May 2009
30 posts
Play
Listen
“It Must Be A Camel” by Frank Zappa, the final track from the Hot Rats album. (Amazon; Wikipedia)
This is my favorite track from one of the best albums ever made. Listen. No, really: put down the Fudgsicle and listen. It’s only five minutes long, but it’s a challenging five minutes. This is not background music.
I think this song is kind of a litmus test for Zappa appreciation. If you get it, it makes you want to live inside it. If you don’t get it, it makes you want to smash things with your head.
Lately I’ve come to realize that most of the things I like can be described this way.
- Me: You know, when a lady stars six of your tweets she's obligated to give it up. It's like the third-date rule.
- Wife: I don't know, I've starred @sween six times and I'm not ready to sleep with him.
- Me: He's Canadian. They're on the metric system.
“Choosing friends based on proximity to your house is much odder than choosing them based on shared interest and conversational rapport.”
—@redrabbit: In defense of the tweetup
This.
This.
Twitter Tees
(WARNING: the following post is embarrassingly self-serving. Please forgive.)
So I decided it’s about time I started profiting from this internet-smartass gig, and since Twitshirt is a no-go, I signed up with Threadless.
Unfortunately, they don’t make it possible to see or vote on more than five of any user’s submitted tweets. They fixed it! So here’s my list of nominees. No need to buy a shirt, but if you like any of these, it’d be cool of you to vote “Heck yes” on the Threadless page.
Twitshirt Responds
In response to my letter of ten days ago, I received this email from Twitshirt Services:
Thanks for your inquiry. We are not trying to be different in our Terms of Service. The terms on our site were provided to us by our legal team. We do have plans to revisit the terms so that they not only address the legality of the site, but also are written in layman’s terms so as to not scare off any users.
That’s good news, but I wish there weren’t so many online services that treat their privacy policies and terms of use as afterthoughts. I suppose the reasoning is that hardly anyone reads those documents, but for those of us who do—especially when money is involved—legal copy is part of a company’s public image, and first impressions are hugely important. Twitshirt’s terms are so hostile and repulsive that I immediately lost any interest in licensing my content to them. I’m not sure revising them will be enough to win me back.
Also, I hope they’re not paying too much for that “legal team.” So unenforceable.
Play
I figured it out, guys
- Find the woman who laughs the loudest at you when you do dumb stuff.
- Marry that gorgeous creature.
I don’t know what this sickness is called
but it started with “Hey, if I buy wireless headphones I can listen to Jon Stewart while I do the dishes,” took a left turn through “★★ Nice use of multitouch, but I can’t hear my podcasts while I’m playing,” and I’m afraid it’s going to wind up with me face down in a puddle of Firefox tabs, CPU pegged, Refresh button in each hand, waiting for the playlist to end so I can wonder where it all went wrong.
This Is Just To Say Yo
I have put
some plums
in your
icebox
so you can
have plums
while you eat plums
for breakfast
Forgive me
but I heard
you like plums
dawg
