I must be high

I'm pissed.

Here's the story: on or about March 12 of this year, a person assaulted one of the management staff of the apartment complex where I live. When he was arrested, he claimed to be me and gave the officers my address as his own.

The first inkling I had of any of this was yesterday when I received a bill in the mail from a local hospital for $1600 for an assortment of drug tests and psych evaluations. The bill itself was addressed to me, but the patient's name was not quite mine (my last name was misspelled). Obviously confused, I called the hospital and told them I had no idea what was this bill was. After comparing my SSN to the patients (apparently they were different), the hospital told me to just disregard the letter (I suspect, though, that this won't be the last time I hear from them).

Then, this afternoon, when I came home from work, I was greeted by an eviction notice taped to my door. Alarmed, I hurried over to the management office and showed them the letter. The secretary and two other witnesses to the original assault all agreed that, in fact, I was NOT the person who was arrested that day. I'm going to have to meet with the apartment complex's lawyer tomorrow to straighten out the eviction order.

I've called the police, of course, because at this point what I'm most concerned with is the possibility that this joker is sitting in jail, still using my name, and thus, I would now have a police record. I called the police, but unless you have an emergency, all you get is a bureaucratic run-around. I tried 3 different numbers but no one could tell me anything. I'll try again tomorrow, but I'm really pissed off tonight.

Candy Everybody Wants

While there have been a bunch of websites like iTunes that have sprung up over the last couple years offering music files to paying customers, there have also been a number of semi-legal websites offering the same services but charging far less money. One of these is allofmp3.com, which operates out of Russia. The RIAA tried to sue the website and shut it down, but apparently the folks behind allofmp3.com have bribed enough prosecutors and judges that the Russian legal system, for now, has refused to let the RIAA bring a lawsuit against the website.

Like other sites, allofmp3.com offers a few hundred thousand tracks, with a couple dozen new albums being added everyday. What sets them apart is that instead of charging $1 per song, they instead charge just 1 or 2 cents per megabyte, which means that one can download an entire album for less than a $1.50. And rather than limiting a customer to just one or two music formats, the site lets one encode the downloaded files into just about any audio format there is. There are also no licensing restrictions: no restrictions on how you can listen to the file, how you can store it, how many times you can listen to it, etc. The site also offers songs from bands, like the Beatles, which so far have refused to sign licensing agreements with any American sites, including iTunes. Indeed, allofmp3 offers the entire Beatles catalog for download at just 5-10 cents a song.

Sites like this are springing up all across the internet. Since it would be illegal to operate them in the USA, they exist overseas in foreign countries where copyright laws differ from the overly stringent rules in the US. This makes these sites a little bit shady, but for one willing to take a chance, they are a huge bargin.

Your bird can sing

Yesterday I downloaded CCC's mash-up of the Beatles' Revolver album and various artists. Check it out. It's real good, comparable, in some respects, to last year's famous Grey Album mash-up. CCC took all of the songs on the album and paired them with lyrics and music from a wide variety of other musicians, from Hendrix to The Cure to Madonna and Glenn Miller. Most of the tracks really turned out great. My favorite track is "And Your Bird Was Right". I liked that one so much I even downloaded the original Beatles track, but it just wasn't as good as the mashed version. ;-)

I love mash-ups and wish there were more out there. They're mostly illegal, though, and that's a shame, because I consider them to be a new form of musical art. The Mu$ic Indu$try thinks they're losing money from the dispersal of these tracks and considers those who create mash-ups to be pirates, but--just speaking from my own experience--I think it gets listeners interested in a lot more different kinds of music and musicians than they might have been interested in previously. I've never really been too interested in the Beatles, for example, but the Grey Album and Revolved, have sparked an interest in me. The music companies need to lighten up.