Pandora's Infinite Jukebox

Whatcha doing?

Listening to this new web site, pandora.com

Is it a download site?

No. It’s a custom radio site.

A what?

You feed it the name of one or more bands or sings that you like. Then it searches for other music that it thinks you’d like. For instance, I programmed in Buzzcocks, The Clash, and a few other 70's punk and New Wave bands, and now it’s cranking out 70's, 80's and 90's punk tunes by not only Buzzcocks, but the Toy Dolls, The Lillingtons, The Sex Pistols, Chron Gen, Black Flag and Green Day.

Green Day?

Well, there are probably still a few bugs in the system. It’s kind of new. But it still beats the crap out of shelling out for satellite radio.

So I can hear anything I want for free?

Well, not exactly. They choose the songs, though you can always skip ones you’d rather not hear, and you can edit your “seed” song list to change the flavor of the stream. If you want to hear anything fairly obscure, they might not have what you’re looking for.

In other words, don’t throw out those old 7-inchers?

Right. But they’ll do better by you than the local Clear Channel top-40 FM station or MTV any day.

I stopped watching MTV when I got a life!

I stopped watching it when I got a job. Pandora saved my butt when my boss banned playing CD’s in our workstations.

Because of that Sony Music rootkit thing?

You got it! It was pretty dismal around the office for a while!

You know, I’m wondering, who’s running this thing?

The Music Genome Project.

I mean who’s paying for it? The rights to all these tunes must cost a lot.

Not sure. Their FAQ doesn’t say. Their about screen says “At Pandora Media™ (formerly Savage Beast Technologies™), we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you'll love.” They’ve got links to Amazon.com and Itunes on their site. I guess it’s a marketing operation.

Or a mind-control operation.

Say what?

Think about it, if they can gather information on the kinds of music that millions of people are listening to, then they’ll be able to figure out what the country as a whole is thinking. Then they can pass the info along to the govermnent, who can use it to figure out how to get away with whatever it wants to get away with and how best to do it. It’s demographic science on a newer and much more intimate, invasive level. And as far as we can tell, all we’re doing is listening to free music.

What are you rattling on about?

...Or they can figure out who the liberals are. They’ll check out the kinds of music that each subscriber listens to. Think about it. They scientifically know what kinds of music a peace activist, a free-speech advocate or a secular humanist is most likely to listen to. Then they can come around and get us one by one.

Jesus, give me a break! You see Homeland Security agents under every dirty sock! Yeah, they probably are collecting information about what we listen to, and they probably are passing it along to Amazon, Itunes, and other music marketing entities. At least I sure hope they are. I’m so damn sick and tired of a handful of overfed, designer-suited, expense-accounted record company wonks with 50-dollar haircuts and drug habits telling us “what we want to hear”! If web sites like pandora.com shake up the business-as-usual of the music industry, and make the radio conglomerates finally sit up and take notice of what we REALLY want to hear, meaning that commercial radio might, just might become listenable again, then I’m all for it! I don't mind the free music either!

More Spammer Names and Subject Lines

Coming soon to an inbox near you!

Lola Lyon Or change of virgin - I’d pay to see a movie with that title!

Get it now - Cialis Angel - Gee, just like the tooth fairy!

Saddest J. Umpires - Must be working at a Mets game...

Your boss = no more - Cybernetic hit men?

Easy to find the software you're looking for. demented - Demented is what I usually am after installing it.

Renovation J. Reconditioned - I’ll bet HE feels like a new man!

Snooze and Loze Inc.- Don’t buy stocks from these guys.

Subject: Of rain he disjunctive prosy

Kiev U. Mentally - A cerebral Chernobyl.

Subject: Sex and The City blood - Vampire metrosexuals! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

It never ends...

Found images, installment one.

I found this card in an antique shop in upstate NY.

The Very Big Stupid is still on the march!

I was cleaning my room a few days ago when I noticed a book which I’d been looking for for some time sitting underneath my bed. It was Frank Zappa’s autobiography. I opened the book to a place toward the back of it that I’d marked using an old telephone company bill envelope. I’ll let you read the following passage let you decide for yourself whether what Frank wrote back in 1989 is still relevant today.

From THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK:

"...Here it comes, folks! Watch it grow! One day, the BIG STUPID goes to a PTA meeting, winds through the PTL Club, wends its way to the White House, spreads out from the Oval Office like a cow flop into the judiciary system, dribbles out onto the desks of BIG BUSINESS, and the next thing know we've got THE VERY BIG STUPID.

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

I can't think of any developing nation with a genuine 'fondness' for America. People in these countries see America as threat to their national security; they see US as an 'Evil Empire'. Everything Reagan said in the early days about Russia is descriptive of our country, viewed by a developing nation.

Because we possess THE VERY BIG STUPID, they know there is always the possibility that we might use it on them - accidentally.

Folks, over the years we have developed a first-strike capability with this hideous weapon, and have already deployed it several times, disguised as Reagan Administration 'foreign policy'.

Some people in the Imaginary Heartland of America. say "Who gives a shit? They ain't going to get us. They ain't coming over here. Why, some of 'em don't even have air-o-planes."

That kind of guy has bought stock in the THE VERY BIG STUPID, and has reaped a philosophical dividend which states on its face that, as a Special Christian Nation, we have the right to stomp all over the other guys (Manifest Destiny). God is on Our Side, and we're supposed to do this, because we're the only creatures sophisticated enough to bring peace and sanity to the rest of the world. Pheeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuwwwwww!"

RIP the JACKER

Just this morning as I was perusing an e-flyer from Circuit City, I happened to notice an ad for a new kind of digital music service. It’s called “Get Digital” and the service is the mass-ripping of large collections of CD’s. No joke, they want to charge you to rip your CD’s and convert the music to MP3 files, for your Ipod, car MP3 player, etc.

Now, the first question in my head is, why would anyone pay someone to do something you could do just as well and for free at home? Even yuppies who are tied to a laptop or cell phone 24/7 can usually find a few minutes to slip a favorite CD into that laptop’s CD-ROM drive and rip it. Get Digital’s prices range from $1.49 per disc for 50 to 200 discs, to 99 cents per disc for 400 or more (if you want bitrates over 256 Kbps, that costs a few cents extra). Now, I was never that good at math, but if you send these guys 1,000 of your precious music CD’s, that adds up to, let’s see, $990.00. Not including the cost of shipping the darned things. And speaking of shipping of shipping, do you really trust the postal service or UPS to handle your precious music collection with care, and not lose it? I didn’t think so!

If this service catches on, there are other specters lurking on the horizon. Will the RIAA in its infinite greed and arrogance mandate a kind of DRM (that’s “Digital Rights Management”, or “Digital Ripoff Method”) which would make home-copying of CD’s impossible, forcing you to mail away your music to someplace like Get Digital, who will doubtlessly be strong-armed into charging “use royalties” on top of their existing fees by cocaine-addled record company wonks? Will money from use royalties rightfully belonging to artists like say, Leo Kottke, Frank Zappa and Thievery Corporation instead end up going to whoever’s at the top of the RIAA sales charts, as has always been the case? Will the resulting MP3's be programmed to disappear from your player after a pre-set time?

Let’s hope that this super-consumer-soaker scheme goes the way of the 8-track tape, real soon.

The high cost of mall jobs

Recently I saw the movie "Wal-Mart – The High Cost of Low Price". Through interviews with independent business operators, the movie describes how the arrival of a Wal-Mart in a Midwestern town guts the local economy by undercutting local businesses. Wal-Mart workers (or Wal-Martyrs as some people call them) go into detail about their minimal-pay, about being forced to work off-the-clock (read: for free), about the company's all-but-useless high-deductible health "benefits" and – this is the kicker – how they often have to turn to public assistance (with the encouragement of their managers) just to make ends not quite meet. All of this against a backdrop of Wal-Mart’s CEO rhapsodizing to stockholders about how virtuous and socially-responsible the company which they have invested in is. You don’t have to look too far to find out if the film’s assertions are correct. As excerpts from local television news programs included in the movie prove, the media is full of corroborating evidence.

I certainly don't disagree with the film's basic premises, that the 21st-Century robber-barons who run this giant corporate octopus are ruining lives and communities. But as far as I can see, Wal-Mart’s business practices are only slightly more egregious than those of any other national chainstores. Furthermore, the detrimental effects of chainstores upon local economies has been a fact of life long before Sam Walton’s Arkansas discount store chain went national.

Back in the early 1960's, a developer was planning to build a suburban-style shopping plaza (what we would now call a strip-mall) only a few minutes from downtown. My father, a very active participant in the local business community, tried to warn every retailer he knew about the adverse effect this would have on their businesses. He suggested that they buy up the land before the developers could get hold of it and donate it to the city as a park. They pooh-poohed my father's advice, The subsequent construction of the shopping plaza, capped by the arrival of the giant discount chain Grand-Way, sent downtown's retail economy into a steep downward slide from which it has never recovered.

Retail sales used to be a respectable profession with potential for advancement, not the dead-end McJob it has largely become. For instance, when you walked into a camera shop in the 1960's, the people behind the counters were either photographers themselves or at the very least knew what you were talking about when you asked for anything more specialized than a roll of film. When you went to the local electronics store to buy a stereo or a TV, the salespeople there had some background in electronics. No business operator of that day in his right mind would have hired a salesperson who had no knowledge of what he or she was selling. So, what happened?

In the mid-1950's, a little hamburger stand near Chicago called McDonald’s started raking in the bucks by selling cheap hamburgers, and milkshakes by the carload. When Ray Croc bought the business, he made some fundamental changes. Out went the skilled - and highly-paid - personnel, like short-order cooks. In went an assembly-line-like system whose individual tasks were so dumbed-down that unskilled minimum-wage earners could perform them. As the fast-food chain and others like it grew by leaps and bounds over the next 20 years, the management of other corporations watched in awe, and said to themselves “Hey! I want some of that!”. The chain stores which displaced traditional retailers over the last 30 years employ much the same business model as McDonald’s; reduce skilled tasks to a series of simple routines, hire cheap, unskilled workers and watch the money roll in. It apparently has worked, because that is how nearly all national mass-market retail chains do business now.

The makers of Wal-Mart - The High Cost of Low Price also took Wal-Mart to task for breaking with founder Sam Walton’s ideal of buying American, and sourcing much of its merchandise from China, which is known for extremely low wages and deplorable working conditions. Actually the “made in China” issue has been around since at least the mid-1980's. About that time, CBS aired an installment of “60 Minutes” which outlined how Chinese manufacturers were undercutting American manufacturers, putting many of them out of business. The program featured a business encounter with a representative of one Chinese manufacturer, who informed her American client, on-camera, that quality control in her employer’s factories was enforced through beatings of workers who failed to meet quality-control standards.

My own experiences working in the modern retail industry spoke volumes about it. At one mall job, after explaining to my boss that I had skills and experience with cameras, recorded music and home entertainment gear (which I did have and still do), he assigned me to cover the automotive department, even though at the time I had never worked on a car. At another I was the only one in my department who knew anything about the camera or computer equipment we were selling, apart from whatever was printed in the weekly sale flyer. The pay at these mall jobs was whatever the minimum wage was at the time give or take a few pennies. Benefits were non-existent. Only a handful of commission salespeople in departments which sold big-ticket items worked full-time. Management often treated my co-workers and I as if we were petty criminals or mental defectives. Each company reminded us, and reminded us often, that we were expendable and that they could (and often did) force any of us out on a whim. One particular employer used a sure-fire cost-cutting tactic. When they decided that they had no further use for you, instead of laying you off or firing you, they simply cut you down to four hours of work per week in order to force you to quit so that you couldn’t collect unemployment insurance. Unions? Never heard of 'em. At least partly as a result of the way they were treated by management, my mostly high-school and college-age co-workers never took their jobs seriously and it showed in the mediocre level of service they delivered. Customers' simple questions about products often got answered with an indifferent "I don't know", in no small part because we never received any information from the company about the things that it sold. Management just hired us and put us in whichever department they chose and left us to fend for ourselves. One of my co-workers was an older woman whose demeanor was the very epitome of resignation. “A job is a job is a job” was what she would often sigh whenever our break-room conversations turned to work-related issues.

America cannot afford to put up with Wal-Mart’s current business practices, no two ways about that. Wal-Mart cannot be permitted to merrily trash local economies and soak taxpayers by letting welfare agencies feed and house their underpaid work force. But as bad as it certainly is, Wal-Mart is not unique. Wal-Mart’s issues are merely the big-screen version of what is wrong with America’s “service” economy. Realistic minimum-wage laws (also known as living wages), genuine fair-labor practices enforced by law, and unionization of retail workers are the only true long-range solutions to the sorry situation of not only Wal-Mart workers but American service-sector workers in general.

Actual spammer names and subject lines

Those pestilential junk e-mails for everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals to bogus debt relief schemes are usually sent with fake usernames, some of which are generated randomly by computer. Some are sent from non-English-speaking countries, which also results in some interesting word combinations. A few examples of this uniquely 21st-century accidental-art form are presented here. Everything you see below is a sender name unless otherwise noted.

Nonindustrial G. Landscape

Well, that would describe most of the Northeast, wouldn’t it?

The do so wirecutters (subject line)

Yes, from the same people who brought you “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!!”, a cartoon series about a band of superhero electricians!

Loudspeaker F. Tinny

Don't buy a stereo from this guy.

Sex and The City spacecraft

Omigod...Metrosexuals from outer space! Run for it!!!!

More to come, I'm certain.