A website called Spiralfrog launched this week. It provides about 800,000 free legal music downloads. Of course, the files can’t be burned to CDs, and won’t play on either the iPod or Zune MP3 players. So much for a solution to the crippling music piracy plague that continues to threaten the music industry with extinction. Here’s a great idea I heard myself say the other day when I read this article: Stop trying. [story]
More and more Americans are giving up friends and sex for a life spent on the Internet. A recently conducted survey asked over 1,000 American adults how long they would feel OK without using the Web. Fifteen percent said one day or less. Twenty-one percent said a couple days. Nineteen percent said a few days. The survey also says that over one quarter of those polled admitted spending less time socializing than they spend online, and twenty percent said they spend less time having sex because they’re online. I’m not surprised. I was over at Ilya’s last night and he kept turning on his laptop, instead of sitting in complete darkness with three other people, in utter silence, watching the LOST Season 2 DVD. What’s up with that!? The Internet totally ruins people’s social lives! [story]
634 pounds of marijuana were seized Friday morning from the sleeper cab of a trailer hauling Chips Ahoy cookies. The drug kingpin who derived this scheme must be some kind of super-genius, because he knows all about how well marijuana and Chips Ahoy cookies go together. They might be a rung below the Entenmann’s soft-baked chocolate chip cookies, but you wouldn’t believe how many nights I spent in Livingston as high school/college kid silently offering a prayer of thanks that one of my good friends had a younger sister with a sweet tooth. Because of her, multiple boxes of Chips Ahoy cookies were always readily available. [story]
Uh…apparently the Department of Homeland security is awarding a contract to a Russian mind control expert to study Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, “A software-based mind reader that supposed tests a subject’s involuntary response to subliminal messages.” This one is certainly weird. [story]
The apartment search continues to no avail. On Monday I called a place about a room for rent. I was told it was $600 a month, and in a good area. Then I called to confirm the appointment for Saturday to see the room, and was told they’d made a mistake and the rent was $650 a month. I awoke this morning prepared to tell the person that I wanted the room, even if it wasn’t an optimal place to live. When I showed up, I was told the rent was $700 a month, and then shown into a bungalow with dimensions measured roughly ten feet (length) by six-and-a-half feet (width). I then proceeded to drive around town for over an hour, calling various “For Rent” signs only to return him with not a single new option. Eight days.
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