Have I mentioned recently that I hate the RIAA?

I had known about this previously, but hadn't had it actually affect me directly until tonight.

I mentioned in my previous post Vin Scelsa's radio show "Idiot's Delight". Vin is a long-time NYC dj, something of a legend among progressive music djs, who has been running that eclectic and often brilliant show on a variety of radio stations since 1985. He's now running it on WFUV, the Fordham University radio station. Since Fordham is in the Bronx, about five miles from me, I get the signal quite well, but in this modern century, that's not nearly enough; it should be available world-wide via TCP/IP, or, really, it doesn't exist at all.

Well, WFUV does have realtime audio, in a couple of formats (Windows Media and streaming MP3). So when, tonight, Vin settled in to a four-hour-long tribute to Johnny Cash and Warren Zevon, I fired up my AIM client (Trillian) to let people know. The people I found was, well, one person--I don't have that many people on my AIM list and I don't keep it on most of the time. But I told him what was up, and he went to the appropriate WFUV link... and prompty got something othe than Idiot's Delight.

Why? Because the Recording Industry Association of America dictated very restrictive terms under which radio stations could offer internet audio. Those conditions include strict limits on how many times a single artist or album could be played in an hour. (Here's the summary on the WFUV site:

In any 3-hour period, we can webcast:

No more than 3 songs from one album;
no more than 2 played consecutively
No more than 4 songs from a set/compilation;
no more than 3 played consecutively
No more than 4 recorded songs by the same artist
(live studio appearances are okay)

Vin Scelsa is fond of doing multiple songs from a single artist--he'll feature an album, or do a career retrospective, because if you're passionate about music and want to learn more about it, or enjoy it fully, you really want to experience it in big chunks, not a song at a time. But because he understands this about music, Idiot's Delight can't be webcast.

Why? Because the RIAA doesn't exist to promote music. It exists to stand between artists and audience to make sure that it gets its share.

RIAA delenda est.

Gaming this week

Just notes to myself, really, though more detail will be provided if asked.

Quicksand: Lackluster multi-player race game from Fantasy Flight. Players have concealed identities and try to push forward or hinder the racing figures. Some slightly clever mechanisms which can't overcome a preponderance of luck and a lack of involvement.

Bohnaparte: The new Bohnanza expansion set, in which Bohnanza meets Risk. Will be better if played with the proper rules. I have no one to blame but myself for getting them wrong.

Ice Lake: I finally managed to explain this in such a way that everyone actually understood how the game worked before we began. It's amazing how hard it is to grasp given how simple it is. I love it anyway.

Euphrat & Tigris: Always fun. Three-player, with one new player who was a quick study, but who still ended up throwing the game to me because he "just wanted to see what would happen". No one took it too seriously; you cannot understand the implications of the actions on your first play.

Carcassone: First time I've played this in a long time. We played with the original farm-scoring rules, I think. (Okay, a historical footnote: Carcassone is a fairly simple game of placing tiles to create a countryside with roads, cloisters, cities, and farmland. Most of the rules of the game are elegant and straightforward, but the rules for how farmers score are not only somewhat confusing, they have undergone two major revisions since the game was originally published. Even on this play, I wasn't sure that I correctly understood what rules we were using, but I understood what I had to be trying to do.) I won, a first.

Dvonn: Brilliant abstract, owes a lot to Sid Sackson's slightly less elegant Focus. Like the earlier Zertz, the game shrinks as it goes along, constraining the players' actions. I managed to figure out how the endgame was going to unfold a turn or two before my opponent and manage to trap most of his pieces where they'd be isolated and die, die, die! Thus I managed to salvage a close victory out of what looked like a lost position. Yay me!

eBay: You know what would be neat?

Someone should set up a script (in Perl or somesuch) which harvests eBay auction headlines and final prices and archives them somewhere. One of the biggest problems with eBay is that its archives are really short, so items which show up infrequently have no institutional memory.

Actually, what I also would really love is a newsreader-style eBay browser, which harvests auction headlines and lets me mark them "read" if I've seen them once and decided to ignore them. Browsing eBay borders on the impossible not just because of the pure volume, but because of the redundancy; there are too few ways to indicate "I've seen that, never show it to me again".

If anyone knows of tools which do these things, please tell me.

I used to like him, but now he's too shrill

Well, actually, I still like him, and don't think he's shrill at all.

Via Avedon, Paul Krugman's one-sentence summary of 21st-century American politics as it is played:

Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals. Do some homework to discover the real goals. Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking. Don't think that there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives

(Added from original: Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I am willing to cut a lot of Bush voters slack. Bush ran as a moderate Republican; he's governing like a radical plutocrat. Even the people who voted for him didn't get the candidate they thought they were voting for.)

I never actually managed to write this post, so

I guess it's "Advantage: Jim Henley" again.

In a long post about the "Flypaper" theory strategy ex-post facto rationalization for the invasion of Iraq--that anti-Western terrorists will all go to Iraq to blow themselves up, thus protecting us in the US heartland at the cost of the presumably expendible citizens of Iraq and members of the US military--Jim makes this point in passing:

Then there's the question of whether violent anti-American extremists are a non-renewable resource. For Flypaper to work, there has to be a fixed quantity of muslims sufficiently motivated to attack the United States, all of whom flock to Iraq to die.

I noticed a long time ago, mostly when arguing with thuggish Moledet supporters, that there are people who seem to take it as axiomatic that "They can't hate us any more than they already do." The "they" and "us" change with the argument, but you can take the pairs "Arabs/Israelis" and "Muslims/Americans" as primary examples.

If you think that the Arabs (as a total group) can't possibly have more hate for Israelis than they do now, then it makes sense to drop bombs on apartment building in crowded neighborhoods to kill individual criminals, or openly assasinate their leaders. If you think that the Muslims of the world can't possibly have more hate for Americans than they currently do, it makes sense to pre-emptively invade their countries in a half-assed manner that will lead to mass privation and an ongoing quagmire of violence.

(And yes, I realize that both of those supposed dichotomies have overlap--there are many Arab Israelis and many Muslim Americans. The people who adopt the "They can't hate us more" model seem not to notice, or believe, that.)

Since it's clear that it is possible for "them" to hate "us" more than "they" do, I can only conclude that people who advocate these things are stupid, or insane, or lying about their motivations. None of these make me want to listen to their theories.