A childhood friend’s early morning story of girl troubles inspired today’s post. ’99 Problems’ is from rapper Jay-Z’s ’03 release ‘The Black Album‘. The black and white video was directed by the brilliant, award winning director, Mark Romanek who has directed the best music video ever made, (in my opinion) for Janet Jackson’s ‘Got ’til its Gone’ as well as videos for the likes of Beck, Lenny Kravitz, Audioslave, Madonna and Fiona Apple.
Forget about all the shareware programs you’ve been using to download YouTube videos. Simply right click on the text in red below and select “Bookmark Link”. When you’re watching a YouTube video you like, simply click on the bookmark from your Bookmarks menu and it will reveal a link on the top right of the page that says Download MP4. Save that file to disk and you will have a high quality video that you can also add to iTunes and play on your iPod without any transcoding.
I’m not sure whether this is an ad for Apple or Microsoft. Notice the way the woman wistfully says “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Geez.
I’m betting this ad campaign dies still-born, just like the Seinfeld-Gates one did. You heard it here first.
Leave it to what is the arguably the best show on television today to do an episode (called Margaritaville) about the deep doodoo that the economy is in and to make it toe-curlingly, laugh-out-loud funny to boot.
Also, since South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are two of the few people in the industry that actually understand ‘teh internets’, you can actually watch the entire episode online. And not just if you were born in the USA! They won’t block you even if you’re sitting in a third world country like India! Woot!
Click on the image to go watch the full epsiode.
Spoiler: Just for bonus points (in my book at least) they sucker punch El Presidenté at the end. Priceless.
Please don’t leave smart-arsed one liners about this blog being read exclusively by the women I’ve been with. Haa Haa, I’ve heard all of them before.
So, here’s why I haven’t posted in a few days. First off, I’m torn between:
The knowledge that I ought to post regularly if I want more readers on this blog. (To what end, I haven’t figured out yet.)
&
My long standing laziness and more recent apathy (maybe I’d go so far as to say misanthropy) to everything and everyone around me these days. Its hard to write when everything you see,hear and read about in the world around you either pisses you off or you don’t care enough about much anyways and would rather spend your time blasting away at endless hordes of zombies in Valve Studio’s latest PC game, Left4Dead, which by the way, is absolutely brilliant and deserves to be spoken about in a post of its own, but I digress.
At this early point inEl Presidenté’s(my nick name for Obama) first term there are already films calling him out on all the campaign promises he has reneged on and all the lobbyists and ex-banking motherfuckers he has filled his administration with. (Rahm Emmanuel anyone?)
For people not clued in to the conspiracy theories (for want of a better term), this film may seem to go off on the deep end about global banking agendas and a New World Order but even so, just the laundry list of promises (already) broken and shady back room deals makes for thoroughly interesting viewing.
Something for all you Obamabots to really think about and form an opinion that is actually your own, not the product of some fucking Facebook group.
New Pollution, from the ’96 sophomore album ‘Odelay!’by ubercool alternative rocker Beck, known for being one of the most creative and experimental artistes around. Amongst his other great hits is ‘Loser’ from his ’94 debut album ‘Mellow Gold’, the chorus of which I used to sing at the top of my voice in public, during a particularly trying stage of my life. It went something like..
“Soy un perdedorrrr”
“I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
Yeah I have issues. Who doesn’t?
Here are the MP3s for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!
Take Five, from SanFran based jazz band, The Dave Brubeck Quartet‘s 1959 album, Time Out. It was also the title track to the brilliant British television show,The Secret Life of Machines, which I have previously written about.
Which brings me to the state of content piracy on the internet. You used to have to be a bit of a nerd to know how to pirate music and movies in days past. Setting up a torrent client, finding torrent files, making sure your ports were open and mainting a decent share ratio was not for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. (Bonus geek cred for understanding the beauty and simplicity of how torrent sharing works.)
But all that has changed nowadays. All you need to do is be able to spell half decently & do a Google Search and sometimes not even that. The almighty Google suggests corrections. That and knowing how to open a .zip file opens up to you a cornucopia of copyright content, just begging for violation.
There are tons of music blogs on the web these days, most on Blogger (another Google property) that are dedicated to nothing but linking to entire albums of music, literally thousands of them, neatly zipped along with album covers, available for direct download, no shady file sharing or nasty P2P software needed, just a browser and a few mouse clicks. Here are two such sites I found this week.
Google is the one, true overlord of the internet and has become as much of a verb as it is a noun. Absolutely no one has the cojonés or the money to take them to court and fight an extended legal battle. So the file sharing genie is now well and truly out of the bottle, once and for all. (If that is, there were any lingering doubts about the fact)
Copyright Associations can threaten indiviuals, sue PirateBay (and they are trying as I write this) and try to thumb the dikes, but it is all over. (I almost spelt dikes with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i” before I realised what a grevious error that would be.)
So. The point I am trying to get at, in my usual belaboured and obtuse fashion is this:
Copyright, as we know it, is dead.
So. From now on whenever I post links to music, I will also try and post a direct download link to the song. For review purposes only, of course. If you like the music, you be sure to go out and buy the record now.
Forget about all the shareware programs you’ve been using to download YouTube videos. Simply right click on the text in red below and select “Bookmark Link”. When you’re watching a YouTube video you like, simply click on the bookmark from your Bookmarks menu and it will reveal a link on the top right of the page that says 
Please don’t leave smart-arsed one liners about this blog being read exclusively by the women I’ve been with. Haa Haa, I’ve heard all of them before.