The other Ghetto Supastar…

Updated Tuesday, April 16th at 6:00 p.m.

…is my buddy George Scriban, who calls “shenanigans” on the RIAA. He says that it’s price-fixing by the record labels and the disappearance of the single (in the hopes of forcing customers to buy the entire album) — not Internet piracy — that’s hurting music sales. And he’s got proof:

On CD singles:

since 1997, shipments of CD singles have free-fallen from over 66 million units to 17 million — they now represent less than one percent of the total dollar value of all CDs sold. had CD singles represented as much of the overall market as they did in 1997 (the peak of the format, with 66.7 million units shipped), the major labels might well have seen a modest increase in music sales compared to 2000, rather than a drop.

On price fixing:

from 1992-96, a period that saw cut-throat price competiton from discount retailers like Best Buy and Target, sales of CDs grew 371 million units (from 400 million units to nearly 780 million units). once the labels started to enforce “minimum advertised pricing” (MAP) on the retailers, that sales growth started to slow. the RIAA reports that from 1996 to 2001, annual sales went from 780 million to 880 million units, an increase of only 100 million CDs in five years.

I think he’s on to something here, and so do bOINGbOING and Good Morning Silicon Valley. George’s insight and Mack Daddy Right-On-ness are why I love working with the guy.

Update

Slashdot now points to George’s cool chart on price fixing. Now the record industry’s dirty little lie is exposed to the geekiverse, and George got his first slashdotting to boot!

Welcome to the ranks of the Masters of the Online Universe, George. Somebody buy this man a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Ghetto Supastar

That’s what I feel like today. That’s also what I’m blasting on my Monsoons.

The weather’s warm, the sun’s out, lots of interesting happenings this week, and by the mere acting of thinking of looking for work, I’ve been contacted by three people asking me to flaunt my mad koding skillz! One of them needs me to come over for a design meeting this afternoon.

There’s also the matter of a phone call I got this morning. The call was actually for Paul (who’s gone to Washington DC for a meeting, then down to Florida to visit his folks and take care of some vehicle registration stuff) by a guy from the Weekly Standard. I told him that Paul had already left, after which he asked who I was. After hearing my name he said “Oh, yes, the other Peekabooty programmer. I know all about you. You’re a legend in my mind.”

Daaaaamn right.

(Note: The Weekly Standard is owned by News Corporation, which in turn is largely owned by Rupert Murdoch. I wrote an article on the Peekabooty site about Murdoch’s kowtowing to the Chinese Government in order to secure lucrative satellite TV deals. Perhaps I’m legendary to the Weekly Standard reporter for my blasphemy rather than my coding skills, rakish charm or dulcet accordion playing. I’ll still take it as a compliment. As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.)

I have a little work to do right now, so I’ll just close with this freestyle rap:

That’s d-e-v-i-l-l-a

I’m the Flip-hop coder Cassius Clay.

Word.

Lots of stuff going on, but in the meantime…

…Tuuli are playing tomorrow night!

They’re playing at the Horseshoe Tavern (Queen West, just east of Spadina — crawling distance from Casa di AccordionGuy), and the gig’s free!

0S4M4 0WNZ J00

Translation: “Osama owns you”

bOINGbOING pointed me to a Wired article about a special Taliban IRC client (for the uninitiated, IRC is an Internet chat program). I couldn’t resist checking it out. Here’s a screen shot:

The article wasn’t kidding: each chat window does have a picture of John Walker Lindh (a.k.a. Abdul Hamid), with the caption “The Taliban” underneath. It’s reassuring, knowing that while I’m chatting with potential infidel dogs on the Great Satan’s Internet, I’m under Johnny’s protective gaze. I just wish they could’ve found a nicer photo of the pious lad; all of the ones I’ve seen tend to make him look like a more deranged version of the Tom Hanks character in Cast Away.

I wonder why the programmer, Mullah Abdul Qahar MuntaQim (a mere slip of a lad at the tender age of 20), chose Walker Lindh’s image to represent the Taliban. Johnny’s a relative newcomer to the club, and a convert from the Great Satan. Years of reading comic books have taught me the supervillain rule of never trusting anyone who’s just crossed over and joined your side without some issuing kind of diabolical loyalty test. Lindh is more a poster boy for laissez-faire parenting gone horribly wrong than a symbol of the Taliban. Surely there are more suitable faces than the rookie’s — couldn’t MuntaQim have gone with Mullah Omar or Osama?

(An aside: If I were Osama, I wouldn’t let Walker Lindh perform anything beyond latrine duty until he performed some kind of onerous task to prove that he’d really joined our team in body and sprit. “Osama commands you,” I’d say (supervillains always refer to themselves in the third person) “to blow up one of America’s most cherished instutions! Only after you have destroyed this ‘Taco Bell’ will I consider you a true Talib.”)

Of course, the question of whose photo should appear in the chat windows is moot. The Taliban would condemn this program. Their fundamentalist dogma forbids the depiction of people in pictures, and even if it didn’t, they’ve put a ban on the Internet anyway.

The app has a handy call-to-prayer timer. During the proscribed five times a day Muslims are supposed to pray, it plays an MP3 of the appropriate song calling the faithful. It also comes with a handy set of cut-and-paste quotes you can use while debating with infidels in the chat channels.

I’ve been using the program Ethereal to see if this application is sending covert messages. SO far, it’s done nothing that the mIRC chat client it’s based on doesn’t do. My virus scanning programs report no suspicious activity. There aren’t even any annoying pop-up ads (I can see it now: “Party at Osama’s place. We’ll be using X10 cameras to stare at hot chicks’ ankles. Attendees are kindly reminded to set their shoe bomb detonators to Daylight Savings Time — we don’t want last week’s incident repeated.”)

The two things I like most about the app are in the “About…” windows:

1. This little slogan: “The Taliban, the most friendly people in the world, possibly the universe”. Most friendly…in the Universe? What kind of people does MuntaQim deal with on a day-to-day basis? Sociopaths? Hired killers? Verisign executives?

2. This tech support notice: “If you have any problem with this program, any Suggestion, any thing you want to Share Just email me and I will answer to you as soon as I can (InshaAllah)”. InshaAllah means “God willing”. If only all tech support messages were that truthful.

Great Canadian minds with some kind of connection to Korea think alike

I’m a hard-drinkin’ heavy-thinkin’ Canadian blogger with a silly pseudonym and a Korean brother-in-law! He’s a hard-drinkin’ heavy-thinkin’ Canadian blogger with a silly pseudonym (stavrosthewonderchicken) and lives in Korea! Together, they photo-edit WWII posters!

Each of us made our poster — here’s his, here’s mine — independently, neither one knowing that the other was doing exactly the same thing. We were both inspired by SomethingAwful’s collection of photo-edited WWII posters.

Here’s another coincidence: Stavros’ secretary is named AccordionGuy and my secretary is named stavrosthewonderchicken. Good thing neither of us is going to the theatre or Dallas…

(By the way, go read his blog, emptybottle.org. It’s good.)

Tina’s Birthday

Taken Tuesday, April 9th at the Bovine Sex Club, Queen Street West, Toronto. The birthday party of one Lady Miss Kristina “Tina” Gravelson, fishnets-and-PVC Queen extraordinaire. We all bought her drinks, her poison of choice being a double whiskey sour in a pint glass. Happy 22nd, Tina!

Funny story interlude

At one point during the party, some guy in his early twenties took a look at my digital camera, noticing that there was a small LCD display on the back.

Him: Is that a screen on the back of your camera?

Me: Yeah. Take a look. (I show him the camera.)

Him: What the — ? (looking at screen) That was the picture you just took! You mean you can see the film develop?

Me: No, there’s no film. It’s digital.

Him: It’s what?

Me: Digital.

Him: What the fuck do you mean, digital?

Me: It’s electronic.

Him: You mean it uses batteries?

Me: Yeah, but the picture is stored electronically.

Him: (A little agitated now, as if I’m speaking some kind of crazy moon language) I still don’t get what you’re talking about!

Me: (Trying to dumb it down a little further) The pictures in the camera are stored on…computer…chips.

Him: (Completely astonished, shouting) They can do that now?!

I decided not to tell him about the Internet, for fear his head would explode.

Smile!

When Paul and I were last at the grocery store, we bought these strange and rather creepy potato treats:

They’re McCain Smiles (for which I can only find a Norwegian Web page), mashed potato treats formed into little visages, blissfully unaware of the fate to which they are doomed. The only way that these snacks could be more disturbing would be if they were British smiles.

I used to kid my former girlfriend, a vegetarian, that what made meat taste so good was the animal’s soul. I also said that the wonderful feeling that comes after eating flesh was in fact our stomach nerves’ interpretation of the anguished cries of an animal’s soul being slowly digested. (Surprisingly, that is not the reason she broke up with me.) If having a soul implies delicious taste, then Smiles have no more soul than the ordinary french fry (or chip, to my orthodontically-challenged British readers).

I suppose it gives vegetarians a chance to answer “yes” to Animal Alliance’s question: “Does your food have a face?”