DiscountArmy.org

My wife's discount shopping blog, DiscountArmy.org is your pre-moistened gateway to the cheapie shopping meccas of the East Bay. She's also getting down with the web promotional discounts, so check it out if you enjoy spending lesser amounts of money than your idiot friends.

My friend Michael is a MAJOR VILLIAN on Guiding Light, biiaatch.

Michael Dempsey plays the ARCH FIEND ALAN-MICHAEL SPAULDING on Guiding Light. But Michael Dempsey is not an ARCH FIEND. Michael Dempsey is a nice guy, married to a nice woman (Jena, who is one nice MFer), father of a baby that I haven’t met yet. (The baby may not be nice. But I am willing to assume he is nice for the sake of the parents. His name is Cassius.)

I’ve known Michael for fifteen years and now the douche bag is on… GUIDING FUCKING LIGHT!?!?!

Fun fact: Michael and I once stole a case of beer.

If Guiding Light is one of your “stories”, please, cheer for Michael. Even if he plays a rat fucking bastard.

The George Plimpton Project

My friend Toby is channeling a considerable amount of his manly vigor and caloric intake to getting a statue of George Plimpton propped up somewhere in Manhattan (Plimpton is entirely deserving, of course). He's also put together a nice little FLASH INTENSIVE site (my CHRIST, is it flash intensive) inviting idiots like you to post thoughts and comments about the man hisself.

He, of course, was the founder of the Paris Review, and lost thirty yards for the Detroit Lions, pitched to Willy Mays, and won second place at the Apollo Theater amateur night ("Tea for Two". Piano.) and he shilled for off-brand home gaming consoles and TV dinners that need not be refrigerated (remember that? "Top Shelf" I think it was called.) He also had an accent that doesn't exist anymore and a Beavis-like passion for fireworks. He lived like few of us do, with curiosity and perverse optimism. So a statue is the least we can do.

Shitty Bands like Sony's XCP copy protection

The fine people over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have provided a list of known carriers of Sony’s love letter to music consumers, a copy-protection Trojan horse call XCP.
Sony-BMG has been using copy-protection technology called XCP in its recent CDs. You insert your CD into your Windows PC, click "agree" in the pop up window, and the CD automatically installs software that uses rootkit techniques to cloak itself from you.
The program then sits on your computer, monitoring your activity in order to prevent "piracy" that evil pricks like you get up to with your insidious nano-robot technology. Bad, evil things like making extra copies of your CDs or favorite songs. And of course, there is no "uninstall" feature on this program.
So, now Sony-BMG is being half-assed contrite and is issuing a patch that supposedly "uncloaks" the XCP software, but what it actually does in leave a big gaping smoking hole by which evil doers may enter to frolic and gambol through your hard drive like lambs.
Macs, of course, seem to be immune once again. And if the list of infected cds below is any indication, people with taste may have nothing to worry about as well (note that this is probably just a partial list):
Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)
Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)
Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)
Amerie, Touch (Columbia)
Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)
Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)
Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)
Ricky Martin, Life (Columbia)
So, how do you know if that Erasure CD you’ve had your eye on is infected like Celine Dion’s gums? Look on the spine of the CD case for the words "CONTENT PROTECTED" and the IFPI logo (the letters IFPI in lowercase italic).

There’s also another copy protection scheme that goes by the moniker SunnComm, which is just as evil, but hasn’t been found to fuck up anybody’s property. Yet.

For the record, I bought one copy-protected CD that flat-out would not work on my PC at work: Kings of Leon’s A-Ha Heartache. Dicks.

Fuck Sony.

SONY IS EVIL UPDATE: Sony is getting sued for price fixing in the UK, gounging online retailers. Bastard fuck bastards. They would love to set the calender back to 1995, when they understood their own marketplace.