Salon has an article on indie distribution site Fightcloud.com, which is bucking the entrenched system of CD price-fixing and profiteering by selling every CD in its catalog for free.

The catch? They charge a slightly marked-up shipping charge of $4.95, turning a small-but-sufficient profit on every CD shipped. They then pass on 50% of that profit to the artists. This probably works out to a much better deal than the fraction-of-a-percentile margin a major-label artist, even a hugely successful one, would be earning on each CD.

The wave of the future? Ask the experts over at The Future Of Music Coalition, but my money says we'll eventually be rockin' in the free world while the major labels crumble slowly to dust because they refused to change their ways.

You may have noticed that the times and dates of my postings seem a bit odd. The server hosting this site is somewhere in Europe, and the truly brilliant minds behind antville have not yet completed a localization scheme for the product. They're working on it, though -- find out more at project.antville.org if you're really interested.

Meanwhile, just subtract 7 hours from any timestamp to find out when I actually posted something from here in Austin, Texas, U.S. Central Daylight-Savings Time.

Found this lying around in the electronic snippet graveyard, edited it a little, and ended up with the following untitled poem....

You and I can laugh together at the heavy heft of this thin thing: my pig of pages fatted for the lean kill in spring, to whom no farmer comes.

These verses are content to wallow in their own mud, and it is a fine thought to keep your hands clean of common poetry.

A pig in a poke—we can both find that funny.