meta-roj

comedian

poet

valenti autographs betamax. no irony here, gentlemen. move along. nothing to see here. no. not even a strangler.

[via boingboing, of course]

folklore academic

over here, mark ask for some help…

I think the RIAA logic holds. I think total music sales are up significantly since 1999.

I’m just looking for the proof. Anyone able to help?

i can’t pull numbers out of thin air anymore (that was a year ago), but i will drop one clue from my past. it’s this post about cdbaby. it’s hardly a comprehensive view of non-riaa music volume [heh], but it’s one measure. if someone’s got the time to extrapolate, i have earlier numbers documented here and to add a third data point, today’s numbers are:

88,988 artists sell their CD at CD Baby.
1,443,938 CDs sold online to customers.
$13,867,939.27 paid to artists.

so, mayb that helps. i wish i had more time to dig into this for you….

civil rights

ejected from a presidential event after being identified as a bumper-sticker-sporting slogan-terrorist? say it ain’t so.

i wonder if i can get jail time for this one?

in a follow-up to the internet brings the stupid, i’m happy to announce that as of this moment, this post is now the #1 hit on google for walmart job application and walmart online application.

thank you, stupid people of the internet. i couldn’t have done it without you.

over at the big picture, barry’s done some new work on something i spent a lot of time on here long ago.

so, if you want the new numbers on where people are spending their time, don’t look here, look there.

University of Georgia to Alter Mural [ap via abcnews, march 29, 2005]

University of Georgia officials said Monday they would alter a wall-sized mural commemorating the school’s integration because of complaints it contained a racial slur.

The mural features a photo of the former Charlayne Hunter, the first black woman admitted to the university, pushing her way through a mob in 1961, along with the highlighted quote of words shouted then: “Make way for the nigger.”

this bothers me for two reasons… one is that it is about the legacy, and it’s a bitter, controversial and emotionally-charged legacy. second is that i’d never have known about this mural if it weren’t for the racial slur it included, so the art worked. once it’s altered and this vanishes into the archives, i’ll forget about it, and that’s not a good thing.