Musical tidbits and more

Howdy again.

• The BlueLine/Take Note! concert went quite well IMO with a very enthusiastic capacity crowd. We recorded the whole thing on multitrack, so there may be a live track or two to come out of it if that all went well. Woo.
  
  
• Free track I recommend you download: for a limited time, Randall Bramblett's website is providing the excellent opening track "Nobody's Problem" from his new album Thin Places as a free mp3. If you like it, try some more samples from the album. Favorite tracks of mine: You Can Be The Rain, Gotta Stop Somewhere, I Don't Care.
  
  
• New iPod comes Monday; Newsweek got an exclusive look at it. Highlights: cheaper! (40GB = $400 instead of $500), ability to vary the playback rate (handy for audiobooks), and the buttons are in the wheel like the iPod mini now.
  
  I'm still shocked that the iPod mini is selling so swiftly; it seems awfully expensive for what you get. I would have thought that with a 20GB model now at $300, the 4GB mini would have to be dropped from its $250 price point (add $50, get 5 times the capacity!) ... but they can't make the minis fast enough now, so why would they drop the price?
  
  
• Joe Jackson plays in Central Park on August 24, with Todd Rundgren. Details... Also, there's going to be an album of women artists covering Joe Jackson songs (called, of course, Different For Girls)
  
  
• Congratulations to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund on its victory over the Child Online Protection Act at the Supreme Court on June 29. The law would have made it harder to post content on the Internet that isn't suitable for kids, thus dumbing down the entire online world; the Court properly found that COPA = "a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech". The CBLDF is a 501(c)3 organization; donations can be made here.
  
  
• What do you call someone who says something stupid and false and offensive, is confronted with facts in public about how exactly he's misrepresenting reality, then continues to enthusiastically repeat the stupid and false and offensive thing for months on end on national TV? I don't know what word to use for such a person, but use it for Tucker Carlson. (via Medley)