Looks like Prince has pissed off the RIAA & Pirates at the same time with a free give-away

Prince has angered the music industry and stirred up trouble among British retailers by giving away his new album with a tabloid newspaper this weekend.

“Planet Earth” will be packaged with the Mail on Sunday at a price of $2.80.

The giveaway has been roundly criticized as a major blow for an industry already facing rapidly declining CD sales. It has led Sony BMG U.K., Prince’s local label, to pull the plug on its own sales release of the CD in Britain.

International sales launch for “Planet Earth” is July 16; the U.S. launch is July 24.

“The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores,” said Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, referring to a period in the 1990s when the singer famously stopped using his name to protest a binding record deal.

“It is an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” Quirk added.

Also fueling retailers’ ire is what they see as a traitorous move by one of their own. After initially harshly criticizing Prince and the deal, music and books retailer HMV, which doesn’t normally sell newspapers, decided to sell the Mail on Sunday in its 400-plus stores across the country.

“Like it or not, selling the newspaper is the only way to make the Prince album available to our customers,” HMV said.

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Spinal Tap reunited and called on “every bass player in the universe” to join them on stage.

Drove by this on my way to the cabin this weekend. Told the wife I had to get a picture of it on the way back.

Have you ever wondered why when you hit the snooze button on your alarm you only get an additional 9 minutes of sleep? Why 9 minutes? Wy not 10?

By the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950’s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. We’d tend to disagree with that logic, but, then, we must be in the lazy minority. Although today’s digital clocks can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, most stick with nine minutes because that’s what consumers expect.

An amazing animation where each frame is drawn and then erased from the wall before the next one is drawn.

I’m on vacation this week in the backwoods that is upper Michigan. Haven’t seen any albino kids playing banjo on porches yet.

Here are a couple photos taken from the roadside on our trip up.