I understand that artists record music and then if there is an untimely death, they can release the material postmortem. I get the feeling though that this is going to be a TuPac like scenario where Michael Jackson will be coming out with music for the next 10 years. I think it’s interesting how this song has adapted to current pop music tastes and you’d have no idea that Michael Jackson is around 50 years of age when recording this. I also think that they can probably just take previous recordings of Michael’s voice and just put everything together to form songs. Technology is truly wonderful.
This song has 38 million views!
I actually think it’s pretty good myself. It’s an uplifting song that people can relate to and I am not surprised at its success. Catchy chorus, good beat. I’m a homo. Although the gay guys kissing is really gay and I don’t understand why this gets included in the video. Whatever happened to a guy kissing a girl. The fireworks coming out of her boobs are hot.
Ck4 and I also had a debate on who the biggest female pop star out right now and the top 3 of the list were Katy Perry, GaGa, and Rhianna. I personally find Katy Perry to be the hottest act out right now but after some fact finding, she won’t take this award. To make this as informative post as possible, I found the album sales of various female artists and comprised a list from top to relevant.
Madonna – 300 million
Celine Dion – 200 Million
Mariah Carey – 200 Million
Whitney Houston – 170 Million
Barbara Streisand – 140 Million
Cher, Britney, Janet Jackson, Olivia Newton John – 100 Million
Rihanna – 60 Million
GaGa – 55 Million
Katy Perry’s second album has sold 800,000 copies. Obviously music is downloaded and pirated more frequently today so that probably has something to do with it.
Concluding our bball season in week 10 turned out to be uneventful. Ck4 lit it up with 6 3 balls in the first half and the other team was never really threatening. Jkash was back for first time since a shoulder injury from football and I believe he may have re-aggravated it during the bball game. We ended the regular season at 8-2 and probably have the 2 or 3 seed for playoffs. Essentially there were 4 basketball teams in the league and 4 other teams who got some people together. It’s somewhat sad to say that we were one of those good teams considering the 0-8 debacle from the Springfield league a year earlier. As Ck4 would say, if the other team goes man, we lose. We’ll see what happens come playoff time.
I “had” a 24 in Samsung monitor that would no longer display. It was acting kooky for a few weeks before it finally just died and started making weird clicking sounds. Now this was a pretty nice monitor that I spent near 500 bucks on about 2 and half years ago so I wasn’t exactly thrilled with it dying this soon. So I go to best buy with the monitor and tell them I’m 95% sure it’s the monitor because I hooked up another monitor and it is working fine. So they say they can try to repair it, it will cost 85 bucks to ship and that my best solution is to just buy a new one because you’ll spend just as much money fixing the old one. Naturally. So I know that my desktop is 4+ years old and this might be a good time to upgrade anyway so I begin to look at some laptops because it would come in handy. So I talk to the salesman, who doesn’t work on commission, and come away with a model I like. I ask him if there is any advantage to ordering through Best Buy opposed to Dell. He really can’t give me an answer so I was happy to know they were out of stock so I just bought direct. It doesn’t solve my monitor solution but for the moment I have a 15″ little guy to use thanks to Evan.
During my Best Buy trip I was looking around and noticed how slim their CD inventory has gotten. I thought of a few bands I liked and bought the newest Anberlin and Arcade Fire CD for ten bucks each. Anberlin was a mere 10 tracks and Arcade Fire 15 but the price was certainly right. I remember the days when they had rows and rows and CD’s were still in before this new age of dl’ding music existed. Nevertheless I will listen to them in my car for a bit and probably write about them in the future.
After Best Buy I went to Barnes and Nobel to pick up some books. Business books tend to pique my interest and I wasn’t surprised to see tons of books on blogging to make money, how to use facebook, and a plethora of books on Google and the banking industry’s collapse. So then I browsed some fiction books and just couldn’t really come up with anything (if you’ve read a good book, I’d be glad if you shared it with me). I ended up leaving the store empty handed. I then went to Target and bought 2 pairs of mesh shorts because I’ve had a few pairs mysteriously disappear and a new wallet because my old one had a rip in the side with the cards and they had a tendency to all fall out. I also bought the 2nd Stieg Larsson book and will read it after I finish Michael Connelly’s Black Ice.
What I realized was that I didn’t have to do any of what I just did physically. I could have easily bought everything I left with online and probably didn’t even have to take my monitor to Best Buy to get the information. Yes I would have had to wait a day or two for the goods but I was in no rush for anything. So not only could I have saved time but probably money as well. It’s no wonder shopping on the internet has revolutionized business practices. Retail stores are on their way out and most business models concentrating on physical retail have a big hurdle to jump. Our generation from 18-35 will rely on the internet for EVERYTHING if we don’t already. It’s sort of wild to think like that and then comprehend that baby boomers have a harder time grasping this fact. I just sort of really realized it today when it came to my attention that I completely wasted my time. The one advantage is though that you get to see everything which there really is no substitute. I can see how some people wouldn’t feel comfortable shopping without that. For me though, I don’t try anything on and size myself up and buy goods that I am not too worried if they fit perfectly. Just an interesting thing to note.
Off topic, something that is funny is when there is a song that an artist covers that no one really knows is a cover. I heard “the first cut is the deepest” the other day and my first thought is that it’s a song by Sheryl Crow. Wrong. The artist that sang the song I was listening to was Rod Stewart. Even he didn’t write the song, I wikipedia’d it and turns out it was written by Cat Stevens. Funny how without doing the research, you would have no idea who created that song. Another music sham that goes around in today’s age that people may not be to privy to is older songs beats used as background music. I heard a relatively new song by Nikki Minaj and Will.I.Am called “Check it out”.
Background music is Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Good trivia that anyone who knows music knows, this was the first video aired by MTV. Thing is, younger people have no idea that this beat was from this song and just attribute it to these artists. I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with it, but I’m just pointing out how creative these new artists are to reuse all these beats from old songs. Just another interesting tidbit.
I set my alarm for 6:52 this week. On Monday, I woke up and hit the snooze a time a two, for some unknown reason my blackberry snooze is every 5 minutes. So I end up into my car at 7:15. Green Lane is already backed up past our driveway and then the entrance to Kelly dr is backed up for, I’d guess 50 cars. Tuesday I’m in my car by 7:09 and I’m greeted with the same scenario. So today I get up when my alarm goes off and an in my car by 7:01. No backup on Green, none on the way to Kelly and it took me around 35 minutes and that even includes stopping at Dunkin Donuts. Today’s drive was perfect and I wonder if it’s because Wednesday’s are lighter traffic days or if those few minutes make the difference. Personally I think the minutes make the difference because in people’s minds 6 am is different than 7 am. The mental state behind it being 6 in the morning compared to 7 is the explanation behind the back ups. In my opinion, when people are leaving to go to work when I am, they most likely have an 8am start time. If they are on the road at 7:15 it’s early and they have plenty of time to manage traffic. They don’t need to be on the road any earlier than that. Considering more people probably have 8am start times than 7am, it makes sense why 7am would have considerably less traffic then 7:15. Just my whacked out opinion on traffic but since you deal with it every day, it’s something to comment on.
The other problem with morning commutes is the music today was awful. At one point I was listening to It’s Alright by Kenny Loggins because it was easily the best song playing. I actually like this song but for it to be by far and away the best was hard to take. There’s a song called Percussion Gun that is so awful and still gets play time on AltNation. Pink, Pat Benetar, Travie McCoy, and Justin Timberlake were clogging up the airwaves today. It’s so obvious that they should create a new station where you have one person pick out the music and he can pick out whatever he wants based on his personal music tastes. The stations are all geared to a specific genre of music. They should make it so you have a personality who speaks every so often so you can personalize with the dj and if he likes the music, there’s a good chance you will too. I feel like they have a list of songs that get shuffled and a lot of old boring crap is played. I actually intend to give this suggestions to Sirius because I know they have guests who do this from time to time but I want stations devoted to it. They had Mark Hoppus from Blink who was doing this and even though I’m not a huge Blink fan, he had good taste in music and it’s cool to hear what a talented artist thinks is good music.
New subject. Monday, for the first time ever ,the guy who opens the doors at Dunkin Donuts asks me for change. Now this came as a bit of surprise to me because I never knew he was looking for change, I just figured he liked to hold the door and wear a bright colored traffic vest for nothing. So I actually tipped my change on Monday so I didn’t have anything to give him. On Tuesday I eat my breakfast somewhere different but today as I was driving right past DD, I heard the song “Change” by Tears for Fears. This sparked my brain to give change to the guy. So I went in and he wasn’t there. After I ordered and got my food, he appeared out of nowhere to open the door. I had already tipped my change again so I went to my car, got a buck, and gave it to him and said something stupid like “you do a good job.” A smile ran across his face and I expect to have good karma for the rest of the day.
Finally random rant. The way that Guitar Hero is ruining songs, I feel like Glee is having the same effect. It’s not in the same way because Guitar Hero would ruin songs by making you play them repeatedly until you got sick of them. This is a common thing with songs because once you hear them too much, they start to get on your nerves. Sad to say I thought Teenage Dream was pretty good and now it just bothers the hell out of me. What Glee does is opens the eyes of their fan base, I would guess middle, high school & college students and makes them aware of some pretty good songs out there. I actually think that they make some of the songs better as was the case with “losing my religion” by REM. But I also think they can ruin songs like “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel. I was thankful they didn’t sing any Christopher Cross songs last week because that could have nationalized the popularity of a gem in “Ride Like the Wind.”
Final paragraph goes out specifically to my brother Sam who I think might like this band because they play the type of music who I believe he may find likable. They are XTC and I don’t believe it’s because of the drug.
So I’m just going to give some randomness for a few paragraphs. This guy at the local market where I buy my sandwiches from wore this really crazy Marvel shirt with 50 of their characters on it. I noticed it a month or so ago and I just thought it was weird how I remembered remembering it and thinking back then that it was a unique shirt. It sort of goes against my philosophy of being unrememberable so that you can get away with wearing anything and no one can recollect if you wore it before. Technically I wear 5 t-shirts during the week. I have two of these dark green Jameson shirts, one green B&B sheet metal shirt, and my black Pokerstars shirt. None of them have any flash and I’m pretty sure no one knows that I only alternate 5 shirts on a week to week basis. So for this guy to wear his Marvel shirt and for me to take notice, he can’t even wear it again without me thinking that he wears it all the time. Just something to consider when choosing a wardrobe.
This pet peeve is up there with people using their phones at the dinner table. I cannot stand people who hum a tune. This tilts me to no end. It’s sort of like they don’t like silence so they hum some song that is running through their brain. Personally, I prefer the silence. It just gives me the feeling that instead of thinking of something to say they go with this humming nonsense. It doesn’t come up very often but some woman was doing it line today and I just wanted to get a piece of duct (yes it’s duct tape, not duck tape)(I actually just googled it and apparently it used to be called duck tape…) tape and shut her the fuck up. This also goes along with CK4 who will learn one line from a song and then he’s on repeat for the rest of the day. I know he reads this and it really doesn’t bother me at all compared to the hummers.
I hate getting ripped off by companies. I want to go over a few examples. Potato chip companies that give you 1/3 of the bag of chips and the other 2/3 with air. My mom defends it saying that they need the space so the chips don’t break… I don’t give a shit if my chips are broken, quantity is more important in potato chips than quality. Broken chips don’t lose value. Next, I’m pretty sure Blackberry makes their screens so they are prone to breaking so you have to buy a new one. JC broke his in the first week and mine somehow got a golf tee through it. I always know these companies think of ways like this to get people to buy more of their product. The last one I don’t necessarily agree with but JC swears by it. He thinks the people who make sharpie markers make the cap so that it doesn’t fit the tip properly and is more suspect to fall off so the ink wears out faster. I’ve never really noticed it but if you ever bring it up to him you’ll immediately be his best friend.
I’m just going to finish this with a song I came across that I think is pretty good.
I’m a horrible dancer and I ain’t gonna lie, but i”ll be damned if it means that I’m not gonna to try.
Now I’m a shitty romancer baby ain’t gonna lie, but i’ll be damned if it means I’m not gonna try.
Sirius came out with their earnings this morning and they have continued to add subscribers and actually had a net income of 15 million compared with a loss of 159 million last year for the quarter. The stock was up 5% pre market. I’ve been touting this stock on my blog for a while now and I think it’s finally starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not to late to buy the stock and obviously not to late to get away from that horrific AM/FM that the zombies of the nation listen to. It’s funny because I hear my mom and her reasons for not switching over and they include “I like the radio and I listen to CD’s and my Ipod”. AM/FM is a complete joke filled with the same music and commercials out the ass. CD’s are a thing of the past. An Ipod only plays the music you’ve downloaded so it’s never anything you haven’t heard before. Get Sirius! I’m not sure if this is the slogan they use but they certainly should. Once again more proof that I can make it in marketing.
Sam and I were reviewing his traffic to his blog last night and amazingly almost half of his traffic is derived from people coming from my website. Talk about helping a brother out. That’s a funny line by the way. Good to know that the loyal viewers of my blog keep it in the family. Adam always tells me that Sam’s blog is better, but until his traffic numbers surpass mine, I’m crowning myself. Sam and I get along pretty well and our blogs can feed off of each others. We said we’d look for more referring sites but it’s hard because I don’t want to just throw links up there to trash pages. I’m not really sure how but eventually something will come of this website.
I’m also starting to get this feeling of depression that Summer is coming to its end and people are getting ready for school again. When you don’t have school any longer there’s never a shocking shift to another type of lifestyle so I have to feel it through others. I really enjoy Summer weather and I dread the thought of the cold months that lie ahead so I think that has some bearing on me as well. I don’t miss treadmill running one bit but I’m not as strong in the Summer because of the lack of weight lifting I do in the Winter.
Last night I went home and was complaining to my mom how the customers at work were bothering me, people weren’t returning my phone calls, my feet hurt, and I had nothing in the pipeline. She starts singing…
I’m thinking, jesus, add nagging and baggage and we’re all set. She’s just looking for some effort on my part to find a mate (caveman terminology) and I just don’t feel the rush. Some people are so gung ho about getting married and having kids that it scares me to want to add responsibilities to my life. I like not having to wake up on the weekends until 1. I like the freedom of Rainbow Spa if I choose. I like money not flowing out of my wallet to feed extra mouths. Now, I can change any of these thoughts at a moments notice but I’m not going to pretend to like someone just to have the feeling of having someone by my side. I legitimately get along and like most people, however, there’s a difference between liking and getting along with them than really liking them. Plus I can be timid, goofy, awkward, and miss obvious signs, so that doesn’t help. I just figure, when it’s right, you know.
These girls are extremely talented. Katy Perry’s new song “Teenage Dream” is really good. When “I kissed a girl” was her first hit, I remember saying that this song is really good and now I’m not surprised at how big she’s gotten. Personally I find “California Gurls” her worst song but I was a big fan of “Waking Up in Vegas.” I think Gaga is good too. I still think “Just Dance” is a top quality song.
For whatever reason, I perceive the majority of their fan base as teenage girls so it’s not the easiest thing to admit to liking their music, but I’ve grown past the point of people’s opinions about me. I just like to give credit where credit is due, so that’s the reason for this post.
I was talking to my Dad’s friend today and he said that he enjoyed reading my blog and was wondering that if he promoted it, if I could make any money off of it. Now I don’t even like the idea of self promotion let alone other people promoting it. However it got me thinking, yesterday I put up this blogs link on facebook and had the most hits that this site has ever gotten. The only time I ever put the link on facebook is when I think I wrote a worthwhile post and people will be somewhat interested in what I have to say. It’s not easy to continuously write dynamite posts day after day. So then I thought that since I’m only one person with my own ideas, I could offer up to anyone else who might want to write every once in a while. Certainly there is no notoriety to writing on rnningfool.com but at least some people read it. I won’t even edit the work. Hell, I was track two English, I can’t edit the work. The way I edit what I write is I read it aloud and when I pause, I add a comma. I did however get an A in General Writing my freshmen year of college. This was because I was schooled up against Pittsburgh kids. To them I was Charles Dickens. While I was reading Great Expectations in middle school, they were reading Green Eggs and Ham.
If you add more people, this could possibly turn into a flourishing website. There could be different themed weeks and some people could do specific subjects. I am far from a talented writer but I think I write some interesting things from time to time. Not to mention if there was anyway to get paid for all this work I put in. 250 posts and not a penny back. Do you have any idea how much time that is? For what, to try to amuse a few people who are interested in my life because there’s must not be too much better? I am serious though that if anyone ever wants to write anything that they think is worth posting, I will happy to do so.
