Sometimes the jokes write themselves, again

Astrological Magazine, via Fark:

 We regret to announce that due to
unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of

The Astrological Magazine

will cease with the December 2007 issue.

Video downloads: we need 27-hour days

An excellent proposal from the New York Times (via Daring Fireball):

Typically, you get 24 hours to watch your on-demand movie. Here’s what happens time and again to my wife and me. We get the kids down, and about 8, we click an on-demand movie to watch. I get sleepy by 9:30 (I work hard, okay?) and turn it off but I want to see the rest of the movie the next day.

Next day, I get the kids down at 8 and—poof—the rest of the movie has disappeared. If it’s free, I have to fastforward through the movie (which is particularly slow and annoying). If I paid for it, then it’s particularly enraging.

With a 27 hours to view the show, all problems solved.

I agree entirely. We started watching something earlier tonight, Baby Bigmouth kicked off, and by the time BB was settled Mrs B was too tired to watch any more. Once dinner, BB’s feed and bath etc are sorted tomorrow night we’d have exceeded the 24-hour time limit on most VOD (iTunes, Xbox, whatever).

From the “no shit, Sherlock” files: post-pub crime reduced by cunning “extra police” plan

VIOLENT incidents in Glasgow city centre are on the decrease after the number of police patrols in the area on Friday and Saturday nights tripled. Stabbings and serious assaults fell in almost every part of the central nightlife zone, according to official figures.

Full story at the Evening Times.

Woman stabbed, shot, attacked and set on fire – in different incidents – is either very unlucky or a fraudster

Via Fark:

A Davenport woman who reported being stabbed, shot and attacked, and whose camper was set on fire, has been charged with making false reports and insurance fraud.

Full story here.

Apple keynote: gadget lust a-plenty

Razor-thin laptop, wireless network storage… nice.

I don’t see much point in regurgitating the keynote, but I do fancy the £1,199 MacBook Air  (£2,028 if you want a solid state drive) and Time Capsule (the £329, 1 terabyte version). Revised Apple TV looks nifty too, although it wasn’t clear whether the “all the studios are involved” deal on iTunes movie rentals includes the UK.

E from Eels has a book out

It’s called Things The Grandchildren Should Know, it’s an autobiography, it’s under E’s real name (Mark Oliver Everett), it’s out on the 17th and it’s getting excellent reviews from the critics. In best Amazon.com reviewer style, I haven’t read it but it’s the best book ever.

I want the book even more than I want the Official Girls Aloud 2008 Calendar. Yeah. That much.

This month also brings two double-disc Eels compilations: Meet The Eels, a kind of greatest hits (although the stunning Electro-Shock Blues is under-represented), and Useless Trinkets, a collection of B-sides and other odds and sods. The latter also comes with a DVD. Both go on sale on the 21st, and I’d imagine they’ll be on iTunes then too.

Beware DNA, “athiests” and monkeys

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, for example… sounds impressive, right? But have you ever seen what happens if you put something in acid? It dissolves! If we had all this acid in our cells, we’d all dissolve! So much for the Theory of Evolution, Check MATE!

Various quotes from stupid people on the internet, via MetaFilter (this particular crop are from Christian fundamentalists, but it’s not the religion. It’s the dumbness).

More:

If we did evolve from monkeys then how come babies arent born monkeys

And:

I believe my son has a girlfriend, because she left a dirty magazine with men in it under his bed.

I particularly enjoyed “Athiests as a majority” [sic].

That joke isn’t funny any more

Apologies in advance, but this is my favourite joke at the moment:

A man goes to the doctor to get his test results. The doctor looks sad, and tells him to sit down. “I’ve got some bad news for you,” the doc says. He pauses. “Actually, it’s two lots of bad news.”

The man steels himself. “Okay,” he says. “What’s the first bit of bad news?”

“You’ve got AIDS,” the doctor tells him.

“Shit,” says the man. He thinks for a moment, letting the news sink in. With a pained expression, he asks: “What was the second bit of bad news?”

“You’ve got Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh well,” the man says, brightly. “At least I don’t have AIDS!”

I don’t think there’s anything remotely funny about Alzheimer’s or AIDS, but the sheer wrongness of it makes me laugh like a drain.  If the second disease had been anything other than Alzheimer’s, it wouldn’t have been funny.

I’m sharing the off-colour joke because I’ve written a column that seems to have caused offence. In .net, I was arguing against multimedia on the grounds that just because you can put video on a website doesn’t mean you should. And the example I used was this: if you have a hot new gadget but you get Michael J Fox to hold it while Muhammad Ali films it, you’re probably wasting your time.

Of course both Fox and Ali have Parkinson’s disease, which isn’t funny in the slightest. Which was kind of the point. I was trying to come up with something that was funny in a “I shouldn’t be laughing at this” way.

(I do appreciate that Parkinson’s isn’t funny, incidentally. I was tested for Parkinson’s a few years back – constant shaking that I thought was RSI but the docs thought might be an early symptom of Parkinson’s or some equally hilarious degenerative disease. Waiting for the results of that test wasn’t the best laugh I’ve ever had.)

I’ve apologised, naturally, but it’s got me thinking about humour, offence and where to draw the line. Is it a bad thing to make light of something serious, even if it’s gallows humour? Is it about power, so a Parkinson’s sufferer can make gags about it but someone who doesn’t have the disease can’t? Is finding the “at least I don’t have AIDS!” joke funny evidence of being a bad person, and if so does that make Gerry Sadowitz the worst man on the face of the Earth?

I’m genuinely interested in your answers – humour’s a very subjective thing, and I imagine what’s offensive and what isn’t is even more subjective…

Music biz to Apple: thanks for saving our necks. Screw you! And come to think of it, screw music fans too!

I’m hoping that part of Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday will be the news that all iTunes music is going to become DRM-free, but I’m not holding my breath. The big four major labels have all made Damascene conversions to the cause of unprotected music downloads, but they want to sell them through Amazon, not Apple.

The official reason for this is that the majors are worried about Apple’s dominance of digital music. But the real reason is that they want you to pay more for your downloads.

To understand this, we need a quick bit of time travel. In the bad old days – a few years ago – there were loads of digital download shops, and they were all shite. It wasn’t that the music didn’t work on iPods, although that was a pain. It was that the rights you got for your cash varied from label to label, artist to artist, track to track. Some downloads could be burned to CD. Most couldn’t. Some downloads could be transferred to your portable player (provided it was a Windows Media one). Most couldn’t. Actually working out what rights each individual download came with took longer than it had taken the artists to learn their instruments, write the songs and get them recorded.

It was a bloody mess, and punters – quite rightly – stayed away in their millions.

Enter Apple and the iTunes music store. Where there was confusion, iTunes offered simplicity. Yes, the tracks were copy protected – the record labels wouldn’t let Apple sell the tracks otherwise – but the protection was consistent, and so were the prices. You knew that a download cost X, could be played on X machines, could be copied to your iPod as many times as you like, and could be burned to CD.

Punters – quite rightly – shopped in their millions.

The difference between iTunes and everybody else was really, really simple. The other download services’ terms were dictated by the record labels, who didn’t give a toss whether the result was confusing or punter-unfriendly. iTunes, on the other hand, was more interested in making things simple for you and I.

It turns out that if you treat music buyers with a modicum of respect, they buy music. Who knew?

So what’s happening now? Apple has been banging the anti-protection drum for a while, and the labels have belatedly come to realise that Steve Jobs’ “thoughts on music” open letter – basically, DRM is shite and alienates legitimate punters – was bang on. But they also reckon that Apple has got too big for its boots, so while they’ve embraced DRM-free downloads they aren’t letting Apple get them.

A bit part of this is trying to knock Apple down a peg and show Steve Jobs who’s boss (which is ironic, as it’s the labels’ insistence on DRM that’s created the iTunes/iPod lock-in that helped make iTunes such a big deal). But more than that, it’s because the labels hate the idea of fixed prices for music. The idea that a new song is 79p and an old song is 79p appalls them, and if Apple is the only game in town then that’s what they’re stuck with. Cut Apple out of the equation, though, and they can start varying pricing.

And ultimately that’s what this is all about. Despite the massively reduced production costs of downloads, despite the massively reduced distribution costs, despite the record contracts that mean artists get a pittance from download sales, despite the Long Tail that means selling lots of old records can mean healthy profits, what the labels really want is to put the price of music back up again.

Hands up anyone who thinks variable pricing means new tracks will stay at the same price while old stuff gets cheaper?

Update, 15/1: the New York Times goes into this in some detail.Икони

Maybe I’m getting old, but I like this idea

ASDA’s going to start fining drivers who park in disabled or parent/child spaces. Quite right too. The point of these things is that people with mobility problems – not necessarily wheelchairs, but the inability to walk far – get to park closer to the door, and parents get to put their kids in prams at the side of their car without having to do so in front of moving vehicles. In my local supermarket half the drivers seem unable to see other cars, let alone buggies.

In my neck of the woods I reckon 9 times out of 10 the people parking in disabled/P&C spaces are neither disabled nor carting kids around. They’re just far too important and busy to park with the rest of us plebs. Which means they’re important and busy enough to pay £60 when everyone else parks for free. Yay.