View from the Loft

Kitten album covers!

If you haven't yet seen these classic album covers kittified, you should!

Here they are.

Enjoy!

I hate the music industry

Wow. A couple of years ago I put up a series of posts featuring videos of non-mainstream holiday songs. I just went back to check them out, and lots of the videos I embedded in my posts can no longer be seen, thanks to the music industry and their fervent dedication to copyrights.

What complete bullshit! I suppose next they will send out their minions to spy on campfires and tap "Kumbaya" singers with some sort of copyright violation.

The fact is that despite the music industry's fevered actions, music is just not easy to reign in so that it profits only the singer/writer/producer/corporation. From time immemorial, music has blossomed from the efforts of those who came before and has spread by means of replication, imitation, parody, embroidery, and who knows what else that artists have employed through the centuries. You just cannot corral something as elemental as music. It's a losing game. Yet the music industry fails to recognize this and continues with its jihad against ordinary people simply wanting to share what they like musically.

I think this is really shortsighted. Yes, the music industry will continue to blindly seek legal "solutions" to its nonexistent "problem,' because that is how they--being corporatists--are programmed. But I think it's a losing battle. The genie is out of the bottle, and all the music industry is doing is making people angry and bitter at their tactics.

 

Another earworm ...

Are some people more likely to have earworms than others? Because I'm really plagued with them. And they don't arise because I've lately heard the song somewhere or anything. They just pop up in my brain. Anyway, here's the latest.  Talk about nostalgia!

 

Put the message in the box

For some reason, when I woke up at four this morning, this song--which I've neither heard nor thought of in years and years--was playing in my head. I wouldn't call it an earworm--yet--but I was amazed to remember it after all this time.

 

Making amends ...

... for that last video. Here's something to take away the bad taste.

 

 

Thanks, Lily Allen. Couldn't have said it better.

I know it's not new. But damn, I really like this. Especially the part about needing approval from an authority figure ... wow, that's the GOP all over!

Fuck you very much!

 

This week's earworm

I was zipping through various channels on the satellite radio and came across this. Didn't even listen to the whole thing, but I've had the earworm for days nonetheless.

 

Skepticism, anyone?

A friend and I have been having a most interesting conversation based on my post about the scarlet A over there in the right column. He's a reasonable person and I hope I've been reasonable too. And he's not, to my knowledge, a religious person. at least in the sense of organized religion. But in the course of our conversation I ran across this video by Tim Minchin, who is known for his skepticism and nonbelief in god, and couldn't resist putting it up here.

 

Heaven (artist's conception)

I've been reading lately about atheism/agnosticism, especially from the point of view of those who used to believe the tenets of Christianity. One of the interesting things I came across was the idea that in heaven there's no free will, because in heaven one can't choose to sin. In hell, however, there apparently still IS free will, because those rebellious souls landed there in the first place through exercising it.

Anyway, I started thinking about this song by Dar Williams, about a couple of teenagers who end up in heaven. I like how their heaven is just like school ... but without the bad parts.

 

Cheryl Wheeler: "Your God"

I love Cheryl Wheeler. Check this out: