Today I bring you a brand new word, perfect for dinner parties, fishing trips, or anywhere you might find yourself really.

The word is purchasipate, a portmanteau of “purchase” and “participate,” which basically means “you gotta pay to play.”

Think of all the uses… “purchasipatory,” “purchasipation,” the list goes on and on…

The call has already been made to the Kinsmen Telemiracle Foundation, asking them to change the name to “PurchasipACTION.”

If you like it, definitely get the better quality version (preferably in QuickTime), and check out the rest of his site while you wait for the download.

Man… How inspiring. That’s something I would totally love to do. Maybe not the dancing part. And maybe not the video-recording part. And probably not the posting-it-to-the-Internet part, but definitely the traveling part. But that’s my only problem. Do they have beef and potatoes in the Bengal Jungle, Kilimanjaro Summit, Serengeti Plain, or Impenetrable Forest? Preferably with no flavour or spices. I’d even settle for pork or chicken.

Yeah, you might remember seeing this a decade ago. Remember that story about the alien craft crash landing in small town America years ago? They even made a show about it. Wait, sorry, this one. This was supposedly a video secreted out of Area 51 showing an autopsy of the alien that was recovered from the site.

I say “was” because shockingly the men who “discovered” it didn’t so much discover it as they did fabricate it. Shocked, yet? Yeah, me neither. A comedy, Alien Autopsy, just hit theatres in the UK retelling the events leading up the now famous footage. I’ll definitely have to keep my eyes peeled (pun intended).

All this talk of aliens and autopsies reminds me of a guest that was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. On Nov 11, 1998, Dr. Jonathan Reed tells his story of how he encountered an alien in the woods, knocked it out (yes, knocked it out), brought it home, and stuck it in his freezer. Several days later, some men in vans came and stole his freezer. You have to understand, it was like 2:00 in the morning, pitch black, in the middle of the prairies, on the highway, on the way back from a Grey Cup in Winnipeg; it sounded pretty compelling. It was at that same time of night you find yourself needing a Ginsu knife. I don’t know about the validity of the claims of Ginsu, but people sure seem to think that Reed’s story is a hoax. Really?

If you like aliens… if you like conspiracies… if you like vampires, or ghosts, or bigfoot… pantookas, dang-donglers, or bizilbix and wums*, then definitely check out Coast to Coast AM if you’re up at night having trouble sleeping, or on the road driving long distance. It used to be on one of our local radio stations, CJME, before they changed format and frequency. There are still a handful of Canadian affiliates carrying the show. For those without a local affiliate, I recommend listening on-line to 1410 CFUN out of Vancouver, as they seem to have the longest coverage. My favourites are when they open a phone line for time-travellers.

* My apologies to Dr. Seuss and his estate.

I’ve only seen various blogs and discussion groups such as here, here, here, here, here, and here (which currently seems to be Quebec-specific).

And that’s the underlying problem. Everyone’s conjecturing, but no one seems to really know. As good as the references about the issue are for the US and the UK, it doesn’t help that they’re muddying up what people think is legal here in Canada. Are there no lawyer-photographers using the Internet in Canada that could look into it and chime in?

I wonder if Tim Bray has ever run into any problems. Although I believe he pretty much sticks to scenery.

Long story short, one of the areas I’ve been cleaning up is my bookcase that had a stack of CDs buried at the back. These are the CDs I bought just to have a single song, or sometimes because I heard the artist on a compilation CD and thought I’d like their other songs (without having heard them first), or sometimes because it’s a soundtrack and I think it’ll have the song I heard during the movie. And sometimes, as was the case with the stack of ten or so I have sitting here next to me, none of those scenarios apply because (a) the song you thought was on there wasn’t, (b) the compilation CD was a fluke, and all their other stuff is crap in my mind, or (c) the soundtrack has every song except the one you were hoping for. There’s one other scenario, and that when it’s a freebie.

For the ones I bought just to have one song, I’ll get rid of the CD and buy the song on the iTunes Music Store if I ever need or want it.

So here they are (in no particular order):

1. KMFDM / Symbols
2. Soundtrack / Men In Black: The Album
3. Spin Doctors / Pocket Full of Kryptonite
4. Soundtrack / Starship Troopers
5. Counting Crows / August and Everything After
6. The Dead Milkmen / Chaos Rules: Live at the Trocadero
7. Soundtrack / DragonHeart
8. Compilation / Big Shiny Tunes 2
9. The Tannahill Weavers / The Mermaid’s Song
10. Soundtrack / The Cable Guy
11. Primus / Pork Soda

Now don’t take that to mean I think all those are equal in quality (or crapitudity). Really, only Pork Soda do I think is utter crap, but apparently people either love it or hate it. Spin Doctors and Counting Crows were alright, but my tastes had changed and there was only one song on each that I wanted. As for the soundtracks, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Technorati Tags: audible, books, scifi

I haven’t bought a non-Anime or non-Game soundtrack since. I simply don’t know what’s out there. I created an AudioScrobbler (a.k.a. Last.fm) account when they were brand new, but I wasn’t getting good enough recommendations on their system, as I didn’t have my songs properly rated on my own system to do so (which has since been alleviated). Plus they were always going down. It looks like they’ve corrected most of their problems, and their similar artists actually seem fairly similar, so I will likely start up again fairly soon. I’ve also tried MusicBrainz, but somehow Kenny G and Bon Jovi don’t seem all that similar to me. And my music I tried with their tagging software didn’t give me very accurate results. Again, maybe that has changed since I tried it a year or so ago.

Long story short: bring back MongoMusic! For the time being, I can probably get buy with AudioScrobbler and iTMS.

Technorati Tags: audioscrobbler, music, itunes, recommendations

Finally found Sentry Box after three times of looking for it in as many years. If I was into trading cards and the like I’d probably spend all my time (and likely all my money) there. Thankfully, I’m not. The extra money did come in handy when I found their anime DVD section, though.