Just got this press release regarding the Deluxe Edition of Beck’s Odelay released this week:

The first pressing of the recent Odelay Deluxe Reissue was found to have gone out with unproofed lyrics that were taken from a lyrics website as place holders for layout purposes.

Beck apologizes for this unfortunate oversight and is making arrangements for the corrected lyrics to be available gratis via
Beck.com. Subsequent pressings of the Odelay Deluxe will also include the corrected lyrics

This is lulz for several reasons. First off, the fact that the staff at Geffen used a lyrics site for whatever reason is just a little bit ironic, given that the music industry has made a point to try to shut down these very sites through litigation and threats of jail time many times in the past. And second of all, the fact that the “corrected lyrics will be available” online kind of diminishes the idea that buying an actual legit copy of a record is worthwhile, especially at $19.99. But what do I know? After all, the music industry had a banner year in 2007, especially Geffen’s parent company, Universal.

So granted, that video with the dude beating his wife or whatever was pretty corny, but TRJA did scan over 800k units of their first record, which even by today’s margins is no chump change, especially for a label like Virgin, whose roster reads like a dollar bin in a used record store. Nevertheless, in a blog post titled “Virgin Records, Soundwave, and our NEW record…” the band states:

Stay tuned for a series of important announcements regarding Virgin Records, the Soundwave cancellation, and our NEW record…

To our fans in Australia - an announcement has been making the rounds that we are not playing Soundwave in order to stay behind and make another record for VR - this information is highly inaccurate and something that we did not approve -the full story shortly. Don’t You Fake It.

Long Live The Alliance

-RJA-

Hints as to what this might mean are pretty much summed up elsewhere on their Myspace profile, where under label they list “none.” So the real question is who dumped who? The all-knowing wisdom of The Velvet Rope seems to to point to El Droppo, which is kind of sad until you remember….THEY ACTUALLY CALLED THEMSELVES THE RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS!!111

Anyone who calls their band something like is srsly asking for it. But on the bright side, after selling 811,176 copies of their last record and touring on it for a couple years, each band member - after recouping costs for recording, promotion, tour support, etc - probably made literally tens of dollars, so I’m sure they won’t be hurting for a least a couple of days. Rock and Roll! The only job where your paycheck is really just a loan! In their downtime the members of TRJA are busy coming up with totally original concepts like this:

Actually…wait, didn’t that already happen?

VIGILANTISM. What a divisive concept. On the surface it seems like a just and righteous cause - righting wrongs where the powers that be do nothing. But it’s also a scary concept. That gang of torch-wielding villagers is powerful in their chaos, and once feeding into their own frenzy they cannot be stopped. Sure he looked scary and gross on the outside, but did Frankenstein’s monster really have it coming?

Regardless of whether you believe Scientology is a CULT or a legitimate RELIGION, whether it should be left alone to its own devices or kicked on its shellback, belly up for the feasting, is good for debate. However, while I personally believe that the Church of Scientology is a scam (…if anyone tells you they have THE ANSWER they are JUST TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING, you silly-ass MARK. And the same can be said of organized Christianity, but that’s a debate for another day…) and the original concept of Anonymous’ war on CoS has merit, Anonymous’ attack on the Church of Scientology is, sadly, doomed to fail. The Church will not be brought down, its members will not be enlightened to the hierarchal brain-washing and its more nefarious designs, and a Utopian future where the everyman has power over the corporate superstructure will not come to be. Sorry brah.

This is what I believe will happen before Anonymous topples the Church of Scientology.

I call it the Schrodinger’s lolCat complex: No one likes a Clever Dick. This is especially true for an elite group of Clever Dicks that think they are more clever than every other Dick. Once an original idea enters the mainstream of popular internet culture, the group who originated it (such as those who frequent sites like 4chan) is quick to abandon their memes, in-jokes and conquests for lulz.
For instance, the fact that I used the term “lulz” means it’s already on the way out, soon to be replaced with a new portmanteau or new term altogether. Or another good example: lolcats. According to ED, the original creators coined the term Caturday, which took off in the Clever Dick society, eventually filtering down to the pop culture as lolcats. Now that your 44-year-old aunt in Wisconsin has seen and chortled at a lolcat, it’s fair to say the joke is over. The originators are over it, and a bit bitter about it too.
I imagine this same scenario playing out with Anonymous’ war on Scientology. It’s a funny, great and arguably just idea; one that will (and already has) spread into the pop culture with mercurial speed. And while its main proponents are still the revolutionary-minded counter-terrorist vigilante types, as the message spreads and more and more people get involved, the message and spirit will get diluted until the Anonymous originators see a diminishing return of lulz and tire of the war. At which point, drained of creativity, the war will grow to stalemate and sooner than later, the phenomenon will dissipate, relegated to the tomes of memes that are “so 1,000 years ago.” Once you put Schrodinger’s cat in that steel box it’s already as good as dead. By examining something you fundamentally change it, and although a cat is fine too, nobody even gives two shits about Schrodinger’s lolCat anymore.

On to the next silly internet thing. Here’s to progress. Thanks for the corruptions, Anonymous.

During a recent campaign speech in Florida, John McCain warned the crowd “I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.” How’s that for optimism? According to political pundit and former Republican Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, a vote for McCain is basically a vote for war with Iran.

“You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran. There’s no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. … His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we’re going to be in Iraq a hundred years.”

Buchanan’s not exaggerating about Iraq either. John McCain actually said he’s fine with that too:

He later clarifyied that troops could be there ‘thousand years’ or ‘a million years,’ for all he cares. Talk about legacy.

To make matter worse, John McCain is a certified Myspace STEALER:

John McCain’s people commandeered my world-renowned MySpace design template and did a few things wrong:

They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.

They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the “Contacting John McCain” table.

As if #2 wasn’t bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load. So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!

Luckily this led directly to lulz:

The McCain campaign of course immediately swung into action, dispatching their obviously crack squad of 1337 Myspace page cr34t0r5 to solve the problem. Or not.

So anyways, if you want a president who loves war, thinks the internet is a series of tubes, and looks like the emperor from Star Wars, VOTE MCCAIN ‘08!!111

Oh come on, gimme some funny captions. Here’s mine: “Not thorny, but horny.”

Apparently Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like being in front of the camera nearly as much as he does being behind it. The footage is from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which somehow came and went last week without me even knowing it. Guess nothing really exciting happened. Bunch of stupid ass movies I’ll never watch showing for a bunch of people way richer than me, in a town that somehow manages to be cool despite being just up the road from one of the most vanillafied bastions of backwards religious fundamentalism this side of the Mississippi, Salt Lake City, Utah. Maybe, next year.