i can't find the words

Several weeks ago, Kristen tipped me off to the existence of la la, a CD-swapping Web site in beta release. Wanting to join the cool kids club, I signed up. (And I suggest you do so as well; we club members get to wear funny hats and drink lemonade in our secret clubhouse.)

The premise is simple: For every CD you send to someone else, you get a CD from your want list. Each disc costs you $1.49 (the envelopes, with postage, are sent to you free), and 20 cents of that somehow makes its way to the artists.

The premise is super awesome: You’re not sending to and receiving from the same person, so it’s very easy to unload your most embarrassing music and get better stuff in return. I’ve rid myself of Creed and 3 Doors Down, trading up for Elvis Costello, Big Star and the Pernice Brothers. It’s perversely enjoyable.

The premise is frustrating: Because people are trying to jettison their most deplorable music, the requests for “bad” CDs are hard to come by. The Web site works best for those people who are able to waste hours in front of the keyboard, refreshing their browsers every 10 seconds (e.g., me).

The premise is cheatable: When you receive a disc, you’re supposed to mark it as such so the sender can send more (you’re limited to having 5, 10, or 15 CDs in the mail (depending upon how reliable you are) to prevent you from “promising” 1,000 CDs, not mailing them, and getting 1,000 in return). You can also mark albums as unplayable or burned copies or just plain the wrong thing — and then you get credit for another. There’s nothing to stop you from marking everything bad (though apparently they look for patterns of that sort of thing).

The premise is still being tested: La la does not require that you send the entire CD package — just the disc (they provide little clamshell case thingies). This means that you don’t have to send the liner notes or tray insert. For many people who like to put the CDs into jewel cases (e.g. me), this is problematic. On the forums, there is definitely an us-vs.-them mentality about this. Surprisingly, the “us” is the people who don’t send the inserts, either because they don’t have them or because they just don’t want to. They rally around the idea that “la la is about the music, not the artwork” and occasionally tell new people who express an interest in liner notes that la la isn’t for them; they’d be better served by shopping at Best Buy. Having these factions at odds with each other isn’t good for the site, so they’re working on some sort of premium service that guarantees the inserts.

Anyway, you should join and add me as a friend. Or something. The Web site is set to go public July 4, so you can adopt early and beat that wave of newbies.

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Speaking of noobs, I have for some reason started playing a computer game from my high-school days, ARC. Basically, you are a little spaceship that looks sort of like a nipple, and you go around and shoot other nippleships in what amounts to a game of capture the flag.

ARC is exactly the same as it was in 1998. It’s laggy, there are cheaters and you get called a n00b pretty much all the time. And yet it’s ridiculously addictive.

The worst thing about being a copy editor is that it makes me an awful person to hang out with. It’s not that I’m any less interesting or that I smell worse or anything like that — I just have a terrible habit of pointing out mistakes. I’ve always done this, of course. But where in the past I would note errors of fashion or music or personality (usually in the form of a snide aside), I now generally stay within the friendly confines of grammar, spelling, style and fact. Practice makes perfect, no?

And while it may be funny to point out that the menu misspells enchilada three different ways or that NO ONE can use nauseous correctly, surely I begin to sound like a broken record after the sixth or seventh correction. Who am I to revel in the missteps of others? My business card says I am a copy editor; nowhere does it entitle me (oh man, that’s another good one — entitle vs. title) to go around casting stones.

However.

When an egregious slip finds its way into my hands — something that should’ve been fixed a half-dozen times before it got to me — well, I cannot help myself. Finding fault in, say, Harper’s gives me the tingles:

I ask Taylor if he worries that P. Diddy and Nelly might have a negative impact on the Cadillac brand.
“They want it, they get it,” he explains. “But you can’t force it.” What he means is that every marketer in America would kill to have P. Diddy or Nelly wearing their clothes or driving their cars. After all, black people are the most imitated Americans on the planet. Louis Armstrong was black. Charlie Parker was black. Chuck Berry was black. Martin Luther King was black. Michael Jordan is black. Oprah is black.

So read paragraphs three and four of page 64 in the June Harper’s, in David Samuels’ otherwise sterling The Blind Man and the Elephant, about the Super Bowl, Stevie Wonder and, well, read it yourself.

One problem, though. (We will ignore anything relating to Sean Combs, as his nickname changes too often for a newspaper to print it with any guarantee of it being accurate the next morning.) One ugly, glaring, oh-my-deity-of-choice-how-did-that-see-the-light-of-day flub.

They killed off the father of rock ‘n’ roll!! (Alternately, they made him not-black.)

Dear Harper’s:

I enjoyed the essay about football and rock music and pizza. Really did. One quibble, though. Chuck Berry is still alive, still rockin’ and still, so far as I can tell, black. Anyway, write back soon!

yrs,
Tom Steele

P.S. Do you have any job openings?

Timmy TiVo is sad. What with the season finales of all his favorites plus an awful two-week Daily Show and Colbert Report break, he doesn’t feel like he has much of a purpose these days. Sure, he’s got the Gilmore Girls reruns and the odd Cardinals game or two, but apparently a digital video recorder needs a little more than that to be self-actualized.

On the TV note, I’d like to brag about my reality-programming choices this season. Last week, those lovable hippies managed to come from behind and beat the frat boys on The Amazing Race. I jumped up and down. Several hours ago, Taylor Hicks completed his improbable run and was named winner of American Idol. I would’ve jumped up and down, but I had guests. Ladies. Hurrah! I don’t think my day-one favorite has ever won a reality show before, and it somehow happened twice.

But now that I don’t have any excuses to stay inside and watch TV all the time, I suppose I should go out and do things — because really, being a bum is only going to make me hate Florida more than I already do. Too bad it’s freaking hot all the time. (I learned this the hard, hard way when I dropped my car off at Maaco last week and figured I could save the cab fare by walking home. Four miles. Ow.) I may have made a huge climatic error.

Also: I am growing a beard. It looks awful! Yay!

This mug, from the “Page2People” recap of the White House correspondents’ dinner, was the funniest thing in Monday’s paper.

OK, so I chose that photo and wrote those two words. But they combine to form a motto we should all live by!

Seriously, everyone should have to look at this every day. A constantly wagging Colbert finger reminds us that Stephen sees all and knows all — and he doesn’t like what we’re doing.