I am *thisclose* to canning the text ad program entirely, mostly because finding an adult-oriented ad provider whose network ads aren’t cheap looking and embarrassingly laughable is just about impossible these days. Lousy network ads equal lousy clickthroughs, which in turn equals shit in the way of money and a lousy amount of network advertisers signing on for individual ads, and for whatever reason, the loyal, hairy-palmed readers of this site seem to be afraid to advertise their wares here.

For a little while there, before they lost their collective minds, AdBrite was solid, but now they’re just another fucked company. Google AdSense rejected me. AdToll is really not knocking my socks off. I haven’t looked at Yahoo! yet, but I’m really not sure I want to jump through yet another set of hoops to give up some of my screen real estate to products and services that I don’t actually endorse personally.

So, yeah, during the course of writing this article, otherwise known as “thinking out loud about shit that no one gives a rat’s ass about”, I’ve decided to start a pilot program called “MOTHERFUCK ADS”. I’ll be hiding the ad section of the sidebar for now, but if you do decide that you want to buy ads from me, suck@mybigblackcock.com and we’ll talk.

You can do everything that you need to do perfectly…dot your Is, cross your Ts, be completely and totally on your game, and if someone else makes a mistake, is generally incompetent or just plain doesn’t give a fuck, you still fail miserably, and in most cases, nothing happens to the people who agreed to help you, either as part of their job or just as a matter of keeping their word. Add the government to this equation, and the potential for mishaps, failure, and no accountability for the people in the wrong increases by a factor of a million.

As I just told someone who was talking about the movie “Brazil”, “My day was like Brazil.”

I don’t have them very often, but this afternoon was one of those afternoons that made me want a drink. I’m in no danger of acting on that impulse whatsoever (before you say anything: no, really, I’m not), but still, I know that stupid, stupid feeling when something’s kicked you in the gut so hard that you just want to numb it all too well, so as I drove home from Hell, I contemplated what could possibly make it go away. On the short list were the following: booze (Honestly, even if I were that weak, I’m too broke to afford it today), food (See above for the most part; I’m not spending my last $1.79 in cash on a McDonald’s shake any more than I am a bottle of Mad Dog), Xanax (Why fuck up the rest of my day by making myself THAT numb if I’m not actually experiencing anxiety? Also: habit forming), retail therapy (Again, no money, plus, where would I go? I’ve seen everything in all the book, toy, game and comic shops around here), friends (I’d just have to talk to them about my day, and for a few hours after I got home, even, I had no desire to talk about my day), sexual gratification (Give me a break; I’m hard to coax into sex in a good mood, I’ve got no partner nearby, and the thought of masturbating while screaming about my hatred of the government makes me think of, well, Warren Ellis), and so it went for a while, until I realized that the answer was music. I had music with me. I didn’t want to hear everything I had with me, so I skipped around a bit, and in time, I found songs that accompanied every single emotion I was feeling, and helped me get them out in some sort of responsible, healthy way. I found comfort, I found sadness, I found an outlet for rage, I found irony, and I even had a little time left over for laughter.

Unfortunately, to get back to soul-destroying, gross bureaucratic incompetence, when I got home, I wanted to put up a playlist widget of the songs I had on during my ride home today that didn’t involve me hosting anything locally, and it was like pulling teeth finding a working one that isn’t totally handcuffed. It really is like the bitter, pathetic, greedy pricks who run the bigger companies in the music business don’t want anyone to listen to music. I’m not even talking about people who don’t want you to listen to music without paying, I am clearly saying that these people don’t feel that the public has any right to listen to any music, period, no matter who the rightsholders are, or what license they give to the public to hear it. If they could make whistling a capital offense, they would, just to keep music locked up nice and tight in the vaults next to the Kruegerrands and the pictures of themselves with nude boys.

The next person who tries to give me the “But Scott, don’t you think that creators *deserve* to be paid?” spiel is going to be spitting out my left sneaker. No, as a creator, I don’t think I *deserve* to be paid for every bit of whimsy I fart out of my ass like it’s some goddamned birthright, nor do I think anyone else does, especially not the folks who throw in with the corporate accountants who are whining about their gravy train evaporating because the world at large built a better mouse trap (one that should legally be covered under the Audio Home Recording Act and similar laws, like I’ve been saying for the past 10 years). I create things when I create them because I can’t help but do it, not because of some illusion that I should gain fame and fortune for doing it. I’m not a teenager anymore, so “Let’s start a band, get a lot of chicks and make money!” no longer applies. Sometimes I create for the joy that it brings me, and sometimes I create because it’s the only way I know to put sadness in perspective. If people get something out of what I create, that’s fantastic, and if they choose to show their appreciation monetarily, that’s even more fantastic, but this idea that creative people are somehow *entitled* to be paid for everything we do whether the general public asks for it or not, and in a lot of cases, repaid over and over again by the same people for the same things, well, it’s a concept invented by spoiled, ridiculous, greedy people, and not one they should be paid for no matter how much money it’s made people over the years. With the amount of entertainment and educational choices competing for peoples’ attention these days, each of us who creates is fortunate every time anyone acknowledges what we’ve made in a positive way, never mind paying us, as there are literally billions of other ways people could occupy themselves. Unless those people have specifically commissioned us to create something for them (and hey, a lot of times, those folks don’t pay us either, and usually have much better lawyers than consumers do!), I don’t think we’re *entitled* to jack shit. Again, I’m not going to say that I don’t like getting paid. It’s awesome. I will say that I am realistic, smart and humble enough not to expect or demand payment for what I create for creation’s sake, though, and the sooner the artists of the world (and the real lampreys among the people who make a living by selling our ideas to the public at a markup; let me make it clear, I don’t think everyone on the business side of the entertainment industry is inherently awful) get the hint on that front, the better off the world will be.

And so, it is in the honor of the incompetent people in the entertainment industry who fucked up the possibility of me putting a nice little, download-free music player at the bottom of this article, as well as the incompetent people in government who fucked up my day so hardcore that I present to you “Ride Home From Hell”, a 5 song suite of other peoples’ work that really fits together well and perfectly captures my mood this afternoon. Hopefully none of the artists whose work is represented here get pissed off, as I’m at least vaguely acquainted with a couple of them. If y’all are, send a takedown notice and it’s gone, fine, you win, no one gets to hear the nice pretty music without slipping you a twenty. A nice little 5 song player that’d let you skip back and forth on tracks, see song titles and so forth would have been great, but after reading this, you know how that went. If you’re not willing to listen to 5 songs without prejudice, you probably don’t want to download this, but if you want a window into what it’s like to be in a car with me when I’m alone and in a really bad mood, this is for you.

…but remember what he did to the air traffic controllers back in the 80′s?

That’s probably fairly similar to what Obama should do to the people in the financial sector who are whining about losing their retention bonuses. Reagan was a little ridiculous, as the people who keep the planes from falling out of the sky are slightly more essential than the people who’ve lost us a fuckload of money by pretty much looting the financial market. In this case, though, I think the shoe fits.

The argument the companies are giving is that ditching those bonuses or forcing them to non-tender existing bonuses in some way would inhibit their ability to hire and retain “the best and brightest” in the business.

Given what “the best and brightest” have done for us in recent years, I say “fuck ‘em”. Let them earn a living, as well as our trust. Put a tight, loophole-free (as much as that’s possible, anyway) five year freeze on bonuses like that within the financial sector, and then we’ll go back to the drawing board and see if anyone in the business should be rewarded for the job they’ve done. Five years of frivolous extra income for folks who already make a ton of money is nothing compared to the entire lifetimes of money their industry has lost of other peoples’ money. I think they’ll live. If financial companies really wanna totally piss away the money they’d spend on retention bonuses like they’ve been addicted to doing, have them give it to teachers who love their jobs, are great at what they do, but can’t really make ends meet on a teacher’s salary. Oh, and have them spend some of it on a plan to reform tenure, so that lousy teachers who, like these folks who fucked up the financial system, shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing can be rooted out of the system, too.

Now, I’m far from an expert, so if you have a differing opinion that makes sense and isn’t just regurgitated partisan rhetoric of some sort or another (my argument here isn’t based upon talking points from either side of the fence; it just seems to make good sense to me), I am all ears. Throw me a comment and we’ll talk.

…to mention the thing that sucked the most about 2008.

…the guy who posted a Sammy Hagar album in a lossless audio format on one of the torrent sites today. Apparently, he doesn’t realize that “lossless Hagar album” is an oxymoron. When you post Sammy Hagar albums on teh Internets, EVERYBODY LOSES.

Yep, my incomplete short list is something like Torquemada (“Let’s face it…you can’t Torquemada anything!”), Hitler, Stalin, J. Edgar Hoover, Mark David Chapman, Michael Alig and some guy who posts Sammy Hagar albums on the ‘net.

Oh, and Stacy London. Man, she’s awful.

Frank Caliendo sucks.

…but I’m pretty bothered by DirecTV’s new commercial, where they revived the late Heather O’Rourke (and dyed Craig T. Nelson’s hair) to hawk their service with a sendup of “Poltergeist”. Now, dead people in commercials, be it Col. Sanders, Orville Redenbacher or the old Coke commercials with Louis Armstrong and the like, are nothing new, but “Poltergeist” was a creepy movie to begin with, and the girl died at a very young age while making a “Poltergeist” sequel. There’s just something that doesn’t sit right with it about me. Maybe her parents beg to differ, I don’t know, but I’m squicked.

Short review: Hey, wow, some half-assed band ripped off “Battery”. Oh, wait, it’s Metallica. Never mind.

Longer review: This one actually wouldn’t be so bad if there was a shred of focus to it. It’s not as completely off the rails as the “St. Anger” stuff, but you can tell that they’re just trying to show their audience (and maybe themselves) that they can still “thrash”, and in the process, they’re kind of ignoring the whole idea of there being a song somewhere in there, and they still look like a bunch of old men scrambling for their hard-on pills. Come to think of it (and pardon the pun there), “Cialis…it helped me avoid ‘My Apocalypse’, and it’ll help you avoid yours too!” has a hell of a ring to it. Someone get their management on the phone for me, we’ll make millions together.

Short review: Wow. Some half-assed band ripped off “Fade To Black”. Oh, wait. It’s Metallica. Never mind.

Slightly longer review: in fairness, this is a lot better than anything on the last, oh, how many pieces of shit did they put out between “Load” and “St. Anger” again? 3? I forget. However, it’s painfully obvious that they’re pretending to be Metallica so we’ll like them again. It sounds like one of those bands of old guys who get back together and do a song that sounds like they’re trying to be who they were 15 to 20 years ago. Yes, exactly like the last 2 albums The Cult have put out, now that you mention it. Soon, both of these bands will be licensing their music to people who make hard-on pill commercials. Also, someone really needed to chaperone Lars while they were recording this, just to keep him from turning the drums up in the mix. Dude, we know you tuned your snare this time. We’re very proud of you. Can we hear the guitars and bass now, please?

Well, that’s 2 1/2 hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Hey, Nolan! Learn how to pace a movie, for fuck’s sake. This is 2 Batman movies you’ve screwed up now by letting them go on FOREVER. Apparently, you’re not into the whole brevity thing. Acquaint yourself with it, or at least let this guy edit your movies, because you’re just not good enough at building tension to be using up all this running time.

Ledger was alright, but unless it’s a really slim Oscar field and a really misty-eyed Academy, there’s no way he gets a statue, and no way people’d even be thinking about awards if he had a pulse still.

$65 million to make an average, 75 minute episode of the TV show? I’m fairly confident that the FCC wouldn’t have fined Fox 50 million dollars because Marge said “God damn it!” and Bart had his wang on-screen for a second.

Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t hate The Simpsons. They’re not a religion to me like they are to some, but I can usually laugh when I watch the show. However, I can think of much better things to do with 50 million dollars of Fox’s money. Maybe not more profitable things (the movie grossed half a billion dollars…), but better things. I could make a really big bong or something. I don’t know. Maybe that would make a lot of money, if you marketed it to the same audience.

Call me when it works.

…and by “interesting”, I mean “disruptive”.

There’s apparently a Flash file or three that I haven’t nailed down yet that make all sorts of noise on certain LJ pages. If anyone happens to know the domain wild card I could block to make the bad noises go away, I’d appreciate that information.

But, in light of all this, isn’t my slow, gradual phasing out of LiveJournal (and MySpace, who are guilty of similar things, and, not being too naive, I’m certainly looking over my shoulder while I’m on Facebook…) a terrific idea?

Evil, greedy people have purchased LiveJournal from another bunch of perhaps not as evil, but certainly greedy people, though I lean toward “evil” in my opinion of the Trotts in recent times, and after the supposed free lunch that our Internet social lives have had over the past decade, it would seem that services like these are becoming a bit more unfriendly in their old age, and it isn’t surprising, because every jargon whore’s favorite word, “monetization”, just isn’t happening.

Now, full disclosure, not that I need to defend myself, but: I serve text ads on both of my web sites. I do so because they’re unintrusive (and if they ever become intrusive, please contact me and let me know), and in the case of the Cock, it gives all the people who get confused by my domain name and my content a place to go. Things with audio, loading/streaming video, and things that you just plain can’t get rid of easily through ad blockers, those are what we call “evil”, because in Scott Crawford’s world, disruption is the most unspeakable evil.

You’re going to see a lot more of that particular evil in the coming months and years all over the ‘net after something of a lull, because “the shareholders”, which we’ll call them because “the cunts” isn’t very polite, are disappointed in ad earnings, and don’t have enough money to gas up their Hummers. Well, you silly bastards, maybe you should’ve paid attention to the fact that people hate annoying ads before you invested an assload of money in them, no? And about those vehicles…I’m thinking that eventually, people (not me, I’m not a violent sort) will get angry enough at you for ruining the Earth with them to see if the consumer grade versions hold up to explosive force as well as the military ones, so I’d consider maybe putting the things up on blocks, buying a cheaper car with what it takes to gas the thing up a few times, and letting the neighborhood kids fuck in the pieces of shit instead of driving it. After all, I hear they’re very roomy, and teenagers are always looking for new, creative places to get laid! But I’m off on a tangent, aren’t I?

Anyway, get good ad blockers now, and consider moving all your personally valuable content (anything from contact information for your friends to journal entries about how your sandwich sucked at lunch today, if you consider those valuable) to servers that you can exercise more control over. It doesn’t have to happen today, it can be gradual, don’t worry, but it’s worth investing the time, energy and bother into centralizing your data in a place where people who *need* to access it (yourself or others that you trust with it) aren’t at the mercy of stupidity like difficult-to-block multimedia ads, revolving door company buyouts, with each company getting progressively worse, or something totally ridiculous, like a company engaging in libel against you and your business because you used a funny name for your web site.

Now, granted, unless you develop an entirely new Internet or find an effective enough “swarm” method of content distribution and always-on connectivity (think BitTorrent taken a bit further) for you to maintain an online presence at all times without being beholden to any bandwidth provider, there’s always going to be some give and take, and no matter what any emboldened moron who talks about offshoring objectionable content may tell you, if there’s enough of a stake in it, yes, the people atop the hierarchy of the ‘net will eventually shut off entire countries in the interest of isolating that content or data. It’s gonna take something pretty spectacular for that to happen, but I bet that we see it at least once in our lifetimes, if there isn’t a current example of it happening that someone can point out.

However, for the most part, if you’re running your own site rather than piggybacking on a LiveJournal, a MySpace or whatever, like we used to do before everyone got lazy, you have a good deal more say as to what does or doesn’t appear on it. Maybe not absolute say, but the control’s significantly more than it is otherwise. Driving people to self-sufficient sites is tougher, but in a lot of ways, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and the drawbacks are gonna start becoming even more visible, as I’ve pointed out. With all the talk about going “green” and reducing pollution and all that, perhaps it’s time that a concerted effort is made by people to go “data green”, avoiding harmful corporate audiovisual pollution whenever and wherever possible.

Just something to chew on as you get over your hangovers this Sunday morning, and with that, I’m off to go food shopping, and have some cashier give a database an inventory of everything this household uses, to cross-reference against previous shopping trips! Ta!

(And apologies if I sounded more British than usual when I typed this. I just watched 3 episodes of Doctor Who in a row, in the middle of the night, on a disrupted sleep schedule. You try sounding American after that.)

Who else thinks Firefox 3 (or, at the very least, the default theme) sucks?

…looking at the pre-Clinton “suspension” speech coverage.

By the way, it’s nice of her to say “I’m out…kind of”, “suspending” her campaign rather than ending it (presumably holding out for a dead girl or a live boy in Obama’s bed), instead of doing the honorable, decent thing and saying “I’m ending it”. The choice of language is just sort of curious, in that typically Clintonian way. Women of America, is this really who you want speaking for and leading you? Maybe “But it’s a woman!” is significant on some level, but it shouldn’t be the whole story, I’m sorry. Imelda Marcos, Eva Braun and Britney Spears are or were women, too, so’s Ann Coulter, despite rumors to the contrary. Let’s get down to brass tacks, folks. Getting rid of a glass ceiling doesn’t mean shit if you replace it with a ceiling that has spikes on it. We need the most capable, honorable person to lead this country, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a man, a woman, a black guy, a white guy, a gay guy, a lesbian, a dwarf, a quadriplegic, or a cyclops with AIDS and a speech impediment.

OK, she’s talking now, let’s see what she has to say.

She’s done, and I suppose that’s about as gracious as it’s going to get. She’s still talking like she won something, though, and maybe she has won something we don’t know about yet (we’ll have word on that whenever Obama chooses a running mate). Maybe I’m not as enthusiastic about the “big picture” victory she kept alluding to, that we should be doing cartwheels because it’s even possible for a woman to run against an African-American man for the Democratic Presidential nomination, because I’ve become outraged in my old age that any of that ever mattered in the first place or may still matter now in this country. That any of this information is still important to anyone in the world at this stage of the game, not just Americans, makes me embarrassed for and ashamed of humanity.

Some may say that I’m the last person on Earth who should get uppity about these things, and that my sense of humor (from the name of my web site on down) is at cross purposes with my attitude toward discrimination, bias and prejudice, but the goals of any joke I make along those lines are to point out the absurdity of that line of thinking to begin with (“My God, do people really think like that?”), and to do that whole “laughing instead of crying” thing that tends to bring out the best humor, in my view. That said, “let’s not make this about me”.

To get back to Hillary Clinton, my major gripe with her is and always has been that, no matter how compelling a public speaker she’s capable of being, there’s a serious integrity deficit there, just like there was and is with her husband. I don’t need to detail it here (Google her if you’re curious), and if I did, someone would probably just come along and claim that Hillary, like Roger Clemens before her, “misremembered” when she said and all those things. I’m not going to claim outright that Barack Obama won’t turn out to be the same kind of person; he is, after all, a politician, even if he’s a very good one. The difference between the two is that we don’t KNOW he’s a total fraud like we do with the Clintons, who are more suited to reality television than politics. There’s a chance he could turn out to be decent, unlike his opponent in the primaries or his opponent in the general election (who appeared to be the closest thing the Republican Party had to a man of conscience two elections ago, but has led a scorched Earth policy against reason and decency ever since, fuelled by his desire to get the religious right to like him so he’d be “electable”). I’m totally willing to take my chances with Barack Obama, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll admit that the country failed, but also take pride in the fact that we were willing to try something new.

The Clintons are still patting themselves on the back for all “they” did for the economy when it was my friends in the tech industry and academia who did all the heavy lifting that the Clinton administration took credit for. No World Wide Web (and no, Al Gore didn’t “create” it either, despite the fact that he was always a proponent of its development), no Clinton-era economy, and anyone who thinks otherwise is foolish. Bill and Hillary would take credit for creating pussy if you let them, just because they both eat a lot of it (Allegedly, lawyers, allegedly!). I can’t blame them for doing that, as I love pussy, but I’m not the kind of guy who’d go around taking credit for it, either. Besides, I’d get in a whole mess of trouble for that whole “menstruation” thing I left in by accident if I did cop to it.

All silliness aside (and I’m sure there’ll be a few of you who read this and think that my silliness demeans some of the more serious points I’ve made here, but that’s nothing new), today’s Clinton sorta-concession speech should’ve happened a week ago, was well-spoken but had about as much sincerity to it as anything else the Clintons do, and will do little to dissuade the unfortunately very vocal lunatic fringe who are going to continue to yammer about how they’ve been disenfranchised just because most news web sites have open commenting now. Folks, let me give you a hint, if you’re still on the “I’m not voting for Obama because Hillary lost” train: if you’re going to play the role of disenfranchised victim spoiler nutjob, don’t vote for McCain or write in Hillary Clinton’s name like you say you’re going to. The line to Ron Paul’s campaign headquarters forms here instead, and your votes will at least make my friend Frank Edward Nora happy, even if they don’t do a hell of a lot otherwise.

As for me, to somewhat ironically (given my whole attitude about race and gender in the first place, which I stated above) quote something I read somewhere earlier this week: I’m “VOTING FOR THE BLACK DUDE!” (Sorry, Ev, but the crassness of that sentence was too hilarious for me not to share.) I will be voting for Barack Obama come November, unless the aforementioned proverbial “dead girl or live boy” show up, in which case I will be voting for Cookie Puss. Actually, if Clinton does get reason to “unsuspend” her campaign, I will grudgingly vote for her, but I’m really going to feel like the person who has sex with someone undesirable so their friend can get laid too.

Regardless of who you choose to vote for, though, it is essential and vital that you register to vote and and show up to do it on election days big and small. I got very informed about my town’s mayoral race this past year, for instance. I still need to read up on school elections more than I do. This stuff is all important, no matter how Diebold tries to fix it. If you’re not there to vote in the first place, you can’t claim that they rigged your vote, case closed.