The day the (free) music (almost) died

According to Wired, today marks the 10th anniversary of the music industry’s lawsuit against file-sharing site Napster.
You may remember that Napster’s defense in the suit, before laying down and playing dead, was that it did not give away copyrighted music — rather it provided a platform for users to share their own files with each [...]

Friday Random 10: Jersey Shore Edition

Last night marked the debut of one of the television season’s most anticipated shows, the regrettable “Jersey Shore” on MTV. Basically the premise of this show is to follow a group of the stupidest guidos on the planet as they dog-paddle through their shallow existence at a certain outpost in New Jersey — official maligned [...]

Friday Random 10: Fading Spirits Edition

Sad news from Mars this week as NASA officials are openly questioning the future of the Spirit rover, which has been cruising the surface of the red planet for six years. It’s not out of batteries or anything. It’s just kind of, well, stuck:
In April, Spirit’s wheels broke through a hard crust on the Martian [...]

Friday Random 10: Whiplash Edition

What ever happened to whiplash? In my formative years of the 1980s and early 1990s, you couldn’t watch three consecutive episodes of any sitcom or TV drama without at least one character outfitted in one of those foam neck brace things. The cause of the whiplash was almost certainly a low-speed car accident, and the [...]

Friday Random 10: Sexy ass fruit flies edition

Scientists in Canadia say they have discovered a way to genetically tweak fruit flies in such a way as to make them utterly irresistible. Not only do fruit flies of the opposite sex flock toward the modified flies, but many of the same sex apparently turn gay for these sexy little monsters.

Professor Joel Levine, who [...]

Friday Random 10: Tough Guy Edition

Most people who jog for exercise are carrot-munching weenies, but not Craig O’Brien.
O’Brien is a tough guy. A throwback to a better time — a time when black people knew better than to be president and joggers were free to scream obscenities at whomever the fuck they pleased. Bitch.
So when O’Brien was banned by a [...]

Friday Random 10: Astro-pee edition

Becoming an astronaut requires one to possess extraordinary physical and mental capacities. Not only must you be a brilliant and articulate person of science, but you must also endure severe physical challenges that would humble nearly all other humans.
The training program for astronauts is rigorous and largely thankless. Nearly all astronauts spend year after year [...]

Wolfgang Mozart has a cold…

The popularity of the 1984 Milos Forman film Amadeus — which was based on the 1979 Peter Shaffer play Amadeus, which was based on the opera Amadeus and Salieri by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was based on the short play Amadeus and Salieri by Aleksandr Pushkin — has inspired decades of conspiracy theories and century-spanning amateur [...]

Kind of Blue Goes Gray

Pax Arcana
I’m back from yet another research trip to the New Jersey Shore, and while I’m still months from compiling all the data I collected, I think it’s fair to conclude that yes, I will have another Margarita.
My return coincides perfectly with the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, the seminal Miles Davis album that [...]

David Lee Roth had his reasons

Pax Arcana
In the early 1980s, while Malcolm Jamal Warner was busy making the children of the world cooler, Van Halen was making a reputation for itself as the world’s leader in jackass tour riders.
By now the sight of a superstar band demanding preposterous concessions while on tour is a familiar one. But it all [...]