Last.fm Beta Review
As a subscriber I am kicking the tires on the latest beta of the social networking music service Last.fm, which is one of my favourite Internet sites, and the only radio station I ever listen to anymore. Tremble, mainstream radio, your days are numbered!
The new last.fm kicks serious ass. Now it is easily the best online music service out there, bar none. It's even easier to keep track of your musical neighbours and (added) friends, see (and hear) what they're listening to, and send messages to each other. There's a bit more graphical pizzazz (like the depiction of my last ten songs played, to the left of the list).
The best part: you can create and share your own custom radio stations! Tag a group of files, and you can listen to a radio station of the songs you've marked with a particular tag!
I like it...a LOT! And all this for only US$3.00 a month, half the cost of LaunchCast and those other online music services.
Best of the Folk Fest
My favourites so far at the folk festival:
Justin Rutledge (who kinda reminds me of a country-and-western Rufus Wainwright. GREAT lyrics. Official Hottie of the Winnipeg Folk Fest (see right ;-) The link is to his MySpace profile, with a couple songs and a video.)- Hawksley Workman (who is definitely an artist I have to explore further. Hands-down winner of the most bizarre between-song patter; was he on drugs or what??)
- Flook (Irish quartet who had all us folkfest junkies fingerdancing on our tarps and jigging out by the mainstage. They also played some wonderfully calming music.)
- Tanya Tagaq Gillis, known simply as Tagaq (ancient Inuit throat singing meets modern-day rythyms)
- The Refugee All-Stars Of Sierra Leone (link is their MySpace profile)
Oh, and at the Festival Music Store, I picked up Blessed, the 2nd CD by the Soweto Gospel Choir (they aren't playing at the folkfest). If you're depressed this music is guaranteed to cheer you up! I'm listening to it right now.
"I'm pro life, but sweet Jesus you're an idiot"
(found via digg.com) I swear, you cannot make stuff like this up. A pro-life blogger actually assumes a satirical article in the well-known online "newspaper"The Onion is a real article, and condemns it. What follows is a hilarious stream of comments from readers who cannot believe that this blogger actually fell for it. Be sure to read through the comments, there are some howlers here :-) from both the pro-life and the pro-choice readers. My personal faves:
UPDATE: It just keeps getting better (with another 200+ comments). Earth to Pete: YOU DON'T HAVE TWO BRAIN CELLS TO RUB TOGETHER. GIVE UP ALREADY.I'm pro life, but sweet Jesus you're an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?While I am uncertain that you have a central nervous system of sufficient complexity to register high-level emotions such as embarrassment or shame, I still must implore you: please, please, please... no matter how many people on this comment thread cast doubt on your mental capacities or call you "asshat" it is imperitive that you never delete this entry. You have accidentally written the funniest thing in history. Johnathan Swift and Voltaire working together for a hundred years could not surpass you. This must be preserved for posterity.Dude, seriously, you need to get news from a more reputable source. Try http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/
Pete, The Onion, and his MarchTogether.com Blogpost Comments: A Timeline.
Peggy Archer, writer of the blog Totally Unauthorized, has done us all a favour by providing direct links to the comment threads of the four idiotic blogposts made by Peter Shinn mentioned in my earlier post.
People, reading through the comments is the funniest thing I have read for a long time. Truly priceless stuff. Here's the timeline:
- Pete writes his first blogpost about The Onion article.(The Onion is a well-known satirical newspaper, famous for its dead-pan humour and made-up news stories)
- People comment.
- Pete writes a second blogpost, still treating The Onion article as legitimate, among several other astounding lapses in metaphor detection, understanding of satire, and just plain logic.
- People comment.
- Pete writes a third blogpost, in which he says that knowing The Onion is a satirical newspaper is proof that "our children are brainwashed in the public school system".
- A lot of people comment, and this is where Pete adds his own comment: " I moved! And you can't comment! Maybe some of you should have been aborted."
- Pete writes a follow-up which, among other things, declares that oral contraceptives are a form of abortion.
- More people comment
- Pete finally turns off the links to his comment threads, but you can still access them (and yes, you can still add comments) using the links (2,4,6,8) above.
- Pete complains about his personal contact information being leaked to the Internet, when the idiot HAD ALREADY POSTED ALL OF IT HIMSELF on several websites. Do a Google search for Pete and marchtogether and see how easy it is to pull up all that information.
As I said earlier: you simply couldn't make this story up if you tried, I am going to wrap this up by the excellent comment left by Peggy Archer left on a mirrorpage of Pete's blog:
It's a shame you can't see the comment threads on the original site anymore. Out of almost 2,000 comments (I think - Haloscan's counter stopped so there may be more), absolutely none read like your examples.Admittedly, there were a few nasty comments obviously left by folks just wanting in on the internet's hottest party, but the VAST majority of the comments were written by well-educated, intelligent, articulate folks (MANY of whom mentioned being 'pro-life', BTW) who just could not believe what they were reading.Peter came off as not passionate and driven by his zeal to serve his cause, but as a clueless and sanctimonious jerk who continued to make the same silly error even after having it repeatedly pointed out to him by hundreds of people.
On second thought, though, what Peter did really was amazing - for one brief, shining moment, people on both sides of an incredibly divisive issue came together in their disbelief of such stupidity and their relentless mockery of a man who desperately deserved it.
A Quote Which Caught My Eye
I found this quote in jasonvw's signature line in, of all places, the Jack/Ennis slash fiction thread on Dave Cullen's Ultimate Brokeback Mountain Forum.
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.
Let him fed up with Shinn cast the first stone!
Peter Shinn, the jawdroppingly-ignorant and batshit-crazy anti-abortion blogger who mistook a funny satricial article in The Onion for a factual newspaper report, leading to a well-deserved verbal pummeling by thousands of commenters to his blog (both pro-life and pro-choice), is now the subject of an article inSalon.
Peter Shinn + Blogspace = Neverending Commentary
Follow-up to the Salon article mentioned below: 10 pages of reader feedback. This is like the Plain Layne fiasco times, oh, a thousand. Simultaneously funny, sad, and fascinating in that car-wreck sort of way.
Personal Mission, Vision, and Values
I was exploring a search engine I'd never used before (O.K., O.K., I was egosearching, all right?!), and I came across a blog on mission statements which included my personal mission statement! I had forgotten I had put it up on an older blog I used to have, but deleted when I decided to focus on this one.
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