Fri, 18 Nov 2005

I am, I swear
To no one there.
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair.

Songs she sang to me,
Songs she brang to me,
Words that rang in me,
Rhymes that sprang from me.

It's nice that the new Neil Diamond has dialed down some of the excess of the old. His performances are lower key. Mellow even. I haven't listened closely to the lyrics yet, so I can't say whether there are any howlers like the above. But, like Waldo, I'm sure they're waiting to be found.

Warning: Rant ahead: 12 Songs is more than a comeback album. It's also part of a secret plot by Sony BMG to kill the sale of music on CD. You've probably heard about the anti-piracy software Sony's put on some recent releases. Try to play a CD on your computer and it'll install some nasty software that'll watch your every move, keep you from doing anything they don't like, poison your dog, ruin your score in third person shooters and keep neocons in power. And suddenly the DRM Apple uses in the iTMS doesn't seem nearly so bad. You could almost believe Sony wants CDs to fail. I mean, they couldn't be so stupid as to believe they could get away with breaking people's computers without suffering at least a little bad publicity, right? Then again, the really nasty spyware only does its damage to Windows boxes. Their Mac "solution" is both less effective and less destructive.