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**UPDATE 10/11/07**
It looks as tho Oasis, Jamiorquai and Madonna have followed suit! WOW Its no longer a matter of when but how fast the music industry will fall… we’ll listen and see!

Original Post
Music, musicians and their songs are a controversial commodity these days. The RIAA just recently fined some woman for sharing music online, the first of this sort. And now Radiohead and NIN have left their respective labels to pursue music promotion and sales themselves. Could this be yet another evolution to Music 2.0?

Music 2.0, how its delivered: Myspace, Podcasts, iTunes

Indie artists have been flooding the online cloud.
More than ever the amateur and yet-to-be-discovered artists are grasping the tools of the internet to share their talents (or lack there of) to the online community. Weekly, I get seemingly random friend requests on Myspace from up and coming bands. I click on through and some of them are actually good! It looks like they may be onto something as some successful mainstream musicians are following suite and becoming independent again.

Heyyyy its MikeyBoy here!
Just 4 years ago podcasting through crude RSS feeds started hitting the online airwaves. Recording and posting these sound/music clips is very easy, anyone with their home computer can do it. 4 years later this phenomenon has grown into a full commercial commodity. The simplicity of creating and popularity of listening to these podcasts creates, with continuing momentum, the perfect vehicle for everyone from the garage band artist to the multi platinum artists to get their creations to your ears!!

Full circle, mainstream again.
The most popular podcast harvester out there, iTunes, this software makes acquiring these podcasts and songs even easier. Apple has recently teamed up with the coffee-walmart of the work, Starbucks. Through this partnership, $.99 and theclick of a few virtual buttons on a touchscreen handheld device your ears are activated with sound waves from just about anyone.

Congratulations Mr. Trent Reznor, welcome to music 2.0.

It looks like Panasonic is taking the ‘flat-panel’ form factor serious, they’re studying furniture concepts that are tailored to our latest design iteration of the ‘boob tube’ This one I like lots!

Down the road from my A-P-T in the L-B-C is a quaint home furnishings and design shop called David Galindo Home. It’s in a renovated craftsman, run by a furniture designer, David Galindo next to my gas station (what I call a ghetto gas station, but just recently got bought by Valero). With a flair for mid-century modern, he offers his own custom designed and built furniture. He also carries a host of household goods, including candles, lighting, books, mirrors, and kitchen wares.

It’s my favorite store– as well as my sister Annie’s, who’s got street cred because she’s an interior designer. Annie says he’s got a great merchandising eye. Yeah, I agree.

(more…)

Do you have a lot of gas?

Do your farts smell like dog fart or like the korean bbq you had for dinner?

Does your girlfriend get mad when you trap her in a dutch oven?

Then, you should consider a seat cushion that solves the problem of your stray farts. GasBGon is a flatulence filter seat cushion that claims to both absorb the sound of your fart and the odor. Using carbon filter technology designed by a fart engineer– er, I mean, an air quality and filtration engineer– the cushions have washable covers that come in interesting patterns and with amusing tongue-in-cheek names, such as “musical solo” (because that’s how farts should sound) and another in an animal print, called “silent but deadly.”

These anti-fart cushions have “removable cushion properties to dampen sound and a replaceable activated carbon material to absorb odors.” Blah blah blah, whatever. All I wanna do is does this shizniz work or what.

So I looked on amazon.com to read their oh-so-handy user reviews. And, I freaked out when I saw what I thought was “1 new and 1 used” for sale on their site!!! Who would buy a USED fart cushion?! Anyway, I was a bit relieved– and bummed– to see that I had misread it (it was just “1 new” GasBGon). There were a total of 19 customer reviews with 14 of them giving 5 stars. Christopher Wallace, the third user down, actually boasts as to having crapped on himself (gross) into the cushion without his girlfriend or dog knowing! Hooray for the multifunction GasBGon!

Oh, one last thing:

Malodorous gas is a naturally occurring event, obviously affecting some people more than others.

Why does “malodorous” sound like melodious? Ew.