Some helpful advice for the RIAA

You may have heard about the ludicrous legal victory recently handed to the Recording Industry Association of America in their ongoing witch hunt pursuit of justice against illegal file sharing.

The industry claims that file sharing is killing its business. Maybe so. But I think there’s another factor at work. To illustrate my point, I’ve created a helpful chart showing the increased crap level of the output of the recording industry from the years 1991 to 2007. It is also available as a PDF.

Crap Music by Year

The Town that Was

I felt a bit bad, looking back at my last post. Depending on how you read it, it sounds like I’m describing the devastation of the environment and community of Centralia, PA as “random stuff I just love.”

That was hardly my intention, of course. Anyway, I’ll make amends by offering this link to the website for a new feature-length documentary on Centralia that was released this year, The Town that Was. I hope to see it soon.

S.N.P.J., PA

This is the kind of random stuff I just love.

A few weeks ago I spent some time reading about Centralia, PA, a town that has dwindled to almost nothing over the past several decades due to an underground fire in a coal mine that has been burning there since the 1960s. I was just once again reading the entry on Centralia in Wikipedia, and I found this line interesting:

Centralia is now the least-populous municipality in Pennsylvania, with four fewer residents than the borough of S.N.P.J.

OK, there’s a borough (a distinction for municipalities that does not exist where I live, but basically, in other words, a “town”) in Pennsylvania called “S.N.P.J.”? I had to find out more about this. So I did.

S.N.P.J. stands for Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednota which means “Slovene National Benefit Society.” OK, nothing wrong there (and I am trying not to think about Borat). But what’s really crazy about it is that according to the 2000 census, the municipality has a population of zero (although the borough itself claims 13 residents), which makes a little bit more sense when you understand its history:

The society applied to have their 500 acre recreation center in western Pennsylvania designated as a separate municipality in 1977. The S.N.P.J. borough was created so that the society could, among other things, get their own liquor license. North Beaver Township, Pennsylvania, the municipality in which the center was originally located, restricted the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

Wow. That’s almost as crazy as the guy I knew in California whose last name was Church, who filed paperwork with the IRS to get himself tax-exempt status. (Apparently, it worked.)

Well, the borough may be sparsely populated, but it (or at least, the organization behind it), does have its own website.

Site girth expansion

I’ve just finished a modification to the site design. I was starting to feel a bit too confined by the narrowness of the old layout, so I’ve basically kept things intact design-wise, but I’ve expanded the layout to be more suitable to today’s 1024×768-or-greater standard screen resolution. I’ve also bumped up the size of the type slightly.

The only design element that’s noticeably different is the little greenish weirdness at the right end of the photos in the header bar. This was something I spent a great deal of time developing for an old, shortlived design that was part of my quickly-abandoned experiment with running the site on Drupal. I may end up getting rid of it again; I just thought it deserved a second chance.

Now then, if you’ve actually visited this site sometime before, you may find the pages are looking somewhat garbled; sadly that’s the side effect of keeping a lot of the filenames the same; your browser likely has old versions of these files cached. Hit the Refresh button a few times or perhaps clear your cache. I did the Refresh thing, but I had to hit it about 4 times before all of the files actually updated. Sheesh, you’d think I was using a Microsoft product or something, not Firefox!