Haven’t you ever wondered what 1500 Philippino prisoners dancing to the original choreography of Michael Jackson’s Thriller would look like?
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
From the BBC today:
Bush to undergo medical procedure
US President George W Bush will have a routine colonoscopy on Saturday, temporarily transferring power to the vice-president, the White House says.
The procedure - an examination of the large intestine carried out under sedation - is to be carried out at the Camp David presidential retreat.
Doctors are also hoping to finally treat one of Bush’s longstanding ailments - cranial rectal inversion.
So in addition to The Friday Riff, I am hosting another radio show called NonDescript on Fridays at 1pm PDT. You can listen to the show on this very website by using the player in the sidebar, or by visiting KCSB’s website directly and selecting one of the webcast options.
To entice you to listen, here’s the playlist for the next show (Friday, July 20th):
Song, Artist, Album
Brian Song, Monty Python, Sings
867-5309, Less Than Jake, Loser, Kings, and Things We Don’t Understand
I`ve Been Thinking (Featuring Cat Power), Handsome Boy Modeling School, White People
The Hips (The Captain), Kids These Days, All These Interruptions
Draft Dodger Rag, Kind Of Like Spitting, Learn: The Songs Of Phil Ochs
Waiting For Mary, Pere Ubu, Cloudland
My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, The Persuasions, Frankly A Cappella
Working On a Beautiful Thing, The Pooh Sticks, Optimistic Fool
Sweet Transvestite, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Soundtrack
4 Out Of 5, Soul Coughing, Irresistible Bliss
Missing Persons, Tin Huey, Disinformation
Diamond In Your Mind, Tom Waits, Healing The Divide
Ever Fallen In Love, Nouvelle Vague, Bande A Part
Lawnmower Boy, Nous Non Plus, …Nous Non Plus
My Winter Vacation (Featuring Dose One), Populous, Queue For Love
The internet is awesome. Here’s a video of one of the most brilliant satirists of the twentieth century, Tom Lehrer.
http://www.archive.org/download/lehrer/lehrer_full.flv
A snippet from from Irving “Kaps” Kaplansky’s 80th Birthday Celebration
My favorite from this clip is the tune on Sociology… but I can think of a few people who may not find it so funny.
So I had a post all ready to beg everyone and anyone who visits this blog - either on purpose or on accident - to call their congressional representatives and urge them to act before the July 15th deadline put services like Pandora, Live365, SomaFM, and other amazing web-based stations out of business. And when all hope seemed lost, Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired: Listening Post made the following announcement:
At today’s Congressional hearing about the new rates for online radio that would essentially destroy it (as readers of this blog already know), SoundExchange, which was scheduled to receive the new royalty payments on Monday morning (since the enforcement date falls on a Sunday), made a startling statement.
The SoundExchange executive [Jon Simson, executive director] promised — in front of Congress — that SoundExchange will not enforce the new royalty rates. Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out.
So what gave SoundExchange this change of heart? According to Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren (from the Wired article):
“This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did. That’s why this is happening.”
I really hope that’s true. Lord knows, I had my doubts about Senator Feinstein. After I placed a call and sent an email to her office, I learned that the largest contributer to Sen. Feinstein’s campaign, according to the Center for Public Integrity, is “entertainment media”. That can’t be good.
I also learned that Feinstein’s former Chief of Staff, Mark Kadesh, has recently taken a position at the Music First Coalition, another RIAA-founded organization that will be seeking to raise royalty rates for terrestrial-based radio stations in the near future. That REALLY can’t be good.
Hopefully, this will by some time for congressional intervention. This is about the time I make some sarcastic comment about congress and the war in Iraq. Not today, folks… not today.
