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This pledge drive thing has thrown off my schedule, and the show will drop tomorrow night instead of tonight. Thanks for your support, and whether you subscribe or not, thanks for listening.

One of these commercials was for DirectTV, the satellite service.

Savvy marketing, dontcha think? Hulu is a terrific way to avoid paying for cable. It has a lot of negatives if you compare; crappy picture quality, limited selection, and watching isn’t exactly a passive experience. But the positive is it don’t cost an extra $80 a month. And nowadays that’s pretty compelling.

- Daniel k.

What’s with Metallica and digital music? First they drag Napster to the ground and kick the hell out of it, and now their fans are complaining that iPods make their music TOO LOUD.

“Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods… Some fans are complaining that “Death Magnetic” has a thin, brittle sound that’s the result of the band’s attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. “Sonically it is barely listenable,” reads one fan’s online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.

Sure it’s barely listenable sonically, but what about all the other ways?

Well, like all trends this one is a pendulum - it looks like the “make everything loud” trend is about to swing back. I’m sure Lars and the boys have another great unplugged album in ‘em.

-daniel k

Slate, the online magazine, did an informal survey of its readers to find out which was the most ordered and not watched movie among them. The concensus? HOTEL RWANDA. The much-lauded Don Cheadle movie based on a true story is in the top ten most popular rentals at Netflix, and apparently also the one most often guiltily sent back without ever seeing the inside of of a DVD player. Good news if you’re bugged by scratched DVDs - HOTEL RWANDA is probably always in mint condition!

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey told me the company doesn’t keep track of which movies its subscribers hold onto the longest but said he wouldn’t be surprised if Hotel Rwanda was the one. He confessed he’s been sitting on a copy since September 2006.

I’m guilty of this kind of thing myself, but not lately. In the last 90 days I’ve watched everything I ordered. The one I wish I’d returned without watching was IDIOCRACY, which depressed and frightened me. Maybe I’ll feel the same about WALL-E. But God knows I’ve sent back plenty of material, from foreign classics to studio blockbusters.  In fact, here’s a list:

GHOST RIDER
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
DEAD MAN
THE THIRD MAN
CONTROL ROOM
FINDING NEMO

As you can see, my rejection tastes are very eclectic.  I got a documentary, a classic, a couple of huge hits, and a couple of quirky independents. And come to think of it, I started to watch DEAD MAN but fell asleep.

I can’t speak to Netflix as a business model, but it has revolutionized the renting of movies. It allows you to consider renting any number of things that you would never go near if you had to pay for them individually. If you never go near them once you’ve rented them anyway, that’s your problem.

-daniel k.

As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.

i think you should include the REASON why we don’t allow our show to be filmed:  we don’t own the synch rights to the songs we perform, so we do not have the right to be filmed performing them.  if someone films us doing so, we get held responsible and liable.

Don’t think this is a minor point. The music industry has sued a 12 year old girl, an eighty year old woman and a laser-printer in a campus office for downloading music illegally. Cheese has every right to protect his livelihood.

He also adds this:

i didn’t “spit a glass of water” out into the audience.  This implies that a full glass of water was sprayed, which it was not.

Quite so. It was about the same amount of liquid in a typical spit take (see the work of Danny Thomas or John Ritter for reference) which is roughly half a swallow. Point taken, sir.

He also adds that he does the camera confiscating thing at a lot of his shows, whenever someone is watching him through a device instead of just, you know, watching him. He says he’s never broken a camera or damaged a cellphone in the five years he’s been doing the act. And contrary to what I’ve read around the ‘net, he didn’t wreck any hardware the night I was there. I was pretty close, and I’d have heard the crunching.

As a side note, Cheese also pointed out that I left out the word “like” in my previous entry, as in “a voice LIKE Steve Lawrence.” I have corrected this. One other thing I left out because it simply wasn’t apropos: the guy does an eerily accurate impression of Bjork. Seriously, it’s creepy. Check him out live sometime. But for God’s sake, remember that the only round glass thing between you and him should be a highball tumbler.

-daniel k.