What Better Day to Complain About a Music Chain...

 ...than Record Store Day?

My hat is off to HMV on their recent sales pricing.  They've priced most of their CD's at $5, $10 or $15, but somehow done it so that none of the CD's I want to buy are in that $5 category. 

It's not that they've just set all the really bad music to the lowest price - any amateur can do that.  I developed immunity to the bargain bin of cheep crap as a teenager.  But HMV are more clever: they've also lowered the prices on the very finest albums that I also don't want to buy, in this case because I already own them.  Occasionally seeing great music at ridiculous prices just keeps me coming back again and again.  I'm stuck naively rechecking their shelves every time I'm in a mall, only to walk away disappointed like the hipster Charlie Brown that I am.

Supercar Friday

Stopped at a traffic light today, I was surprised to see a McLaren MP4-12C pull up next to me.  However, shortly after the heavy traffic began crawling forward again, I lost sight of it as that lane fell behind.  It seems the car gods were teaching me a lesson: My car may be worth only 0.5% as much, but speed still comes down to who didn't get caught in the lane with an over-loaded semi half-a-block ahead.  Perhaps a car that is theoretically fast on the track isn't what this world needs.  Someone should make an urban supercar: extra small and manoeuvrable, it can hop between lanes in an instant, fit into tiny gaps in traffic, and navigate busy streets in record time.  I guess that would be a motorbike.

Then a couple of hours later on nearly the same stretch of road coming back in the other direction, I saw a Mercedes SLS, their top-of-the-line sports car.  It was about to turn into a parking lot, and I was tempted to follow just to watch the driver open the gull-wing doors - which, aside from looking cool, would finally answer the question of whether you can open gull-wing doors in a crowded parking lot.  It was then that it occurred to me:  Parking lot?  It was headed for Home Depot!  Again, like seeing a supermodel belch, it was an important lesson that we're all the same deep down.

Grocery Store DJ

Last week I heard a song on the radio, then the next day, I heard the same song on the Musak at a grocery store.  What's weird about this is that the station in question was the erstwhile alternative station, the Edge (née CFNY.)

Now you might take this as evidence of the station's continuing watering-down of its "New Music" format.  (Nickleback?  Excuse me?)  But the song in question was a recent Jack White single that is more solidly in their musical target area than the warmed-over nineties hits that they've come to rely on.  Gratuitous video link!

My point is, this isn't exactly what you would expect to hear in the grocery store.  Even among White's oeuvre, it doesn't make one want to spend. 

So was this the career-ending act of a Musak programmer who finally snapped after one too many Coldplay tracks?  I don't think so, since it seems to be part of a mini trend.  In the past few weeks, I heard the following songs you never would have expected to hear in grocery stores:

• Sour Times - Portishead
• Once in a Lifetime - The Talking Heads
• Lullaby - The Cure
• Suburban War - The Arcade Fire

So what's going on here?  Has Musak started looking outside the Top 40 for material, much the way TV commercials have started using Indie Music?  Or have they just noticed that this town hasn't go many natural food stores, and hipsters gotta eat too.



P. S. :  What do you call a post-script to a blog post?  "P.P." for "Post Post" just sounds stupid, and "epilogue" is pretentious.  Anyway, while typing the above post I searched YouTube for "Once in a Lifetime," just to make sure that is in fact the name of the song.  I was disappointed to see Michael Bolton's song of the same name at the top of the search results.  But that disappointment turned to joy/derangement when I saw the following further down the list:

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About the Future, #3

Tampa, Carolina, Dallas, Anaheim and Colorado have won the Stanley Cup.  Toronto is still waiting.  Oh, and enjoy it when Montreal wins it next year, that's the last Canadian team you'll see winning it for a while.

Freezer Etiquette

I put a Muffin Top in the freezer.  Only afterwards did I realise that I put it right beside some muffins that were already there.  I think they're going to need therapy.

I Still Miss Dave Thomas

I'm confused by this new Wendy's ad:

Is the woman in the back seat supposed to be...

• Actually there?  The guys are really not paying as much attention as you would expect.  But they're not surprised by her presence, so I'm thinking she's an apparition, possibly some sort of "Spirit of Wendy's" which brings up the next possibility...
• The grown-up Wendy?  I guess that's possible; you'd like to believe the girl in the logo grew out of her dorky stage eventually.  But that makes the ad kind of awkward: What's next, a good-looking guy in a McDonald's ad turns out to be the reformed hamburgler?  That's why I really think she's...
• The next best thing when they couldn't afford Allison Hannigan.

Hooray! Technology is Getting Weird Again!

I still can't wrap my head around Facebook's billion dollar purchase of Instagram.  It just got weirder when I found out that Instagram is given away for free and has never made a cent.  Yes, dot-com times are here again, revenue doesn't matter, it's more important to have users than income, and everyone with a half-assed idea will try to get rich with it.  I'm looking forward to the bizarre ideas we'll be seeing in the next decade.  What does it say about us that our economy is most interesting when it's behaving totally irrationally?

Certainly I'm trying to come up with my billion-dollar idea.  I'm starting with the principle that Instagram is a dumbed-down Photoshop that's connected to the Internet, so I'm trying to think what other popular desktop software can be simplified for the iPhone set.  When you put it that way, Instagram's success is a little more understandable: This particular audience consists largely of people who have been introduced to computers through smartphones, and aren't fully versed in what they're capable of.

Instagram is to Photoshop as my app is to _______.  So what desktop software goes in the blank?  I was thinking of a simplified spreadsheet, but the simplified, mobile version would be a calculator.  Even I'm not nerdy enough to want a calculator that posts it's results to Twitter.  How about a simplified, mobile blogging platform?  That would be Twitter.  Original crazy ideas are hard to make.