Music...where have you gone.

I am the ultimate pawn of the music industry. No, I'm not trying to make some consumer-conformist-whatever statement, it's just that I simply don't care to peruse the MILLIONS of songs by indie and alternative bands in lieu of mainstream ear candy.

I buy the iTunes top ten...every month. I listen to Top 40 music stations. Yeah. Whatever.

Anyway, this extreme lameness allows me to get well acquainted with today's racket. A racket that has turned from mildly entertaining and comical music (think Beatles to KC and the Sunshine Band to Poison to Madonna to Beastie Boys to Backstreet Boys) to an ego trip (sans Lady Gaga).

You will not be able to listen to a song on top 40 radio without learning how awesome the people are who are singing it. It's...lovely.

Example #1: Taio Cruz's Break your Heart and you'll also enjoy a BBC blog post on it.

"If you fall for me, I'm not easy to please. I'm gonna tear you apart"


But the best part is the beginning, it's an ego love-fest: 


"Woman: This night is gonna hurt you.
Taio: You know i'm not gonna break your heart.
Woman: You wanna bet?
Taoi: Bring it on."


Taoi, you make my knees weak, man. 


Example #2: Kevin Rudolf's I Made It featuring half the rap world and Cash. Money. Heroes. 


Observation a. When you make more than $10 million, you should be better at naming your posse. Cash Money Heroes? Fucking awesome!


"I look up to the sky
And now the World is mine
Ive known it all my life
I made it, I made it!"



BTW, Rudolf, you are the old man equivalent of Kesha. It's true. 

THE PAY TSAR

Just kidding.  I meant Pay Czar.  This isn't Russia. Is this Russia? This isn't Russia.  I'm currently doing a project on this guy and he is pretty rad.

His resume includes:

• Chief of Staff for Ted Kennedy in the late 60's
• Special Master of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund
• Court-Appointed Special Settlement Master in several high-profile product liability cases including Agent Orange and asbestos
• Administrator of the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund
• Had a street in his hometown named after him
• Founding partner of this law firm

He actually has a pretty reasonable view on executive compensation.  His main tenets are small cash salaries and lots of long-term stock compensation.  He also strongly believes in "claw-back" provisions, where if someone receives a bonus based on a performance target, and it later turns out that target was not actually met, that person should pay back their bonus.  To a normal person, that sounds like common sense, but I guess it took this baller to make companies actually do it.

Best of all, he likes to have testy exchanges with congresswomen.

Platform Tennis

Thanks to my new gig caddying at a golf club, I've been introduced to the sport of platform tennis.  Each time I walk down the fourth fairway, I look to my left and think "what in the heck is that thing?"  Well apparently it's used to do this:



Is it just me or does this not even look like a real sport?

Tiger Lolz

A lot of the jokes made at Tiger's expense have been crass and/or just not that funny, but Slate made a pretty clever one here, imagining how Tiger's situation might relate to Google's new "Every Search Tells a Story" campaign:








More on Tiger later...

I'm a Newsday Twitterholic

...It's probably like yummy in Spanish, except Portuguese. They're definitely the same language.

...or more like early, drunk people.

In other news, pun intended, can newsday.com find me that commercial where they say "smiles per gallon"? I can't find it on youtube...I would really like that. Thanks Newsday.

ROFL