RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

From The Onion:

"LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. 'We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material.'"

In related (real) news, I received my copy of Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, which I wrote about a couple months ago. You may recall I lamented the fact that Blue Note had foolishly put "protections" on the discs preventing them from being imported into iTunes (and thus copied to iPods). I am happy to report that they have either stopped doing this or it has no impact on Mac users—probably the latter, but I can't be sure.

I've only had time to listen to the opening cut, which was powerful. I can't wait to listen to the rest. The reason I mention it before I've even listened to all of it is to extend an offer to any readers who may have bought the CD and found they were unable to rip it. If you'd like, I'll trade you my copy of the CD and the mp3s I ripped for your copy of the CD. I'm not giving mp3s to anyone who didn't buy the disc, but I'll help you around the "protections" if you'd like. Just leave a comment.

I get "Lost" in your eyes

How many people are secure enough in their own coolness to quote Debbie Gibson in a blog post title?

Lately I have been consuming DVD episodes of television's Lost like a huge bag of Laffy Taffy; that is, much faster than you could possibly imagine, at possible risk to my health. That show is so freakin' good. I can't stop watching it. Drama, humor, mostly excellent acting, a solid premise with captivating twists...it is very good TV.

We get the DVDs one disc at a time from Blockbuster Online, which is a magical service to which everyone should subscribe. (The best way to do it, by the way, would be to try your first month for $9.95 by signing up for the service through my free XBox 360 referral. Even if you only get the initial 3 DVDs and two free in-store rentals and then cancel, you've gotten your money back and then some.) We love BBO because we can't get out to the theater much what with the baby and all, and I have a feeling we'll like it even more during the wintery hibernation that is coming.

Anyway, no real point to this post. I just like Lost a lot. By the way, if you hit me with any spoilers I will be consumed by anger. We're only halfway through the first season, so ZIP IT.

Thought you'd like to know: "Black Friday"

Many people believe that today, being the day after Thanksgiving, will be the busiest shopping day of the year. It won't. In a sign of our culture's penchant for procrastination, the busiest shopping day of the year is always the Saturday before Christmas. The week leading up to Christmas is known in the retail sector as the "13th month of the year."

The day after Thanksgiving is, however, the first day that most retail operations will see a profit during the calendar year. Hence the oft-misunderstood term "Black Friday."

I had to laugh yesterday when I saw an ad during the football game that tried to lure me into J.C. Penney at 5:00 a.m. Since I get hives just walking through J.C. Penney on my way to another store, even in the middle of summer when the place is dead, the idea that I would get up so early to go there today was amusing.

Thoughts on Walk the Line

Mr. Phoenix, I owe you an apology. I doubted that you could pull off Johnny Cash, and I'm sorry. You nailed it. I was wrong, and I hope we can forget the whole thing ever happened. I'll even stop pronouncing your first name "Joe Quinn."

Tracey and I saw Walk the Line tonight, and it was fantastic. I don't really feel up to writing a movie review, but I have a few disconnected observations.

Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were remarkable. They both sang all the concert and studio scenes in the film, and they both pulled off rather astonishing impressions of their subjects. One of the reasons Johnny Cash and June Carter sounded so perfect together was their vastly different vocal styles: his a deep, slow steam train of a sound and hers the sassy bouncing country girl twang. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon nailed their parts, and they create an on-screen chemistry worthy of Cash and Carter's professional and romantic entanglement.

This movie could have gone so wrong in so many ways. The actors could have fallen short. The screenwriter and director could have failed to balance Cash's dark toughness and antisocial behavior with his tender heart and ultimate faith, a rather difficult line to walk in its own right. They could have ruined the pace of the film by trying to cover too much of Cash's life, spending more time in the early years and carrying the narrative all the way to his death. The movie did not fail in any of these respects. I told Tracey before we walked in that I was half expecting to be disappointed. There were just too many places for it to take a wrong turn, and I predicted it would at one point or another. I came out beaming.

Walk the Line is a film that anyone can enjoy. If you are a Cash fan, it's a no brainer. If you want to see a good movie with tragedy, drama, comedy and romance, it will do the trick. If you appreciate the art of good filmmaking, it is a fine piece of work.

Many bitter authors have complained over the last several years about being "Pottered," that is, kept off bestseller lists by the tenaciously popular Harry Potter books. (Many lists fixed this "problem" by creating special categories for children's literature, so Harold Bloom and his ilk have settled down somewhat.) My cynicism about these complaints aside, I hope this movie doesn't get "Pottered" by Goblet of Fire, which was also released today and promises to knock everything else down one spot for weeks to come. It's not that I'm against Harry Potter; in fact, that is definitely my next movie to see. I just hope it doesn't completely overshadow this Cash biopic, which deserves to be seen.

Walk the Line is worth going to see in the theater; Johnny Cash was, as they say, larger than life. I also think it is worth buying on DVD, especially since there are bound to be great extra features. Go see it!

At it again...

Well, apparently I can't stay away. After landing myself a free iPod and a free Mac mini, I have gone to the well again, this time on a quest for a free Xbox 360.

This time, though, it's not just for me. Oh no, it would not be in my best interest to have something that dangerous just lying around the house at all times. This will be a community gaming console: for my friends who live in the houses next to me, for my friends from Artisan Church, and for anyone who provides a referral for me. That's right, if you give us a referral, you will have access to the Xbox. Anytime you want to use it, just let us know. This way, we spread the addictive evil around, ha ha.

It's the standard Gratis (now called Freepay) procedure: you sign up, compete an offer from one of the sponsors, and get friends to do the same. In this case, it's 8 referrals to get the prize. If you want to participate, make sure you disable popup blocking and enable all cookies while you complete the offer.

Here's the link: http://xbox360s.freepay.com/?r=24919139. That's http://xbox360s.freepay.com/?r=24919139 in plain text for you copy-and-pasters. Join in the fun!

Daring Fireball 15" PowerBook review

John Gruber's Daring Fireball review of the new 15" PowerBooks is interesting reading. In one good passage, he suggests that (as usual), Apple's hardware design is fantastic:

"There’s an extraordinary simplicity to the exteriors of all of Apple’s current portables....[C]ompare and contrast to the exterior of your typical PC laptop: two-tone plastic, gratuitously beveled corner edges, dozens of silly extra buttons surrounding the keyboard, and so forth. The difference is that PC hardware appears not to be designed so much as decorated. There are exceptions — IBM’s ThinkPads and Sony’s Vaios are generally pretty good-looking machines. But I don’t think they look as good as PowerBooks or iBooks, and one reason is that although they’re simple, they’re not simple enough."

Follow the link and continue reading for a hilarious and apt use of the F-word, as well as the clever turn of phrase "the ignorant mouth-breathing sort of people who touch computer displays with their fingers."

Gruber's advice on whether to buy now or after the switch to Intel-based machines is also worth reading. It's an interesting set of conjectures even if you are not considering a new PowerBook at all. All in all, the review is worth a few minutes of your time, but some readers may want to skip the more techie paragraphs.

Snowy software

After a couple weeks of lingering warm fall weather, the thermometer made a sharp drop today, to the point where we had a few snow flurries. This was 90% disappointing; I love winter, but I like it to wait until after Thanksgiving Day whenever possible. The 10% that wasn't disappointing came from the gorgeous graphic for "flurries" in my Dashboard weather widget:



This is the first snow since I have been running Dashboard. Pretty cool.

Don't ask me how it was snowing at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sad deevolution of Halloween candy

We went trick-or-treating on Halloween with Abel. Since he too young to know what candy is, let alone eat it, he was basically just a prop designed to get his parents a bag full of candy. A cute, monkey-suited prop. He had fun, though.

Anyway, we've been eating the candy since we got home that night, and it is fair to say that I am thoroughly disappointed. It was one bag of Skittles, a few Sweet Tarts, and like a billion chocolate bars. I think chocolate is fine, but what's up with almost everyone in the neighborhood distributing it exclusively? At Halloween, I want candy, not chocolate. How many Snickers bars can a man eat before he wants a nice bag of chewy Spree? Why am I doomed to dig through endless brown wrappers, only to be let down by the disappearance of the only tube of Smarties?* I'd even settle for a Jolly Rancher at this point.

Please, homeowners, think of the children. Have some variety in your candy basket. If Halloween were a holiday for menopausal women, you'd have gotten it just right this year. But it's not. I say again, think of the kids.

And while I'm making blanket appeals, here's one for the Reese's** corporation: please, I beg you, stop tinkering with the peanut butter cup. I think you pretty much nailed it on the first try, so quit making it inside out, or white, or dark, or whatever the hell else you might want to try to do to it in time to annoy me next Halloween. It's a milk chocolate cup with a peanut butter center. Stop screwing around!

Okay. Back to my story. Tonight, I grabbed two pieces from the candy dish and plopped down in front of the TV to watch a few episodes of Arrested Development Season Two on DVD. I took a Milky Way and a Dum-Dum lollipop, figuring I could wash down the chocolatiness with the hard candy of the lollipop. I chomped down the Milky Way and lazily unwrapped the Dum-Dum, popping it in my mouth just as the first episode got underway. When I tasted it, I almost spat it out.

It was a chocolate-flavored lollipop.




*The American kind, of course. Canadians, in an apparent effort to prove their state of national goofiness, have a different kind of Smarties, which naturally are made of chocolate.

**"Reese's," it should be pointed out, rhymes with "pieces," which is an unhelpful tip since most people who mispronounce "Reese's" also mispronounce "pieces" immediately thereafter.

Crab legs, anyone?

This video (via Kottke) of a crab getting sucked into a pipe through a 3 millimeter slit is pretty wild.