Musical Batonism

iTunesWeblog posts about music, in my opinion, are a kind of no win situation, because there’s nothing that you can say about a piece of music about which you’re currently very enthusiastic that will really mean anything to anybody unless they’re already familiar with it, or unless they’re so powerfully predisposed to that particular genre or style that a positive reaction is a foregone conclusion. The exception to that, of course, is if you have a weblog that is primarily focused on music and/or has accrued a significant share of musical credibility when it comes to endorsing bands. I don’t have that kind of weblog, clearly, so when I think about writing a post about music that’s exciting to me, I generally resist it.

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Do the Locomotive

This guy one row behind me is on his mobile phone and he won’t shut up, but overall, I’m pretty happy to be traveling for my current business trip — this time very briefly to Washington, D.C. — by train. Amtrak, for all its faults, is a far, far better experience than hauling myself out to the airport and suffering through the perfunctory and arbitrary TSA screening processes before getting on an overcrowded airplane. Between New York and Washington, you just can’t beat the train for how easy and how pleasant it is.

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The Peacemaker

Some people say that, whether it was truly a case of plagiarism or not, it would have been polite if the propietor of Lethean-Sound.com had emailed me in advance to say he was lifting somewhat heavily from my own Web site, as discussed earlier today. In fact, I did get an email in the middle of the day today (still after the fact, but better late than never) from Lethean-Sound.com that was very polite and apologetic, and afterwards, at my suggestion, a small credit appeared at the bottom of the site’s home page that read, “Some CSS and code courtesy of Khoi Vinh.”

As I said, I was not, in general, made particularly angry by the affair, though neither was I pleased. But the correspondence quickly mollified me and made me realize that, if it was not polite for the site’s proprietor to fail to contact me about the design in advance of launching it, neither was it particularly polite of me to fail to contact him without first posting about it here on my weblog.

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Un Rip-off

An anonymous somebody or other posted this link to one of the comment threads here this weekend. I removed it immediately, partly because it didn’t have anything to do with the topic of the weblog post to which it was appended, and partly because I wasn’t sure how to react. If you click on the link, you’ll understand my situation: it’s a French-language weblog that looks very much like what a weblog would look like if its designer was trying to rip me off.

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Sith Time’s the Charm

Episode IIIIn the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

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Sith Time’s the Charm

Episode IIIIn the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

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