In "Taking One For The Team" news: I have been informed that Rob, one of our security guards, got kicked in the nuts on Halloween... on four completely separate occasions. Fionn said, "Four? I'm sorry, but after the second one, I'm going home."

One of those kicks was from a ninety pound girl in her underwear. (Some people pay good money for that sort of thing, you know.)

There was this belligerent drunk guy who could barely stand up and who kept trying to get on his motorcycle and ride away, while everyone tried to convince him not to. When the cops showed up to take underwear girl away, they told him that if he started his bike, they were taking him away too. So he did. And then he kicked a cop in the nuts while they were arresting him.

I predict his evening got worse after that. Just a hunch.

Ok, guess what? It turns out that the extremely dusty amp pictured above never actually died. It is, in fact, still working fine.

More coolness from Chris Randall of Sister Machine Gun and Positron Records: the label is now doing releases under a license that explicitly allows file sharing and derivative works! They say:

Unlike those who suffer from what we like to call "major label retardation," we here at Positron! have never believed it was bad thing for our supporters to share our music with their friends. The Creative Commons licenses we use legally allow you to share songs from these records on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, you can sample portions of these songs for use in your own compositions, whether they are mash-ups for your friends, or a commercial release. The only caveat is that the resulting work must be released under the same license. It is our way of both thumbing our nose at the ridiculous state of copyright law in this country, and letting you, our customer and supporter, know that you are not a criminal, but a trusted ally in the war against corporate stupidity.

Chris's blog entry about this goes into more detail. See also creativecommons.org, and the cover story (and free CD) in Wired 12.11.

Another relevant read is this interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee from a few months back: How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop:

Public Enemy's music was affected [by copyright lawsuits] more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything -- they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

The back office (what one might laughingly refer to as the "server room") now has an air conditioner! We've reconsidered our policy of keeping the computers absolutely as hot as we possibly can, and are trying another tactic for a while. We're managing to keep the temperature down around a balmy 80 degrees, and I'm telling you, it's like the fuckin' arctic in there now. There was supposedly ventilation in that room already, but it has never done a damned thing. We've even lost track of which way the air supposedly flows in the existing ducts. Anyway, we picked up a bulbous floor-mount AC and poked its tube out the erstwhile window, so it vents into the 3" gap between the buildings. It seems to be working ok, and it has only popped the circuit breaker once.

Photos are now up of Sunday's Epoxies / Phenomenauts / Smash Up Derby show, and of Tuesday's Laibach / Bonfire Madigan show.

Smash Up Derby are pretty entertaining; they played mix-and-match covers, like the music from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with the lyrics from "Billie Jean". The Phenomenauts are a space-themed rockabilly band, and they were a lot of fun too. One of the guys introduced a song by saying, "ladies and gentlemen, some other planets have been saying they're better than Earth, what do we think about that?" The audience booed, and they went into a song called "Earth is The Best!"

But The Epoxies are my new favorite band. (Yeah, I'm fickle.) Man, they were so great! They do a punk/new wave thing, sort of in the Devo vein. They were really energetic, totally spastic and theatrical, and put on one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. Go check out the videos on their web site, especially "Stop Looking At Me".

Laibach: I still don't get it. At all. Apparently there is some ironic appeal here that continues to go swoosh right over my head.

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If you are the type to slow down and rubberneck at car crashes, then I can recommend this Saturday's event, the... "Pajama Jammy Jam". Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel: we have gone straight through the barrel and are now gouging great big chunks out of the floor beneath. I think it's safe to say that this will top 2001's "Naughty Christmas" as the tackiest, most tasteless event ever to grace our hallowed hall. Strong words, I know, but consider: there's a lingerie contest. And it's sponsored by a party bus company.

Here's how awesome this is going to be: you know Remedy, our stultifyingly mainstream Friday night event? The Remedy guys complained that if we do events like the "Jammy Jam", we're going to give Remedy a bad reputation.

Welcome to the next level.

In more pleasant news, here are some events that you should totally come to in a completely non-sarcastic way:

Mon, Nov 29:	GWAR
Thu, Dec 16:	Kinky Circus
Tue, Jan 11:	Collide
Thu, Jan 13:	Flying Tiger Circus
Thu, Jan 20:	Nina Hagen

I regret to report that the Pajama Jammy Jam was the worst thing it could possibly have been: completely unremarkable. We were all expecting it to be a total horror-show, and we didn't even get any stories out of it. There weren't many people, and there were more staff wearing pajamas than customers. There was also, inexplicably, one guy wearing a cheap full-body penis costume.

So Naughty Christmas's title remains unchallenged.

Speaking of giant penises, here's how you do it properly: photos of last night's GWAR show are up now. Those guys are just so totally awesome. It's like they get up on stage and hose you down with awesomeness. An arterial flow of sticky red awesomeness.

Taking pictures of them is quite an experience: click. click. click. Duck down and wipe the blood off the lens. click. click. click. Repeat.