A Strike at the RIAA

Well it's happening. The biggest threat to the RIAA has been realized. An artist and a listener have conducted a transaction mediated by no recording company.

I bought rain_luong's album "Shiver" from Cafe Press. Rain will, I'm sure, be relieved to know that my copy arrived intact with no harm done to the GEM box. The CD was listened to in the car. The music, I've been listening to for a couple of years, but having it with me in the car was nice.

I'll not attempt a review; it's all good stuff, and Simpson should receive the Bob Dylan award for creative vilification for the line:"You're all that I hoped I'd never find." It's a tight well crafted line, the reworking of a cliche that causes the listener to do a double take.

It's all too much.

A client was describing a situation to me. Three times a week the printer would print two reams of garbage from a print job owned by a remote user. And three times a week, no one would claim the job. And three times a week, it would hit the recycle bin. For some reason, this struck me as the sort of matter-of-fact surrealism that could serve as a running joke during a Monty-Python film.

A Comedy of Justice

So. I've been working on Chapter 38 of Job. In Hebrew. And it's funny! There is so much word play, double and triple entedred that don't make it into translation. Uz, for example. It's Job's hometown. And it's Hebrew for "Counsel." So we've got God asking Job "Who is this darkening counsel by words without knowledge?" But there are other layers of meaning. God is speaking out of a tempest, a storm, and well, storms tend to darken places. So by invoking God in a way that has enraged Him (another layer of meaning for the word for tempest) Job has caused Uz to become dark. And why is this place called Uz, "counsel" anyway? Because all we ever see happen - all that has happened for some 36 chapters, is that people have sat around talking.