1. This week's Tor.com post, Freddy and the Popinjay, just popped up over at Tor.com.

2. This post from a professional musician about music downloads is long and has been fairly widely posted already, but if you missed it, I think it's worth a read.

3. In the nobody saw this coming bit, Tropical Storm Chris strengthened into Hurricane Chris this ( Read more... )

So our local library has a pretty cool system called Freegal which allows you to download three - exactly three - songs per week, DRM-free. This is awesome, but equally awesome is the completely incomprehensible search function. It works something like this ( Read more... )

From multiple sources, a couple of recent articles explain again why most musicians make no money from record sales - and why most of that money ends up heading to the record label.

This is why some artists - the one that comes to mind is Jane Siberry - have given up on the concept of record sales altogether, while many others survive on touring ( Read more... )

Announcement: I can now almost - ALMOST - play "Oh, Susanna" on the mountain dulcimer ( Read more... )

So as I was typing away on an email, the doorbell rang, in a particularly demanding sort of way. I hadn't been expecting this in particular, but I headed over to see the UPS guy - several days early, with a long box, for me ( Read more... )

University of Oregon's On the Rocks does Lady Gaga:

Click to view

Thanks to Devinjay for the link.

Dear Emusic.com -

Cyndi Lauper is NOT a guilty pleasure.

- me

(Destiny's Child and some Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli songs might well be, though. Not that they're in my music library for me to verify at the moment.)

Heh. Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal video version.

I vaguely recall some conversation back in college where we agreed that whatever anyone thinks of the song, the original music video might well be the worst music video ever made.

1. How to fail at disabled accessibility: Come up to the two people sitting on wheelchairs and a person with a stroller and say, distractedly, over and over again, "Well, we can't sit HERE we'll block your view we can't sit HERE we'll block your view oh we never want to block a HANDICAPPED PERSON'S view and then sit down right in front of the curb ( Read more... )

Bleck. Have just not been feeling well for the last few days. So some links for everyone:

1. If you missed the New York Times Magazine article about what a New Orleans hospital endured post Katrina, and the difficult choices its doctors and nurses made, it's here. A must read ( Read more... )