When I was a kid, I took piano lessons for a very short time. I ran into the problem that many kids experience: I hated to practice. I came across a free piano lessons email newsletter for adults on “Piano Chords & Chord Progressions” which runs for 101 weeks - two full years of educational e-mail newsletters! Duane Shinn, the creator of the newsletters, has also created video lessons that run for a full year to teach adults about playing the piano. I don’t have a piano or keyboard anymore to practice on, but if you do, you can check out a free sample of the chords newsletter.

We were channel surfing, or had just turned on the TV, or something - anyway, we ended up on Logo, which was airing their “Click List” show that I’ve never bothered watching before. But for some reason we stayed on the channel, and we were treated to two astonishingly bad music videos. Both videos were bad, both songs were bad…it was just wrong! The first one was by Keo Nozari, his video was “Question of Monogamy” - which is just as silly as you’d expect from the title. The second was Jonny McGovern’s “Somethin’ for the Fellas” - which was so hyperactive it made even my head spin. Now, I can tell from looking at McGovern’s Gay Pimp website (worksafe) that he’s doing it tongue in cheek, so that may be okay…but Keo Nozari’s video was just inexcusable. You can catch both videos here on the Click List website.

I am reorganizing music like a crazy person, now that I have a 500GB external drive for it to sit on. When I first started actually collecting digital music - which I hadn’t really done before - it was in a kind of haphazard manner, with a bunch of tunes all thrown into a directory. When I started ripping my own CDs, I made categories by artist for them, but I was still kind of lax with it. But now I’m putting everything into a category by artist, except for “Various Artists” CDs which are organized by album. The point is to avoid downloading duplicates, although I haven’t found a whole lot of duplicates yet as I’ve been organizing.

I’m pretty sure iTunes is going to go insane when I fire it up and try to sync - it’s going to say it can’t find anything! I don’t have a lot of songs rated or with “number of times played” so maybe I should just start a whole new library, I dunno. I need to delete a bunch of podcasts, too…I don’t need those hanging around.

The Burger King “Manthem” commercial is back on TV, almost identical to its spring 2006 version. And it’s time for me to add my voice to those of many other bloggers who have expressed their dislike for this ad spot.

Although I have been a vegetarian since 1993, my dislike for this ad has nothing to do with the Texas Double Whopper burger itself or the I Eat Meat slogan. Many people eat meat, that’s fine with me if that’s what they want to do. My dislike stems from the appropriation of Helen Reddy’s 1972 song I Am Woman, which was used as an anthem for the women’s liberation movement which was just taking flight around that time. And even though Reddy herself said that it was a “general empowerment song,” the fact is that it is specifically about the gender divide and Burger King has cruelly twisted the song’s history. How many young Americans are not familiar with that song? Do they think it’s a catchy jingle? How many think it’s a good perversion of a classic protest anthem? Would they be so willing to endorse a corporate-generated version of “We Shall Overcome” if it was written to sell hamburgers?

I heard the song “Christmas Wrapping” (by The Waitresses) on the radio the other day, and I wanted to download it. I searched the web and couldn’t find it, and I didn’t feel like using a torrent or something like that. So I was about to open up iTunes and just buy it, but then in my search results I came across AllofMP3. They have songs cheap! “Christmas Wrapping” was something like 20 cents, and I also picked up Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” from Band Aid. I was a bit skeptical about ordering at first, because AllofMP3 is a Russian site, making their downloads of dubious legality. But this TechCrunch post made me feel much better, so I went to pay - but credit card balance refills weren’t available. I checked back at the TechCrunch post, and a lot of commenters said that refilling their balances through XROST was okay too, so I added the minimum ($10) to my account.

I also did a bit more searching around, I added a few Michael Jackson songs I didn’t already have, and I added the entire original 1982 soundtrack album for Cats. All this for only $6.61! Plus, because I signed up through XROST I got a 10% bonus, and AllofMP3 has a 20% holiday bonus for a few more weeks, so I ended up with a balance of $13 total. Woo!

PS: The download speed is pretty fast, too.

I’d like to come out of the closet. For a long time I have hidden my affection and it’s time to admit it. I am…a Michael Jackson fan. I don’t really care about his personal life; he’s a bit of a freak but I don’t obsess over it. However, he is an outstanding artist. I don’t think anybody can deny that he’s a great performer - he has unquestionable talent as a singer and dancer, and he puts on a damn good show. He’s unbelievably creative - downright brilliant when it comes to his music videos. Smooth Criminal, Remember the Time - he’s a showman. There’s a reason Thriller is the top-selling album by a single artist of all time…because it’s GOOD.

The hyperbaric chamber, the intimate relations with kiddies, the plastic surgery, the skin recoloring, the chimpanzee - yeah, I know he’s a weirdo. But I like his music and his videos, and that’s that.

Am I the only one who finds Sean Paul’s “Temperature” video offensive? It’s not the bouncing boobs, it’s not the freak dancing, it’s not even the dancing kiddies (much) - it’s the stepping on women. Literally. I don’t consider myself extremely feminist, but this video is the most sexist thing I’ve seen on TV. There are a couple of spots during the video in which a trio of men literally step on a trio of women, physically pushing them down. (I’m not sure the link above is the full video, but it has at least one clip of this.) It’s horrible, and yet I couldn’t find much online about this. Now Verizon is using the song in one of their commercials; they’re not using the video but every time I hear the song it makes me mad.

Even though I bought a cable to run my MP3 player through my car stereo, I won’t be able to use it on our upcoming road trip. I checked out my in-laws’ fancy car, only to find that it doesn’t have an audio in jack or even a tape deck! It only has a CD player and radio. Fortunately we have an alternative: my father-in-law’s MyFi player, with his XM radio subscription. I’m not sure why he didn’t bring it on the trip, but I’m glad he didn’t. I even managed to find the car charger for the player, so we’ll at least be able to listen to that. It’s not the same as bringing your own music library or having your familiar FM lineup, but it’s better than trying to find something to listen to on the radio dial.

Wheeeee! I finally got the opportunity to see my parents for my birthday - two months late. And they got me an awesome present…it’s a portable MP3 player! It’s by iRiver and it has 128mb of memory. I know that’s not much - it pales in comparison to even the tiniest iPod - but I have never had an MP3 player before so I have not really gotten into digital music much at all. Right now I am copying songs off a couple CDs; I figured out that I should not burn whole CDs that I like, because I can just listen to the CD. Instead I am copying songs from CDs where there are really only a couple of songs I like, and that way I can listen to them all without having to swap out a million CDs. And I can buy music online if I want to, too! I still don’t have broadband, though, so I’m not expecting to get into Kazaa or torrents. Anyway, enough blabbing, I’m going back to copying music!

I am a fairly new fan of Launch Radio, which is run by Yahoo, and I finally figured out how to listen to it at work! Right now it’s playing the Massive Attack song Karmacoma. There are commercials every so often, but they’re usually not more than 30 seconds - much shorter than the commercial breaks on the radio. I prefer Launch to other internet radio stations because I can control the content much more closely. If it plays a song I don’t like, I can skip it. I customized my station to play songs I want - it even has k.d. lang on the playlist! And the best part is that it’s free. There’s a Launchcast Plus plan that takes away the ads and allows you unlimited skipping (though I have yet to run out of skips in a given session).