Remarked by me this morning as I was dealing with a “crisis” around the office:

I am having a ‘fat day’. And you do not want to mess with a single gay man in his mid-30s having a ‘fat day’, ok?

From swissmiss comes this great flowchart to help some people understand what it’s like to tell people you work in web-related design. Replace that last box with, “Oh! Can you help me build a website?” and it’s much closer to my personal experience.

On a lovely side note… Anthony Logistics products are wonderful for keeping my skin feeling great and cleaning out my pores. I just have to remember that eating chili with jalapeños in it is going to make me sweat like a pig even more than I usually do with hot & spicy stuff. I’m glad I have an hour or so before my next meeting. Right now I look like I’m either having a heart attack or that I’m nervous about something.

I won’t say that I didn’t see this coming, but I have been dreading it. Pandora may be near shutting down.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

[Pandora's] royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, [Tim] Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

Some of the stations I listen to, have breaks for ads, and some of the sites have banner ads and the like, but I think that people have been enjoying the freedom in both choice and cost for too long to see any viable way to make money from internet radio. I’d be very sad to see Pandora go away. On those days when I’m not streaming music from my home server, Pandora is a great way to find out about new artists and also laugh at the “similar to…” recommendations they serve up*.

I don’t have a car, so don’t listen to the radio on a regular basis aside from NPR and I rarely catch All Songs Considered anymore. Oddly enough, one of the ways I hear a lot of new music is from ads on tv. The iPod ads aside, I couldn’t tell you what the product is, but I wouldn’t have sought out “Remind Me,” “Love Song,” “5 Years Time,” or “Let the Drummer Kick” if it hadn’t been for ads on the tube.

Between SoundExchange and the RIAA**, the message seems to be that music is a commodity, the fact that it entertains and/or moves you is merely a side-effect. Perhaps next up they’ll be sending around teams of imposing looking lawyers to shake down buskers on street corners and outside metro stations.

* Have you also noticed that if you start diligently rating songs on any station, they all start to become the same station?

** Who just shut down Muxtape.

From the deadline USA blog at The Guardian comes LOL Bush. A LOL Cats inspired look at some photos taken during President Bush’s visit to the Olympic Games.

Do you like watching train wrecks? Of course you do, you’re an American with a television! How about educational train wrecks? If that concept didn’t blow your mind, you should be keeping up with You Suck At Photoshop. It’s a hilarious video tutorial series where the narrator Donnie Hoyle teaches some very good lessons in Photoshop while unfortunately working through… a lot of stuff. I rarely use PS beyond a few basic techniques, but I’ll definitely refer back to this site when the need to know more arises.

I don’t normally advocate web video and especially not web video series, but this one gets a pass because it cracks me so consistently up.

This is a jingle that it’s been pretty difficult to avoid as its been used in both a car and a snack chip commercial. Something about the simplicity of it really grabbed me. I idly wondered what it was but not enough to seek it out. Well today the car commercial was immediately followed by the snack chip commercial and seeing as how we were having such a lovely sunny day, I did some digging.

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[Noah and the Whale - 5 Years Time at the Hype Machine]

It’s such a fun song and a cute video, definitely worth 99¢! Since I actually appear in Super 8 videos (some even from Disney World), I love seeing anything shot in it. I hope everyone’s having a lovely fun and sunny weekend!