You gotta give credit where credit is due, and the iPod marketing team has earned some love. How the hell they’ve managed to create such a cult of drooling maniacs around an MP3 player is beyond my meager marketing skills, but they sure did a bang-up job. Then again, it is Apple and there is a built-in cult of Apple worshippers left over from the ever-declining computer hardware and OS side of the company (which is too bad, because I hear OS-X is awesome…then again, it is sitting on top of a UNIX-like base).

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Celebrity worship amazes and confounds me. The fact that the media and so-called regular folk actually spend any amount of time pondering the opinions of celebrities sickens and discourages me. During my days working Marketing/Promotions in radio, I met many a celebrity musician and have yet to understand what, beyond the desire to study a musical instrument, separates them from anyone else. Many of them were nice, regular folk while others were utter dicks (actually, it was just Joe Perry from that group; the rest of the guys were cool). What have most of these celebrities done that has earned them the right to air their personal politics on national television? Why is their opinion valued when the opinion of a regular, blue-collar guy from the Midwest is discounted as uneducated and uninformed?

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I’m just on vacation. This is the week in between the old job and the new job. I’m busily getting all kinds of errands taken care of as well as hanging out with the local family contingent that often complains that I don’t see them enough. Anyone who knows me will wonder why anyone else would insist on my visiting on any kind of regular basis, but I guess family has to make the effort or seem somehow less than familial. Now I just need to keep working on getting up early so I can get used to the new (and painful) work schedule; a sacrifice I’m more than willing to make in order to escape from the insanity of the last workplace. Hey Texas, DUCK! Someone might need to explain to me why we’re planning on rebuilding New Orleans in the same sub-sea-level spot when shit like this crops up mere weeks after the city got destroyed. Maybe they ought to consider relocating somewhere a bit further uphill.

I should know better than to blog anything about my work, but I find myself in such a bizarre situation that I can’t resist (company names will be omitted, but most people who read this blog know where I work). Perhaps writing about it will help me get it straight in my mind. First, a little background:

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This state is ridiculous. Not only is it one of my most willing states in the nation to infringe upon its citizens’ rights, it manages to do so at the highest possible cost to the citizen. That’s right, Boston is now officially the most expensive city in the nation. Yep, we beat out San Francisco and New York. Talk about dubious honors.

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How many ways can our rights be trashed in the name of public safety? The latest one, which might seem minor to some of you, is a regulation from the Boston police that would require all liquor stores to notify police anytime a keg is sold. The notification must include who bought it and where it is going. That way the police can pro-actively monitor the location where the keg ends up in order to prevent parties from “getting out of hand”.

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A little lyrical post in celebration of Labor Day. This song, written by Ed Pickford, had been performed as an acoustic song by Scottish folksinger Dick Gaughan. However, I came to hear it when the Dropkick Murphys put it on their 2004 album, Blackout.

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I saw this link in a story posted by The Register today: The Interdictor blog. This is a blog written by a military veteran and current employee of directNIC Web Hosting, a company based in downtown New Orleans that has been kept alive and functional by a dedicated staff of employees locked away on the 10th floor of their building with a Diesel generator providing power to the servers. I won’t rehash The Register story nor the blog entries; they’re plenty powerful enough on their own without me watering down the mix. Check it out.