Infinitive Splitter

If yesterday’s news about a new, ad-supported service to offer free digital music downloads seemed too good to be true, it was.

For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones do. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements, and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.

They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog web site monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.

Brilliant. Offer free music to people, but not in a format they want or can use. Who wants to listen to music on Windows Media Player?

No iPods? Imagine if audio cassettes had been specially magnetized somehow to be incompatible with the Walkman.

I wonder how many people who have never bought an mp3 will try out SpiralFrog, get sick of having to watch the ads and sit in front of their computers to listen to their music, and then decide that 99 cents really isn’t a lot to pay for a song.

I’m back! With huge, breaking news!

SpiralFrog, a new music download service, on Tuesday said it would make Vivendi’s Universal Music Group’s catalog available for free legal downloading in the United States and Canada.

The new advertising-supported service, due to launch later this year, joins the ranks of rivals battling for a piece of the digital music market in the shadow of Apple Computer Inc’s dominant iTunes music store.

New York-based SpiralFrog said it would offer users of its free, Web-based service the ability to legally download music of Universal’s roster, which includes U2, Gwen Stefani and The Roots.

“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” SpiralFrog Chief Executive Robin Kent said in a statement.

Kent said SpiralFrog’s business model is based on sharing income from advertising with content partners like Universal.

Finally, a way to get music for free!

In other recent entertainment news:

• Little Miss Sunshine and Invincible are the feel-goodest movies I’ve seen in a very long time. See them both as soon as you can.
• Middle Distance Runner and the Black Tie Revue played excellent sets at Velvet Lounge on Saturday. See either of these bands for a good time, anytime. See them together when you can for extra-special magic.
• On Entourage, firing Ari was an unbelievable waste of an episode. Not because omigod Ari is their friend and they need him and he rules, but because Jeremy Piven is the only person on the show worth watching. I can’t imagine many people are tuning in to see Adrian Grenier.
• The Wilson Bridge demolition was a total disappointment. My associates and I watched from the Washington Street bridge, which the police officers on the scene told us would offer the best view. From there we enjoyed an hour-and-a-sweaty-half of waiting, during which the hooligans in the crowd passed time by inventing uninventive chants (like “blow it up!”) and castigating Maryland for — as it appeared to the crowd — delaying the demolition by failing to stop the flow of traffic on its end of the new, parallel Wilson bridge. At 12:30 the crowd counted down from about six, the bridge went BOOM bang-bang-bang-bang BOOM, the smoke and dust began to rise, and we all started walking back toward our cars.

Next time: a separate update for each half-formed idea!

I would like to register a complaint!

NFL referees are getting new uniforms this year, and as Uni Watch says,

It ain’t pretty. For comparison, here’s what we’re all used to seeing. And here’s the new attire — short-sleeve, long-sleeve (the extra black areas appear to have been influenced by the NHL officials’ jerseys), rear view, and left-sleeve uni number. There are some worthwhile features, like the zip-up mock collar for cold weather, but the black pocket and tapered stripes are bad news. Why fix something that wasn’t broken? Even worse, based on this photo, it appears that there will be a wide black side panel, not unlike the side panel worn by NBA refs, which is a huge mistake.

The kicker, though, is that the officials will now wear black slacks with a white stripe during cold weather — no more knickers and striped socks. Scandalous! Anyone want to bet how many “waiter” and “butler” jokes it takes before this experiment is abandoned?

Blecch. Bad idea, you guys.

In other Friday news, I’m going to see a movie tonight, and it won’t be Snakes on a Plane. Related Link

The Register, on the feasibility of blowing up an airplane using simple household liquids:

First, you’ve got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.

But let’s assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you’ve got them on hand.

Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It’s all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don’t forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked “perishable foods”), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You’re going to need them.

It’s best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate - especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation - to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.

Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you’ll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you’ll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven’t overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you’ll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it’s true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it’s unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that’s about all you’re likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.

(Via Kevin Drum.) Read it all.

This has been your original-content-free post of the week.

Rumors of Bill Cowher’s potential retirement are gaining steam.  His contract runs out at the end of 2007, and he and the Steelers have historically extended their agreements two years before expiration, but at his request they’re not doing that this time around.

Cowher is only 49 years old (he’ll be 50 next May), and while he’s the longest-tenured coach in the NFL right now, he’s still only the second-best of the last two Steelers coaches.

C’mon Bill, give us three more Super Bowls.  Four more if you really want to stand out.

While I was away, Matthew Yglesias wrote to disagree, correctly, with Gregg Easterbrook’s assertion that shooter is an inappropriately PC term and should be replaced in news reports with murderer. Further on in Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column (whose 2006 series began two weeks ago, to my pleasant surprise), TMQ complains that, in Mission: Impossible III, “the supervillain, previously shown commanding a heavily armed private militia and protected by bodyguards even when at the Vatican, nevertheless travels nearly alone to Shanghai to confront Tom Cruise, world’s greatest secret agent.”

I haven’t seen that movie, but I did finally get around to watching The War of the Worlds yesterday morning. It started off very impressively, I thought, but deterioriated significantly in the middle, when the tension between the Tom Cruise character and his teenaged son comes to a head while they are literally standing on an active battlefield between human and alien armies. The “let me be my own man” talk could probably have waited for some other time. Characters in action movies too often fail to properly triage their various disputes.

Also — spoiler alert — the end was a total bust. Maybe it works better in the novel (if the novel ends that way), or maybe that’s just how a lot of science-fiction stories go (”Aaaaaand then by some lucky fluke they all died, and the earth was saved. The End”). Michael Crichton did the same thing in The Andromeda Strain, which disqualified it from the running for My Favorite Book when I first read it sometime in junior high school.

We pushed off from the southern shore (my boat and me) toward the green-
Ery that tipped the island’s eastern edge — the quintessential scene
To end the long, camp-sited coast, where real estate was claimed by tethered boats.

A fire I smelled but did not see burned somewhere in behind the trees.
And passing through the rocks, I looked for fish below among the reeds.
And then I scanned the northern shore to find the camp I’d seen some years before.

An older house, a screened-in porch, a T-shaped dock I knew for sure,
But such were common traits among the camps across that distant shore.
And when I’d narrowed down the bunch, to two, I chose the wrong one on a hunch.

As I approached the lakeside house I wrongly thought I’d once been in,
I saw a figure by the door and wondered if it could be him
Who’d treated me on several nights to dinner with his daughter and his wife.

But no, as you’re by now aware, your narrator had somehow erred
And picked the wrong house (on the right), sans boats and with brown-painted stairs
And not the green one (on the left) — the one that was, of boats, not so bereft.

So, presently I saw the camp that I had meant to aim toward,
But not a light was on inside and both familiar boats were moored.
Now satisfied (if saddened some) that they were out, I turned around toward home.

These things should really be written during the time they describe, because the memory afterward tends to focus on more recent calamities at the expense of longer-ago pleasantness.

Anyway, here’s my 2006 Adirondack vacation diary:

• A lovely week. The house was fantastic; Dad and I went for a nice kayak trip; I wrote a poem; the whole family ate some good food; my brother beat me at ping-pong twice and then I beat him once; and we all spent the nights around open fires, or pizzas, or other enjoyable things.
• On the way back home, my sister and I stopped along the Pennsylvania Turnpike for ice cream and gasoline. Then the car wouldn’t start, so we finished the ice cream while we waited for the AAA guy to show up with his jumper cables. Gladder every day to have bought that fucking car.
• I think I’ll be getting a photo-ticket in the mail for speeding in the I-395 tunnel (I saw the camera flash). What fucking sense does it make to have a 45-mph speed limit in a god-damned tunnel? Fuck D.C.

See? Should have written it down in real time. It really was a very civilized holiday.

Names have been changed, just because.

INFINITIVE SPLITTER: “surfing on a rocket” and “coffee and tv” are two songs that are (a) perfect for any mood at all and (b) always improve whatever mood i started in
SOMEONE ELSE: hahah
SOMEONE ELSE: the best part is on my computer
SOMEONE ELSE: (a) shows up as a smiley face angel
SOMEONE ELSE: and (b) shows up as a glass of beer
INFINITIVE SPLITTER: hahahahahaha
SOMEONE ELSE: so angel perfect for any mood at all and beer always improves whatever mood i started in.

Tomorrow: vacation!

Before today’s games, nine of the 14 teams in the American League — 64 percent — have .500 or better records. Texas is one of them, at 54-54, and the Seattle Mariners, at 53-54, could join the club tomorrow if they beat Oakland.

Just five of the 16 National League teams — 31 percent — are having winning seasons.

In the American League wild-card race, the Angels are in fifth place (9.5 games behind) with a 55-52 record. The Reds are leading the NL wild-card race with the same record.