France taking the lead. Maybe only music geeks can be bothered downloading/storing/tagging/backing-up/etc when it’s all available online instantly anyway.

The original trilogy characters in pixels. Love the subtle changes - especially Leia and Han.

Survey of US commercial radio rotation of Kate Perry:

• Depressing stat #1: 39 minutes between KP plays
• Depressing stat #2: 184 unique songs per week
• Depressing stat #3: 7 songs per hour average

So say each hour you get 25 minutes of music, of which one is bound to be KP and the others you will certainly have heard before, and 35 minutes of guff & garbage.

So, no matter where you are, if you have a radio, you can tune into the local top-40 radio station, and you’ll need to wait, on average, only about 40 minutes until a Katy Perry song comes on. Good to know.

Commercial radio is a travesty. All hail local, government, and indie radio.

In a nice hat tip, Call of Duty: Black Ops has the entire Zork game embedded. Just imagine all the twitch kiddies getting hooked. As Wired puts it:

Did you hear that, Activision? We demand Zork in every game you release.

The Browns have come up with two crazy plays already this year. First a 68 yard fake punt, then the impossible to explain Brownie.

Murdoch’s Times has ~50,000 online pay subscribers. The Guardian has 37 million readers. Interestingly the Times paywall seems to have decreased the number of print subscribers, something Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger didn’t predict:

Well that’s the strange thing that no-one really foresaw coming. I mean I thought that if you switched off other, all other forms of getting The Times and Sunday Times digitally that the print sales would go up but it turns out that in fact The Times figures are sliding faster than anybody else in the quality market, which suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers. And that if you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.

Terrific 30 minute short film from the inimitable Spike Jonze. Typically great soundtrack.

Think you know your drum fills? NPR drum sample quiz part one & part two.

HBO’s Game of Thrones teasers - Winter and Raven. Imagine if they nail this like Deadwood.

MJ’s triumphant Bulls swansong:

A lot of players and coaches can look at film afterward and point their finger at the exact moment when a game slipped away, but Jordan could tell instantly, even as it was happening. It was, Armstrong thought, as if he were in the game playing and yet sitting there studying it and completely distanced from it.

Edit: Video of the final sequence.