This gave me a good chuckle on the way to the metro this morning. But to the dude handing out the DC Examiner free daily at Columbia Heights… ease up! I know you’re dressed better than the guy handing out Express. I see your warm and friendly smile and I see you detach from whatever conversation you’re having to prepare to stand in my way and offer me one. I even see your lips moving in what I can only assume is a greeting and perhaps a pitch, problem is… I can’t hear you. (Thank you Shure headphones!)

Express has pretty much always “owned” that corner in the morning. The Examiner had a guy out for a little while, but maybe they lost interest or our area wasn’t considered part of their demographic before it got all gentri-frilly-fied up. When I worked at L’Enfant Plaza, I would get accosted coming off the escalator by people handing out the free dailies (which I already had one of by then) and lovely Asian women handing out menus, the occasional federal worker trying to rally for a free event, and even the odd caring & concerned student trying to sign me up for a cause.

The direction of both publications has changed a bit in recent times, and while I know that Examiner definitely feels more DC focused where Express feels more fun, I’m mainly reading Express for the inside front cover, the Blog Log–way to go Liz and lachochran!–maybe the Entertainment section, and the Comics/Sudoku page at the back. If I finish the puzzle during the day, then I’ll pick up my own Examiner on the way home, though more often than not, I’ll grab The Onion instead.

Perhaps it’s the complete lack of external sound that the new headphones provide, but when I smile and say/mouth “no thank you” to the guy, that should be the sign to leave me alone. Instead I see a pleading face and lips moving in what appears to be a beseeching treatise expounding the benefits of his publication. Probably nothing like what’s actually going on, but within my world of sound-isolation… that’s what I like to think.

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.

Just reading a cyberscare, “won’t someone think of the children” article about binaural beats, called “idozers/idosers”:

We all know that music can alter your mood. Sad songs can make you cry. Upbeat songs may give you an energy boost. But can music create the same effects as illegal drugs?

This seems like a ridiculous question. But websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones.

First off, that opener sounds like the lead-in to a Fox News story and secondly this reminds me of an episode of the remake of The Outer Limits titled “Music of the Spheres” where kids were getting hooked on a form of music that gave euphoric effects, but that adults didn’t seem to be able to hear at all.

The article goes on to say that there’s no proof that these audio files actually do what they claim and I suspect it’s just another internet scam since the companies themselves say some people may be immune to the beats… yeah, right. I invite comments from the audio/bio geeks out there, but I’ll continue thinking that it’s a sign of alien life trying to communicate with our youth–and make a pretty penny in the process!

I wrote about Pray At The Pump about a month ago, and now they’re claiming victory. They believe their prayers have actually caused the price of gas to drop:

“We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying,” Mr Twyman said. “Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri.”

This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing “We shall overcome,” they changed the words of the well-known hymn to “We’ll have lower gas prices”.

I can’t wait to see what they’re going to pray for next.

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.