You must read and obey

My online friend Joe, also known in some corners of the Internet as Geode, has finally committed his prose to blog immortality after intense pressure/flattery by several of us. And it was worth the wait. Check him out. Not to, like, put a whole bunch of performance anxiety on him and stuff, but he's got a virtuoso voice that reminds me of Ian Frazier, Steve Martin and Christopher Buckley. The guy should be writing for The New Yorker. You reading, David Remnick? You should be.

Morons unite

By and large, I hate it when people send me links of stuff that is supposed to be funny. I mean, how much time can we devote to watching tiny badly animated politicians dance across the screen, or scrolling through long lists of old jokes (I say, as if I didn't have hours and hours to kill). And yet, sometimes something comes along worth reading. Like this.

Warning - not only does this contain bad language, it will also make you drool with laughter.

Now THIS is customer service

I recently bought the new album by an LA-based singer named Quincy (actually, Quincy Coleman - daughter of Dabney Coleman. I loved the first album. We'll see about #2 - hasn't arrived yet). The disc comes through a service called CD Baby. The email confirming my purchase is the best one I have ever seen. I am still laughing about it:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, July 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!


Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music