Monday, December 10, 2007

Finding Downloadable content in a post-oink World


Centralized hub sites like waffles.fm and what.cd are taking off but securing an invite is pretty tough. In the meantime I highly recommend utilizing the site shareminer in order to find and obtain albums (I advise that you only download albums that you've paid for and want digital copies of.) Shareminer basically uses all of these google tools that some of us have been utilizing to find online content. The bottom line is that there are these file hosting sites like Rapidshare that allow free uploads and downloads of fairly large files. Blogs whose contributors have uploaded albums to these sites are indexed via google and some have realized that searching them is a plausible way to obtain digital versions of albums.

To demonstrate I'd like to provide you with a somewhat new Noam Chomsky interview from the NPR "on point" series. It's brief but he manages to cover Sept. 11th, Hugo Chavez, Iran, The Democratic Party, Bill Clinton and more. It's hilarious to listen to that poor interviewer try to ask the same tired questions (How did you feel about Fox news' attack on Bill Clinton?) and wind up with typically unaffected Chomsky answers. One reason I imagine he's so rarely interviewed on major outlets is that he's developed this amazing ability to take a lame innocuous restrictive question and start talking about substantive things. Do a shareminer blog search for chomsky npr on point and this site should be pulled up (I can't check it because I haven't posted yet.)

Secondly, here's a way you could digitally backup your copy of Radiohead's new In Rainbows B-side collections (which you bought, right?) If that link doesn't work go to shareminer and search ' radiohead rainbows.' (not in quotes.)

Speaking of b-sides, here are the B-side videos (videos that didn't quite make the cut) from my forthcoming youtube post:

A cute young girl who's learned to say "whatever" with tons of attitude:



Some Jersey guys who are ready to party SO HARD (stay for the final quote: "I can't wait to watch this on youtube")



Joe Pesci rapping:



A cool dove commercial chronicling the images that young girls are exposed to:



A classic Stiller appearance on Extras (thanks zee.) Skip the first minute until the Stiller speaks and then you can stop watching if you like. It rules:



A stop motion beatbox video that's pretty alright:


Finally, Erin pointed me to an article by an utter moron which makes the case that Poor people have more babies because of social welfare programs. His solution? Cut social welfare programs of course! What makes it so funny is that even though the guy is making the case that "If there were no social welfare, richer families would logically be larger families, since they could support more children." He says in the very next sentence, "In fact all through recorded human history and continuing to the present day poorer families tend to be larger."

I don't throw around things like "Biggest idiot" too often but this has to set some sort of record. He is, by logical extension, claiming that "through all of recorded human history, social welfare programs have existed." (Otherwise he would by undermining his own point by positing a deeper underlying factor that would cause poorer families to have more kids.) This is silly enough, but given the way he defines the problem he should understand that he's basically advocating child-reduction via starvation. See ya next time.

3 comments:

John said...

Thanks Matt.. there are definitely some albums I've paid for since oink.cd went down that I've been hoping to back up digitally. And as you know, I hate ripping them from the CD's I bought. It's much easier to download the backups from online file-sharing sites.

In fact, there are quite a few early-release albums I've been hoping to "back up" in the next month or two.

. said...

Thanks for linking my post. I still can't believe that guy's assertion regarding the...good lord--I don't even think it's worth further comment, so I'll just agree with your label of "biggest idiot..." for this week, anyway. I'm sure we'll get another load of Bushisms between now and next week that will return the title to its rightful owner.

Nice work on the commentary however, and thanks for the DL tips in this post-Oink era.

Anonymous said...

Lupe Fiasco's new album

love, stereogum cross-over reader

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=63EMIN4Z