• YouTube, We Hardly Knew Ye
  
  Remember CDNow.com? I used to go there a whole lot back in the day to sample CDs, get album info, etc. If you ever used CDNow, you remember how great it was. Then, without warning in 2002, Amazon bought CDNow. And it sucked.
  
  Most of what I know about HTML was self learned while I played with my own little Geocities site back in the day. Then Geocities was absorbed by Yahoo and all of a sudden you had to have a Yahoo ID to use Geocities and the file space went way down, etc. And that sucked, too.
  
  Now, just as I've gotten to where I use the somewhat controversial video sharing site YouTube.com a whole lot, it's been bought by Google. And, lo, we shall mourn this day the rest of our lives, and a great plague shall descend upon those who have shared their videos with YouTube.com, and there will be gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, and it shall suck.
  
  Google, after all, is the owner of Blogger… the blogging service I use to manage this site… and the blogging service I bitch about constantly because it SUCKS.



• Wow, It's Been 20 Years…
  
  … since Cliff Burton died. I remember it like it was yesterday, though. I was watching MTV one September afternoon in 1986. This was back when they still played music videos on MTV. Yes, kiddies, us old guys used to watch these things called music videos on MTV. They were like short musical movies… or, more honestly, they were like long commercials for different albums.
  
  Anyway, I was watching MTV one September afternoon in 1986 when a VJ named Alan Hunter came on to do the two-or-three-minute music news (they used to do it at ten minutes before the hour) and he said something like "The world of heavy metal lost a second stringer today with the death of Cliff Burton of the band Metallica."
  
  Metallica was my favorite band. I remember sitting in front of the TV in my parents basement that day with two weird realizations in my head at the same time: One, Cliff Burton had died. Two, I'd just heard Metallica mentioned on MTV.
  
  Metallica, you might remember, wasn't on the radar back in the day because they didn't do music videos. Hard to believe, but there was a time when they were underground and little known and meeting someone in a Metallica T-shirt was like running into another member of your very own secret society.
  
  These days, of course, Metallica T-shirts are as commonplace, meaningless and unremarkable as Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Or Snoopy T-shirts. Or Budweiser T-shirts, for that matter.
  
  James Hetfield reminisced a little about Cliff on the 20th anniversary of his death:
  
  

  "We never would have written guitar harmonies or instrumentals or songs with very intricate melodies and orchestrations without Cliff. We wouldn't be where we are today."

  
  
  20 years. Damn. Seems like yesterday. RIP, Cliff.
  

  




• Freedom Of Speech … Just Watch What You Say
  
  Liberals, of course, are aaaallll about freedom of speech. Unless they don't like your opinion. Then, they are all about silencing you, drowning you out and preventing others from hearing what you have to say.
  
  Freedom of speech, to the average liberal, only applies to other liberals. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ivory tower of academia, where diversity of every kind is encouraged. Well, every kind but one: diversity of ideas is to be stopped, squashed and eliminated at all costs according to the academic liberal ethos.
  
  Recently, Jim Gilchrist of the controversial Minutemen Project was asked to speak at Columbia University in New York. A number of young liberals at Columbia disagree with Gilchrist's positions on immigration, so they did what liberals do best: they attacked. Literally, physically, violently attacked:
  

  
  Tell me again, left-wingers, how we redneck gun-owning Christian red-staters are such closed minded, bigoted, hateful bullies. More video and some smart observations from Michelle Malkin are up at Hot Air.




• Blog Checks
  
  
  • A website I mentioned by e-mail to MCF made this week's P Links. So did this great CEO coloring book.
  
  
  • I also got luv from the 13th edition of Links N' Junk at Rey's A Point. More importantly, Rey posted a link to a great free media conversion site.
  
  
  • The Unseen Blogger is literally disappearing. Check out the fourth thing he learned over the weekend.



• Déjà Vu, Al Over Again
  
  Another Weird Al interview… the first half of this one, with Paul McCartney, is screamingly funny.
  

  
  If you're as easily entertained as I am, check out his sit-down with Madonna.

Labels: Media, Metallica, Music, News, Politics, You Tube

Permalink -- Posted by Darrell at 18:47