They should add "blogging" to this list.

"Greengrocer!"

It had to happen sooner or later I suppose. A sports-related posting from me.

Normally, I would have commented on Ken's post (below) but comments appeared to be broken. Anyway:

3) allofmp3.com

A Russian site that lets you download music "legally, honest" in pretty much any format you like, at any encoding quality you like, and charges you by the megabyte. $0.01 per megabyte, to be precise. If they don't have the encoding you want, don't worry! They'll encode online while-u-wait! Probably funding some illegal activity somewhere, but no evidence of that yet...

Do you buy a lot of music? I do, and I've recently been looking at two vendors with two very different business models and value propositions:

1) eMusic.com

Last time I looked at eMusic, they were still basically a dot-com startup in search of a business model, let alone profitability. At that point, if I'd had money to invest, I would have put it on the Underpants Gnomes before these guys.

However, they are now the new eMusic.com (now with added revenue stream!) and the value prop is pretty good - so long as your musical tastes have sufficient overlap with what they offer, although with over 500,000 tracks to choose from, including a lot of older releases from indie labels, there's a pretty fair bet you'll find enough to make it worth your money. It works for me, nut if you're looking for the absolute latest anything you may not find it here, but otherwise for DRM-free good-quality legal MP3s at around 22c each, you can't beat 'em.

2) YourMusic.com

This site is an offshoot of industry behemoth Bertelsmann Music Group who also own the BMG Music Service, which competes with venerable Columbia House ("Buy 12 CDs for the price of one with nothing more to buy, ever!") (see here for more on these two) but with an interesting two-fold twist on the standard "CD buyer's club" theme:

a) It's a subscription service. You pays your $5.99/mo and they ship you one CD a month, p&p included.
b) You maintain a queue of CDs you're interested in, a la Netflix. However, unlike Netflix, you only get one CD a month (as opposed to Netflix' concurrent use pricing) but, again unlink Netflix, you keep the CD. Presumably Netflix' system worksfor them because copying DVDs is still largely painful to do and requires hardwareand software most people do not have; the same is clearly untrue when applied to CDs.

The downside is they only have 14,000 albums (call it 140,000 tracks), you can only buy by the album, and, predictably, there's a lot of Ashlee Simpson, Travis Tritt and Usher to be found there. When I browsed the catalog I was able to find an average of one album on each page of 12 listed that I was sort-of interested in. I think that would be the stumbling block for me - actually being able to find enough CDs that I wanted to buy for $6 each to sustain a six-month commitment, let alone a year.

Between these two, my money is on (and going to) eMusic.com. YMMV.

Another horrifying intentional disfiguration of a public figure.

Followup: Over at Metafilter, one of their forum users submitted the following transcript of a game played with 20Q (reordered to enhance the suspense):

1. Is it classified as? Animal
2. Does it have claws? Rarely
3. Is it eaten by people? Sometimes
4. Is it a type of fish? No
5. Is it hazardous to your health? Probably
6. Does it have teeth? Yes
7. Does it have a long tail? No
8. Can you hold it? Yes
9. Does it have four legs? No
10. Can it be used more than once? Yes
11. Does it live in groups? Yes
12. Does it lift the spirits? Yes
13. Can you obtain information by using it? Sometimes
14. Can it bind objects? Sometimes
15. Is it a carnivore? Probably
16. Does it provide protection? Usually
17. Would you use it daily? Doubtful
18. Do you clean it regularly? Yes
19. Do you use it at night? Yes
20. I guess that it is a human being? Close
21. Is it commonly used? Doubtful
22. Is it helpful in the learning process? Maybe
23. Is it something you bring along? Maybe
24. Is it smooth? Probably
25. Is it taught in school? Irrelevant
26. Does it need love? Doubtful
27. Can it discharge waste? Yes
28. Is it a crustacean? No
29. I guess that it is a woman? Close
30. I guess that it is a gay man (homosexual)? No

The object you selected is: a prostitute

I recently tried to read a book called "Marketing Strategy: A Storytelling Approach". It was so ... special ... I decided it deserved a review on Amazon.

What would you do with access to Amazon.com's library of sound clips? Build a "name that tune" game, of course! Try your hand (and ear) at, say, the Pixies, Boards of Canada or whoever else you like.

Everyone, it seems, is a critic, and last night amateur rock critic Nathan Gale inflicted a little more damage on the band Damageplan than they planned for. Anyone else notice how much victim Darrell Abbott (more info here) looks like Derek Smalls?

More Canadian dubes in the news. Bonus: this story is sex-related.

"Caruba gives a big fat 'dubey' to former Vice President Al Gore". No, it's not what you think.

The McCulloch Effect. Freaky.

From beer.com comes interactive beer wenches. Kind of like, Ask Crystal, but much better. Enter your commands and watch...you know the drill. Experiment with the usual, such as:

• Kiss
• Dance
• Dane on the bar
  
• Strip
• take your top off
• etc...

But save the best for last...... fight !

Play 20 questions against an AI (expert system). Pwn or be pwned.

"Someone though took their eye off the ball and the baggage handler unwittingly put the bag on a plane." So what was in the bag? Oh, nothing to worry about. Just something, apparently, "no more harmful than a chocolate bar".

The sacred cows of rock and pop - slaughtered while-u-wait!

Something pretty *and* safe for work for a change - check out the design of this site. Niiice.

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is one of my favo(u)rite books of all time, a huge, sprawling, story of addiction in many shapes and forms. Among the (multifarious) conceits described within its pages is a shadowy society called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (aka "Wheelchair Assassins of Quebec"); its members become wheelchair-bound by participating in Le Jeu du Prochain Train ("The Game of the Next Train"), the object of the "game" being to be the last to jump out of the way of an approaching train.

The relevant pages that describe this game in its historical albeit fictional context can be conveniently found via Amazon through their "search within the book" feature. The relevant pages are here, here, and here - at least, they were for me, when I tried it, YMMV. If this doesn't work for you, go here, mouse over the cover image of the book, and type in a suitable search string (such as "jeu du") - there are several mentions of this phrase (natch) but the first link that came up with that search string for me was the right one. If all else fails, buy the effing book and read pages 1058-1060. It's a great book - did I mention that already? - and I think, knowing you, you'll enjoy it.

Anyway - all of this is a very long way around to get to this point:

Life (and death) sometimes imitates art.

From memepool - Remember -- Always pick the right tool for the job ... #4 is the money shot.