Quick Music Notes
I. love. Mirah.More reviews of the new Liz Phair album. Once again, the verdict: craptacular!After just over a year, Dressy Bessy is ready to drop their next self-titled album just in time for all the kids returning to school. While this means you won’t get any new Dressy Bessy for the summer holidays, you can still indulge in a little retro-pop goodness as the days get shorter.And finally, Pitchfork has office space, and will relaunch in August with more stuff(tm). The site continues to evolve after seven years, outlasting damned near every other music site I’ve known.Truth be told, Pitchfork has taken on the role of a latter-day Addicted To Noise, which was one of the oldest music sites covering then-alternative music. To understand what that means, you had to have seen the original ATN, before it was a part of Sonicnet, and before Sonicnet was bought out by MTV. While parts of ATN’s soul live on at neumu, it’s really been Pitchfork that has filled the void since ATN’s passing. Not even the late lamented Bring The Rock, which was the finest indie music news site around in its day, had the impact Pitchfork did, for better or for worse.So. Pitchfork has certainly had its ups and downs, but at the end of the day they’ve lived up to their promise way back when of doing four new album reviews every weekday. Enjoy your new office, boys and girls.

This is Liz Phair’s mid-life crisis. You know, whitechocolatespaceegg suddenly sounds that much better thanks to the new tracks. I don’t need to break out the already-tired Avril Lavigne comparison. I will say, though, that Avril Lavigne does it much better.That’s right. Avril Lavigne is better than Liz Phair. In other news, the universe is set to implode in two hours, and pigs can indeed fly.I especially enjoy this review of the new album.

Finally, after almost sixty years of continuous production, Volkswagen is laying the original Beetle to rest. The final production line in Mexico will shut down sometime this summer, with output currently at 30,000 a year.So, uh, if you’ve been waiting two or three decades to buy a Beetle, now’s your last chance. (Although I must admit, now that its demise is official, I want one of the last ones just to see how far into the future it’ll drive.)
I thought I had harped on this before, but apparently not. Broken Social Scene sucks.Don’t get me wrong, I love their music, and I’d listen to the CD more except that it has a tendency to crash both of my computers and play incorrectly. Winamp refuses to play the CD at all when placed in the drive normally, and will lock up the system until I remove the disc. If I turn off autoplay and start from the second track, then every track plays… for the first ten seconds. Then a lengthy pause, then the rest of the track.Companies need to realize that this sort of technology will only make users more likely to rip / burn / steal MP3s, not less. I think I’ve discovered a way to copy the CD without protection, but only after breaking out the six-year-old Toshiba DVD-ROM. (note to others: LG drives don’t seem to do so well with copy protection.) Thus I will have succeeded in exactly the task that Arts & Crafts and Paper Bag Records were trying to prevent me from accomplishing in the first place.And I bought your damned CD, too. Now I’ll be sending the MP3s to all of my friends who haven’t been able to play / get a hold of the CD themselves. You could’ve saved yourself a world of trouble if you’d just drop the copy protection.For future reference, the copy protection used on Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People is Cactus Data Shield (CDS200), 4.0 build 10b. Resources for defeating CDS are available from a post on the Afterdawn forums and CDR-Info.Addendum: After crashing my second computer several more times, it turns out that I may be further away from a solution that I thought. Either that, or CloneCD really hates my other computer. I now hate Broken Social Scene, since it’s obvious that they hate me.

Dear Sympatico,I realize that spam is a major concern for large ISPs like you, and that as a large ISP you often don’t have the time to implement the most elegant solutions available to you. That said, port 25 filtering puts you in the same league as war criminals. Honestly, do you think all your users are stupid and definitely wouldn’t ever, on the face of the fuckin’ planet, ever want to possibly use an SMTP server other than your own? Fine, your business.JUST MAKE SURE YOUR FUCKING SMTP SERVERS WORK SO THAT I CAN SEND E-MAIL, YOU STUPID PIECES OF SHIT!Block fucking port 25 all you want, but if you can’t get your shitcan equipment to work properly, then fuck you. I haven’t been able to send any fucking mail from your godawful servers for five days now. I’m done, I’m through, and as soon as I get a free moment I’m switching ISPs and giving your customer service reps a berating so awful that they’ll want to kill themselves afterwards, even though it’s your fault that the servers don’t even work and not theirs.In case it needs to be made clear again: SYMPATICO IS THE WORK OF THE DEVIL. It’s times like this that I wish I had supreme powers so that I could kill ever Sympatico employee in excrutiating fashion.

The second-season box set of 24 is all but confirmed for the US, as news of a seven-disc UK DVD set comes from the R2 Project. Unlike last year’s barebones set, the second season will include a disc full of extras and deleted scenes. It’ll probably cost more as a result, but since I’m already 24’s bitch, I’ll end up paying whatever price they ask anyways.

I fear that years of isolation and hard labour have eliminated everything of interest from my life. Discuss. Parliamentary debate rules will be applied, insofar as anyone can remember them. In that spirit, have at it!Against: It’s certainly not true. It may not have been a positive month overall, but even the past couple of weeks have been interesting to say the least.For: Listen, I’m so fatigued by the constant state of unwarranted anxiety I have to maintain that I can’t even bring myself to write this stupid dialogue. Unwarranted anxiety is dull and boring. QE-fucking-D.Against: Knowing self-reference… is that in the rulebook? Do I win this one?What have we learned from all this? Right now, my life is about as interesting as a Democrat primary debate.
In less than 12 hours I start working at an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper. Bet no one would’ve seen that coming four years ago. Wish me luck, because I’ll need it all and more.