Hunter S. Thompson quotes...

Some great quotes from an American icon:

I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
~
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
~
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
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The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
~
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
~
Fear is just another word for ignorance.

Harper’s Retrospective of the Bush Era...

Interesting retrospective article from Harpers Magazine with obscure bits of numbers & stats from the bleak period in American history known as the George W. Bush era. Interesting in the same obscene way a bad traffic accident is to gawk at... Full article available here.

Money quotes:

Days since the federal government first placed the nation under an “elevated terror alert” that the level has been relaxed: 0

Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069

Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3

So what we have is an administration who kept their citizens in a state of fear, broke their own laws and spent 33% of 8 years (approximately 963 days) on vacation.

Unfuckingbelievable...    Good riddance. 

400GB of raw HD Lights In The Sky NIN concert footage...

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once again gives a big fuck-you to his former record company. Seems that Trent & co. wanted to film and release a blue ray/dvd of their most recent Lights In The Sky tour that was nothing short of a musical/visual masterpiece every night - I know first hand having seen 3 shows on this tour. But his former record company holds the rights to some of the songs and wouldn't give him permission to use them, effectively killing the project.

So Trent relaxed the security at 3 shows towards the end of the tour and allowed fans (and his own film crew) to film all they wanted. He has now released via torrent files over 400GB of raw HD footage of the 3 complete shows pre-organized in Final Cut Pro sequences for fans to edit and assemble into their own blue ray/dvd discs. From a band of this stature this kind of fan respect and interaction is unheard of in the record industry. Makes me very happy to be a NIN fan....

Here is the blurb from Trent on nin.com:

The internet is full of surprises these days.
I was contacted by a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives who SOMEHOW managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour. Security must have been lacking at these shows because the quality of the footage is excellent.

If any of you could find a LINK to that footage I'll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool.

Oh yeah, you didn't hear this from me.

Wow, now I need to go out and buy an external 1TB drive to hold the files...

Huge thanks to Trent & co..

Ontario family courts biased against males...

Just read an article in The Star about a guy proven NOT to be the biological father of 16 year old twins but ordered to continue paying child support, as he had been willingly doing since 1998 under the assumption that the twins were his children. Seems the mom had an affair she can't remember. Yeah, uh huh. Not surprising that a female judge made this asinine ruling.

Read the article here.

I've long thought that Ontario family courts are skewed towards women. But what do I know, I'm a male.

Ghosts I-IV Amazon's 2008 best selling album...

Nice to see that even though Nine Inch Nails released all 4 Ghosts albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, meaning NIN fans (and non-NIN fans) could legally share & download free versions of the album, Ghosts I-IV actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store. 

Also good to see fans paying for quality independent releases.... Personally I opted for the Deluxe $75.00 box set (CDs, DVD, BlueRay disc & artwork) bought directly from nin.com. Also nice to note that the Limited Edition $300.00 box set (CDs, DVD, Blue Ray disc, vinyl & artwork) sold out in 24 hours.