I’ve recently hooked back up with some friends that I haven’t seen since college on Facebook and it occurs to me that there are three kinds of friends in life.

First are the ones that you’re fortunate enough to live near as the years go by. Those are easy because you have the same experiences and grow in the same way. The second are the ones you lose track of for a few years and then when you get back together you have a great time catching up for about 10 minutes and then realize you don’t have anything left to say.

The third kind are the ones that should be cherished. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been blessed with more of these than I probably deserve. They are the ones that you can lose track of for years and when you get back together pick up your conversations like they’d never ended. With these people it doesn’t matter that you’ve have different experiences in life or what your political or religious issues are, you can still have conversations. Thanks guys.

It’s been two months since the last Would You Hit It? post and Heather was disappointed so here you go:

They have, thankfully,  been out of the news lately. I’ll leave the jokes to you.

Joseph Carnevale, the traffic barrel monster creator who was arrested in June after Raleigh’s crack police force solved the case, had his day in court. The end result is 50 hours of community service and then the charges will go away. The president of Hamlett Associates plans on erecting the sculpture outside the corporate headquarters and taking Carnevale to lunch. Carnevale plans on doing his community service working with Habitat for Humanity. No word yet on what RPD plans on doing with all the time they’ve got to waste now. Hang out at Snoopy’s, perhaps?

There still hasn’t been any mention in the traditional press but it certainly seems that this whole thing came about  because of a joyless thug named K.L. Everett who wears a badge. As near as I can tell (since the traditional press won’t come right out and say it), he took it upon himself to decide a crime had been committed and set to work the huge bureaucratic machine that is Piggy Central. Hope you take a bullet and it kills you in a slow and painful way. I would say that I hope it paralyzes you but then you’d be paraded around as some sort of “hero”. If you’re dead you just go away and the earth is a slightly better place.

Here’s a link to a story in the N&O.

While I was getting my head sewed back together the other day, I couldn’t help but notice this sign in the waiting room. I’ve got to believe that there’s something left out because there’s nothing I can think of that makes this grammatically correct. What I find especially funny is that somebody put it up on the wall and didn’t seem off-put by it.

I installed a Blackberry app so I could blog wherever I was and then don’t post anything for 8 days. What can I say? When you’re in the moment you tend to forget to do it and lately during the weekends I’ve been really busy.

This is where the WordPress for Blackberry app will be so cool. I’m at Raleigh Downtown Live and I’m posting to my blog. I realize I could do that before with the plugin I had but it was rending a web page on a really small screen and it was kind of a pain in the ass to deal with. This is a native app and I can save stuff and come back to it. Very cool

There was a deal reached this week between the record companies and SoundExchange over music webcasts. It was presented by some as a win for webcasts even though Pandora’s own blog notes that the royalty rates are higher than for any other form of radio. Others such as Techdirt call it a death sentence for Internet radio. One thing I found interesting was that the opinions varied almost entirely depending on whether it was an Old Media or New Media source. I think they’re both right.

What it means is that services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker Radio get a short term reprieve. They’ll be able to suck up the fees and stay in business for a while but I think the royalty rates are too high to be sustainable long term. On the other hand, it will almost immediately kill off any smaller webcasters that are interested in staying legal.

What it means long term is that the recording industry has killed another legitimate source of revenue and if there is no free web radio to listen to people will download and listen to stolen music for which there is no income associated. They should have embraced web radio and given them royalty rates at least comparable to conventional radio – increasing the number of people listening to paid music. Instead they continued their death dance with Clear Channel.

Here’s a clue for you, RIAA. Nobody likes their corporate, sounds the fucking same everywhere, committee programmed bullshit. Some people will tolerate it but the number who will is becoming increasingly few. They are doomed and so are you. But frankly I think that’s a good thing for both musicians and listeners.

I just downloaded and installed the WordPress for Blackberry app so now I can blog from wherever I happen to be. Honestly, I don’t see me doing huge posts from my phone but it will be extra cool from breaking stuff while I’m away from my computer.

I know it looks like I haven’t been going to see any bands lately or supporting local music in any way but you’d be wrong to think that. What you’d be right to think is that I went and got too drunk to write rationally about it. So, for the record, in the last couple of weeks I went to The Brewery on the 19th, 26th and last night and went to Downtown Live and caught the Tubes and Cracker on the 27th.  Out of all the bands I saw at The Brewery I recall exactly two of the bands’ names*. Why two, you ask? One was Hotspur. I remember their name because they had cards printed that they had laying around for people to pick up. I remember MecanIkill because he said his name several times during his set. See my previous whining bitch posts about bands and why you should pimp you band. I’ve liked several of the bands I saw over the last few weeks but will never get to see them play again unless I luck into it. This is not the way to make it as a musician and give up your day job as a barrista at Starbuck’s, kids.

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So I was talking to Kim, another of my wise friends, and she was saying how much she liked Raleigh because it’s like a big city but without all the big city problems (there had been a significant amount of alcohol involved so that may not be a direct quote). I said that I felt the exact opposite. She asked what I thought were the things that I was missing out of big city life and all I could come up with was a dinner theatre and amusement park.

After giving it a little thought the next morning I realized that it was possible that she was right and I’d been riffing on Raleigh all these years because I was unhappy with my personal life. The fact is that if you look around a little there’s quite a bit to do in Raleigh. So I’m going to just let it steep for a little while and see what happens. The really funny thing is when she was talking about it I kept thinking how it sounded like me talking about KC.

Raleigh really is situated pretty nicely between the mountains and ocean. the only other place in the US I can think of that’s similar is LA. It’s not really Raleigh’s fault that I never go to either, ya know? The weather is decent… not cold and not Florida hot.

UPDATE: I just happened to read over this post and realized that was the lamest fucking conclusion to a post ever. Sorry, Dr Almasi. It wasn’t his fault.

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