Dick," but only because his name is Richard Poncher.
Later, Marilyn died and a nation was ensaddenated. After that, Dick died.
And had himself interred directly above Marilyn.
Face down.
I am not exaggerating, nor am I making this up, I don't have the time.
Well, Dick had left behind a wife, and she owned the crypt and one for herself as well, right next to Dick's. And now, she says, that she'll move Dick's remains one spot over to where she was to be interred, and she'll have herself cremated. She's selling the crypt that Dick is in face down above Marilyn Monroe, in order to pay the mortage on her house.
Forget Sotheby's. Apparently she didn't have time to Dick around.1
She wants to raise 1.6 million dollars "to pay off her mortgage on her Beverly Hills home."
Bonus to you prospective buyers; the crypt next to Marilyn's is owned by Hugh Hefner! So... there's that. Also, the advertisement calls it "...a once in a lifetime2 and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe."
At the time of this posting, the auction has reached over 4.5 million USD, so that mortgage is pretty much a done deal.
Personally, I intend to live forever.3 But given the choice, I don't think I'd want to spend eternity next to Marilyn Monroe. From what I've seen of her, she was kind of a ditz, and more of a trophy wife than anything else. I'd be happy to spend eternity interred beside my own wife, thank you very much.
And not face down.
What the Hells was that Dick thinking?
1. I hate myself for that pun. You should too.
2. Har!
3. So far, so good.
"Album only."
That's what I see sometimes when I go to iTunes in order to purchase the latest song I have heard on the radio that I like. It's got a nice beat, I can tap to it, sing along, and it gives me a moment of catharsis. I decide I want to hear it all the time, or at least any time I want, and so I boot up, start up, double-click, click the store link, type the song name and artist into the search input bar, and scroll down the list until I see what I want.
Sometimes, I see "album only."
That pisses me off.
Look. If your album is so crappy that you only have one song on it that's worth buying, then don't have an album; release a single and polish your act. Don't try to make me buy a bunch of crappy songs by only releasing the one good song if the consumer buys the whole album.
Because you know what? When the one song to which I'm going to listen costs ten to fifteen dollars instead of only one dollar, and also takes ten times longer to download, it's no longer worth buying at all. I'll wait until it comes on the radio and record it; that's still legal.
And for that matter, when I decide not to pirate a song and actually pay for it, doing the right thing, I'm rewarded with this kind of crap? I can probably pirate the song for free! But rather than appreciate the honesty and integrity, the people selling the albums punish me by forcing me to buy drek I don't even want just to get the single song that I do want.
This is, as we said back in high school, bullshit.
iTunes isn't the only fish in the web, though.* Amazon.com sells .mp3 format songs for the same price that I can transfer over to my cell phone without converting them to audio CD format from .aac and then from audio to .mp3. They download ready for cell phone use, and they still go into iTunes anyway. So the last time I saw iTunes give their customers the digital bird that way, I went to Amazon and looked the song up there, and sure enough, they had it for the very same price as iTunes!
That price being "album only."
Bastards. All of them.
I'm back again.
It's been a good day. So far, I swam a lot in the pool and went back into the apartment to enjoy the air conditioning. Both experiences were nice. When I got back upstairs, I stole the frosty from Wendy's that my wife had in the 'fridge. I'll replace it. It's been there for days, so she probably won't mind.
But now that I've stolen it, she'll want it when she gets back upstairs herself. You watch.
She's soaking up some sun. I avoid that actively, and since I can't swim any more for a while and hide from solar rays under a foot or so of water, then I'm back up here.
I'm exercising muscles that I haven't exercised in a long while, and they'll be angry with me for it later. But they needed it. And I feel good.
I'll get back to being angry at the rest of the world tomorrow. For now, I have a swimming pool, air conditioning, a frosty, and the intertubes.
And it is good.
Today is the anniversary of my wife's birth. I believe that it is called, in the strange vernacular of the denizens of some of the most remote places on this planet, a "birthday." The name makes little sense to me, but this world's language niceties often do. Split infinitives? The ability to make a statement more versatile is a bad thing? It's strange. But if a "birthday" is what it is called, then who am I to judge. It still makes very little sense to me.
Anyway, I'm focusing most of my attention on her today, because...
Oh! NOW I get it! BIRTH day!
So.
Let's see.
They've done Seuss books.
They've done cartoons.
They've done comic books.
Now they're doing the old video game Asteroids. Seriously. They're so low on ideas that a single line drawing of a triangle making little rocks out of big rocks with a blip-gun seems like it will work for them.
Dear Hollywood
Stop shitting on my childhood.
Your friend,
///Me
P.S. It's okay to do another Batman movie, but don't screw it up.
