• A variety of artists I’m interested in
• Non-DRMed tracks (i.e. will play anywhere, unlike Apple’s iTunes store)
• Reasonable prices (Warp Records has an mp3 store, where each track is $1.35!)

emusic.com seems to meet all my criteria, so I suppose it’s time I pay the piper…

After beginning registration, I decided to go to bed and finish up the next day. What do I find in my inbox, this morning, but unsolicited mail bugging me to sign up for a free emusic.com trial.

Take a close look at the only page I filled out; there is no notice that they are going to send me shit. What is a company, who caters independent music to web savvy young people, thinking when they send unsolicited mail to potential users?

I’m going to call them up tomorrow and see if they have anything to say for themselves. If I get a positive response, I will give them $10/month for access.

Stay tuned for results…

Check out the first and second ‘Other Top Stories’

In other news, I’m excited for people to try the latest version of Democracy, which is *vastly* improved. I would say that Telemusicvision is finally ‘watchable.’

If something worth talking about happens to me, expect to see it here.

Well I’ll be goddamned if the queen doesn’t look like a zombie locked in the back seat of a car.

If you’re thinking zombies don’t smile, think again. In this photo, she’s rolling through Singapore. Singapore is part of Asia. There are approximately 3,917,508,000 brains in Asia.

Dinner is on.

Sgt. Sarvis and I are in the war room.

Because of Sgt. Sarvis’ rank, or maybe because she brought a guy with a pink tie to the ball, we were seated at the front table along with the highest ranking general at the event. I dined straight across the round table from the esteemed General Davenport, who was probably in his mid 70s. The old bastard ate his salad about twice as fast as I did mine. When it came to the stuffed chicken breast, I put the old fool to rest. My massive food hole did the majority of the work; I may have even been the first one at the table to finish(not too bad considering how much bigger some of these guys are than me).

I tried to hold Captain Kennedy’s hand. She hurt me.

The dancing was very minimal. It was more like:

1.)Drink alcohol in the MIT ROTC building (I missed most of this)
2.)Drink alcohol in Hyatt lobby
3.)Stand up really straight and look at people carry flags around
4.)Pray
5.)Toast people (Prez Bush included)!
6.)Eat Dinner
7.)Listen to ex-brass give horrible speech (it was piss poorly written and delivered)
8.)Pray
9.)Stand up straight again and watch people take flags out of room
10.)Drink more alcohol
11.)Music starts
12.)Leave
13.)Go to bar and drink yet more alcohol
14.)Find a different bar and drink alcohol (I had to leave before I got to bar #2… Bummer!)

Do you have what it takes?

You were loved and we will miss you.

Okay, I might sound rather cynical about this military ball business. But honestly, I did have a good time. How often does a leftist-pinko-commie-queer-friendly-jerky-nut like myself get to go hang out with the military elite? At least once in this lifetime :)

I am on an extremely short jaunt (about five blocks) to meet my amigo, Saul, at the Utrecht store on Mass. Ave. I am fresh off Spanish class and it is a really fucking nice night. I generally never ride bike with my mp3 player on my person, but a mere five blocks stands between myself and Utrecht.

I deftly navigate my bike between a jam of slow moving cars and accelerate down the hill on Bow St. Tim Harrington, of Les Savy Fav, is hollering in my ears as I lean forward and pedal hard. I approach Mt. Auburn and see nothing but green encouraging me to hit the left at a good clip (both streets are one way). I’m rolling at about 20 miles per hour, and as I hit the corner, I shift my weight hard to the left.

Many of you know that I am riding a fixed gear bike–one of the dangers being pedal strike (my pedals do not coast–if I lean too sharply into a turn, my pedal will contact the pavement at the bottom of its stroke).

As my left pedal cracks the blacktop, my bike whips itself out from under me. Before I realize where I’m headed, my left thigh and face impact the pavement. I’m up quickly and notice that my glasses are lying about eight feet ahead of me on the road. I rush forward, scoop up my glasses and then hop back and slide my bike onto the shoulder. There is no more Les Savy Fav.

Cars roll past as a pedestrian asks if I’m okay. I stammer, “I think so?” as I put my glasses on. I feel my already bigish lips becoming even more pronounced as I ride my bike at a limping pace the final two blocks to Utrecht. Saul isn’t there yet, so I pull my mp3 player out of my pocket and try turning it on–it doesn’t work anymore.

Saul rides up on this sweet little chopper (not the kind we’re used to–this one is cute and nice looking!) and inquires as to my safety. I tell him I’m okay, and then he explains that the black smudged on my nose and smeared into my lips make me look like a beaten clown with half a makeup job.

The aftermath: About ten seconds after scrubbing soap into my face, I am pissed that I didn’t have Saul snap a shot–I look truly ludicrous! I am still shaky and shell shocked, and am worthless for about an hour. After I mellow out, Saul and I rehearse our lines for a while (Saul is being a real champ and is donating his time and brainpower to a series of Telemusicvision PSAs). Before I leave, I decide to see if my mp3 player is truly dead (I have some files that I want to drop on Saul’s computer). After about two minutes of pressing buttons and poking the reset switch with a needle, I settle on pronouncing my faithful perhipheral dead. Literally right before I stow the player back into my bag, I give the power button a final try and the device lights up! So I transfer the files, and lazy back home on my bike (the night was really too nice to do otherwise).

In the end, I’ve got a scraped mp3 player, one tiny nick on one lens of my glasses, better defined lips, a rip in my best pair of jeans, and an mp3 player shaped bruise on my left thigh. Not too bad, all things considered (click on the thumbnails to see larger photos).

I asked for a signature, but I think she was far too bored for that (or maybe inebriated). If you can decipher the mess scrawled across my chest, then I will send you a lolly.

I must preface this dream by explaining that I’ve long fantasized about getting a really bad tattoo–something I really hate. It has to do with people saying, “you know, you’re really going to hate that some day.” I guess it would be great to tell them that they are wrong–that I hated it before I ever permanently affixed it to myself. On to the dream.

So this asshole was locked into some kind of ideological struggle with me–he was reminiscent of the motivational speaker portrayed by Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko.
He was spreading all sorts of slanderous lies about me, and I knew that I had to put an end to his shit eating ways. Of course, I was well aware that the most surgically precise way to end the debate was to get a huge photorealistic tattoo of this jerk on my back (not of Clint, mind you, but of my bitterly hated opponent).
When I approached my mother with the idea for this tattoo, she agreed that it was the only logical course of action.

It would have been a fun dream no matter, but the fact that my own mother was 100% behind me on marring my body with a hideous tattoo of a person I hated is what made this one special enough to brag about.

I can only imagine what would have happened if I had dreamed my dream a little longer… Jim Cunningham stunned into submission by my brilliant tattoo. The entire town cheering me on and knowing that I had been right and good all along.

Victory.

All of my friends in Boregon should know that Senator Gordon Smith is a far larger douchebag than originally suspected.

Senator Smith got some moneys from the RIAA and the MPAA (the people who control pop music and Hollywood). Now what is he doing, but trying to put an end to fair use! For my non-dork friends, this means that Senator Smith doesn’t want you to be able to use TiVos, iPods, and VCRs to their fullest extent.

The long and short of Smith’s proposed bill is that when you’re watching/listening to TV, movies, radio, Internet or satellite radio, the industry would have a legal right to “flag” the media. Flagged media would be restricted… it couldn’t be watched or listened to later (à la TiVo, VHS recording for later viewing, or saving a program onto your mp3 player). Basically, if this shit passes, it won’t stop piracy–it will just require us to download more cRakz and annoying warez programs to do what we want with our media!

But what do we do?? We could join some dorky ass squad and hand out flyers in the Trader Joe’s parking lot to yuppies who don’t care about this shit (despite the fact that they wear white earbuds too)! Instead, let Senator Smith know that you know that he is full of shit with this handy form (powered by the EFF–they are good people).

If you do that, good for you! You care about stuff. If you’re from Boregon and you have iPod toting friends, you might want to have them fill this out too.

I apologize for the fact that my blog has degenerated into this sort of political rambling–I just think that it’s fucking horrible that Senator Smith is pushing such crap legislation in my home state.

Oh, and Kompressor is dead!

Basically these nice people have taken an objective approach to identifying different qualities in music. They mapped damn near every song in existence, invented a really intuitive interface, and they serve up an unlimited helping of music. When you rate songs, your music stream will change dynamically.

It’s neat :)

(p.s. you can use a fake e.mail address)