I used to call these potpourri entries the Sunday Special, but now that seems like too much pressure.

First up : Remember Billy Ocean, the two hit wonder? Did “Get Out Of My Dreams (And Into My Car)” (in what other decade but the 80’s could you have a hit with a song like that?) and “Caribbean Queen”? And then totally disappeared off the map?

Well, before obscurity completely overtook him, he made this marvelous clusterfuck of a video.

Billy Ocean – Loverboy by papafonk

I have never seen a video that had so little to do with the song or, honestly, even the person singing it. Normally, when a video has absolutely nothing to do with the song, it is because they want to show you the band or the singer performing instead.

In other words, they somehow think that watching a band play is inherently fascinating. You know, our young artists are electrifying performers. We don’t need to make an expensive video in order to promote them. They sell THEMSELVES!

Sure…. if you have David Lee Roth of the 80’s as your frontman. Maybe.

Otherwise, you just made a boring damn video and nobody will remember your band ten years from now.

Billy Ocean, on the other hand, apparently decided to take the opposite approach : make a video you will remember but that will make you instantly forget who made it.

I mean, I loved the Cantina Scene in the original Star Wars (Episode Four for you Sad Bastards) too, Billy, and I also thought the Gelflings from The Dark Crystal looked cool, Billy, but Billy, that doesn’t mean you should spend your money on a video ripping both of them off.

Bonus fact : if you watch the video again, look closely : it does have a plot! Kinda.

Next up, from (quite appropriately) William Gibson’s Twitter feed comes this link to a story about the world’s most amazing free trade bazaar/underground website/drug market in the world.

It’s called Silk Road, and it leverages the latest in anonymizing technology to create something which is basically eBay without limitations. Well, except for one :

You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

This, to me, only makes the site’s credentials as a hyper hip modern digital anarchy destination all the more shiny. They are fighting the system, but they are doing so responsibly.

My kind of revolutionaries.

But other than the aforementioned, anything goes. including every drug in the world. Pot, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, you name it, you can get it online, through the mail, with full anonymity on both sides of the transaction. Everything comes in extremely dull, ignorable packaging and just like on eBay, the main policing tool to keep out fraud and cheating is a customer feedback system.

“A+++ dealer. Delivery was prompt and discreet. Got so high, I hit my head on God’s taint. Would buy and toke from again. ”

Being someone who would legalize all drugs in an instant (plus prostitution and gambling and all forms of porn),I am tickled pink that the heroic forces of the geek world have created such a beautiful end run around the completely futile, naive, and corrupt “War On Drugs”.

I am all for people’s right to put whatever they want in their bodies. There is no such thing as a victimless crime. No victim, no crime. Modern society has, as one of its bedrock principles, the idea that we are not a society in which everything is forbidden except for the few thins which are allowed, but rather one in which everything is allowed except for the few things which are forbidden.

If there is enough demand for something, you cannot control it by forbidding it. You can only regulate it like we do with all consumer products.

Now, traveling the Silk Road is not easy. You have to go to the website with a powerful anonymizing system call TOR installed, and that’s not a matter of just a few clicks.

And as it happens, I have no interest in illegal drugs (I am crazy enough as is, thankye kindly) so I am not looking to sign up any time soon.

A guy from the Wired story says it best :

Mark, the LSD buyer, had similar views. “I’m a libertarian anarchist and I believe that anything that’s not violent should not be criminalized,” he said.

But still…. I support it wholeheartedly, for as long as it may last.

Finally, I will throw you a link to a story about the interesting new phenomenon of movie producers wanting to bring movies to home viewing faster than ever before.

The story rather misses the point by going on about “how can a movie star be big when seen on a small screen?”. Um, ask television stars. Seriously, catch up with the tour, people.

And while I have greatly enjoyed seeing movies in the theater and absolutely agree with the argument that seeing a movie in the theater, with a lot of other people, is completely different than seeing at home, and a valuable experience worth preserving, largely I am indifferent to the plight of the movie theaters.

They have been making the movie experience gradually less and less pleasant for my entire life, and I have no problem seeing them as being mostly superfluous now. The movie studios have obviously figured out that they can make a lot more money selling the DVD of the movie and leasing the movie to the streaming services than they can from traditional movie theaters, and the theater chains are freaking out so violently because they are just now figuring out how easily they could be cut right out of the process.

The very digital technology that has let them get rid of professional projectionists will ultimately doom the movie theaters themselves. That seems delightfully fitting to me.

My only reservations are about whether it will actually work. After all, right now, the movie’s release acts, if nothign else, as the focal point for the entire promotion machine of the movie industry. In fact, as it stands right now, it’s more like the official movie theater release is just a big advertisement for the movie and a way to recoup some of the capital as quickly as possible before sitting back and waiting for the much larger long term DVD and streaming release money to come in.

I can see imagine a future in which movies are released directly to streaming, with a sliding price scale based on how long it’s been around and how popular it is. It would be released first as pay per view, with a price like 5 dollars (still loads cheaper than the theater experience), and then the pay per view price would slowly go down as interest waned, till it settled down into just being another catalog title for the streaming service.

The movie studios make more money overall (especially with the leaps and bounds being made with green screen technology making movies a lot less expensive to make), we the consumer get to have first run movies at home, and the only people who lose are massive movie theater conglomerates, who get removed from the chain and go the way of the telegraph and the incandescent light bulb and the drive in theater.

Sounds good to me!