No balls were dropped to make these link sausages. Had the arrogant SOBs who insisted on lighting off fireworks all evening yesterday been close enough, though, theirs might have been in jeopardy…
- According to the Trib, "Illinois’ largest rodents are in city lagoons, rivers and streams. Now, they’re on Instagram." Really? There was a huge overflow of the Chicago River into City Hall, into the Cook County building(s), and into the Chicago-area homes and offices of machine politicians (party irrelevant) in the state government? Those are the biggest rodents in Chicago; always have been, always will be. And I've never seen a beaver as big as a Daley.
- It seems like demonology may be essential to science. Which all by itself explains the hostility to science of organized religion, although I suspect that's more through projection than anything else. Then, I've read Maxwell's papers; I've done the math; and I've met a lot of demons pretending to be government officials (in no way restricted to American government officials).
- It's the annual "Life Plus 70 Celebration Day" — the day on which, for persons and works under the international copyright norm, their works enter the public domain. Like this guy, who wrote about much scarier things than pandemics.
None of that is going to stop, or even slightly slow down, self-interested and conflicted "collecting societies" from asserting expired rights and then not paying the authors. This was one of my objections to the purported "settlement" of the AG v. GoogleBooks fiasco. It remains an obstacle to dealing with music, whether from "nonprofit collecting societies" like ASCAP and BMI (nonprofit my surgically-removed left big toenail) or humorless transferees like Acuff-Rose Music.
And the less said about transferee misconduct in general, the better. Especially when one of the transferees in question is the proprietor of That Movie, which provides more grist for a copyright exam than I can mill conveniently.