Today’s links of interest:

• French lawmakers pass ‘iTunes law’
  No truth to the rumour that, as retaliation, Apple is going to bribe the refs to issue red cards to Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry during tomorrow’s match with Brazil
• Bono asked to aid copy-protection fight
  This, however, may be too much to ask of Super-Bono. Nobody can stop the evil overlords of media from implementing torturous ways to keep people from listening to the music they purchase.
• China cracks down on blogs, search engines
  Makes you wonder if the Chinese government has a clue.

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Very few bands survive 35 years in the music business without undergoing major changes. Guitarists drown, drummers spontaneously combust, and singers generally get old and cranky. There’s no telling what might happen once rock stars get to be a certain age. Fortunately, the Residents aren’t most aging rockers.

As bands go, the Residents haven’t changed much over the years. True, one of them lost an eye back in the mid-80s, but other than that they look about the same as they did when they released Meet the Residents back in 1974.

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A while back, when the first reports of the delay for the “true Video” iPod surfaced, I argued that it might not be such a bad thing for Apple if there were a few months between new iPods.

It seemed to me that there was a possibility of market fatigue with all of the iPods already out there, as well as a bit of a backlash by consumers who discovered that the 60GB iPod that they had just purchased to watch episodes of Battlestar Galactica on a cross-country flight wasn’t the “true” video iPod.

However, there are fresh reports of even longer delays, and we may look back at these delays as the tipping point where the iPod stopped being the center of the universe and started being just another cool gadget.

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Today’s links of interest:

• Jack Is the Decider - How a radio format is a lot like our president
  "Playing what we want." As long as it’s on the list of 1,200 songs, all of which you’ve heard 1,200 times before. No thanks.
• Star’s ?View’ adieu askew? Former host says she was pushed out
  Her fan is devastated.
• Ethnic group & Trudeau are Poles apart
  Totally off-topic, but what the heck. Name a group that Trudeau hasn’t made fun of.

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An Open Letter To Tom Petty,

Tom, you still don’t know me, but earlier this month I asked you to not sue the Red Hot Chili Peppers for their purported plagarism of your song “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.”

And once again, you’ve provided another example of your ongoing menschdom (menschiosity? menschitude?) by telling Rolling Stone that suing is the furthest thing from your mind:

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In what has to be the slowest news week in the history of the world, this comment caught my eye:

“We serve up a big helping of pop culture that’s of the moment. It would be great to measure the response to that,” said Rob Gregory, Maxim’s group publisher. “Two-year-old data is pretty ridiculous.”

Yeah. Makes it really hard to respond to changes in demographics when you’re working two years behind.

• Publishers Bullish About Readership.com

Today’s links of interest:

• Plan hopes to boost FasTrak
  Cool, but all this will do is move the traffic jams from the toll plazas to the bridges themselves . . .
• The long tail of the alcohol distribution curve
  It’s very very rare when you find your life summed up in a single headline.
• Gammons in Good Condition After Surgery
  Huzzah. Gammons is one of the good ones, and we’re glad to see that he is OK.

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Came across a small piece on the CBS news site that made me laugh. It was essentially touting the fact that New York Times TV Critic Virginia Heffernan now has a blog dedicated to web video.

That’s not what made me laugh: I’ve read Heffernan’s writing ever since her Salon days, and it’s great that she’s leaping into this frontier. I’ll even betcha that it was something she asked for rather than was assigned.

What made me laugh was this bit of old-media-on-old media-puffery, courtesy of the CBS News website:

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When we last left Michael Eisner he was giving his personal Mickey Mouse tie to Robert Iger and noting that all he had left was his Mickey Mouse underwear.

It must be rough being a former entertainment mogul and part-time talk show host. Which is probably why Eisner continues to look for just the right post-Disney venture in hopes that he will one day return to his former glory. Lately he’s pinning his hopes on a company called Team Baby Entertainment. With a name like that it has to be good.

According to the LA Times, Team Baby is a start-up company that makes college-sports booster videos aimed at children ages 6 months to 5 years. Think teletubbies with football helmets.

Believe me when I say that it’s not my long running aversion to all college sports that causes me to say that this is wrong on so many levels.

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Today’s links of interest:

• The People Formerly Known as the Audience
  This is as close as an NYU Journalism professor will ever get to sounding like Gil Scott Heron.
• Warner Bros. sells films via Guba.com
  Apparently kids in dorm rooms don’t have TVs. My how times have changed.
• B-CAT fight over kitty comedy / Local cablecasters to sue Animal Planet for stealing feline reality format
  There is no truth, however, to the rumor that The Cat Burglars were going to reunite for a Very Special Episode. Bob Feline was quoted as saying: "We don’t do reality shows, man."
• NBC to Run Fall TV Promos on YouTube
  Including a contest for fans of "The Office" to create promotional videos for the show. So the concept would be to take some aspect of that show and create something new around it. Nope, doesn’t ring any bells.

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