Mark Cuban has been quoted saying that anyone who buys YouTube is a “moron”.  He does have a good point in that most of the content found on the site is copyrighted.

But Cuban is far from unbiased on this topic.  He is the co-founder of HDNet, and he went out of his way to down play the usefulness of sites like YouTube and “Viral Campaigns“, while touting the great opportunities there are to advertise in mediums like, you guessed it, HDNet!!!

At least Cuban admits that user-generated content isn’t going away.  And I think owners of copyrighted material need to realize that sites like YouTube are a great vehicle for free advertising.  If someone really likes a song or a music video, do you really think they will continue to go to YouTube to watch it?  Don’t you think there is a much better chance that they would come to the source and maybe even purchase it?

Think about the clips from the Daily Show, or Countdown with Keith Olbermann.  If MSNBC or Comedy Central were to sue YouTube do you think that would drive more people to those shows?  In fact I would guess that the negative publicity of such a move would actually drive people from watching.  If anything, the publicity those shows have received from postings on YouTube have probably increased the viewership, and at no cost to the networks.

Dinosaur media needs to get with the program, and fast.  The music industry was on the leading edge of this change, mostly because it’s much easier to download and transmit a 3 minute song than it is to do the same with 45 minutes of network programming, or 90 minutes of a feature film.  But the change is coming.  It’s time to adapt and embrace, or find yourself in the no win battle the music industry is going through which could leave you on the brink of extinction. 

It just wouldn’t be a baseball post-season if we didn’t have a curse to talk about. Well, I’m here to help. I was talking to my friend Roach last night. She’s from Philly, and so we were talkin’ Phillies, and she mentioned that even if they make the playoffs (they’re a game out of the NL wild card at the time of this writing), they’ve got city history to deal with. They’ve got to beat the Curse of Billy Penn.

Now on the one hand, I’m not necessarily a believer in curses. And on the other hand, the Cubs can just go on and keep losing as far as I’m concerned, and let the billy goat take the blame if he must. That said, read about Billy Penn if you want, it’s a pretty amusing curse, as curses go.

In addition, we’re figuring that the curse is the most powerful one going, because Philly is the city with the longest championship drought amonsgt cities that have all four major sports. At least, I can’t think of any that gone on for longer. Can you? Post guesses in the comments, and I’ll try to refute them. Either way, it’s clearly more work to stop four teams at once than to just focus on a baseball team, or a hockey team. Billy Penn, working hard to spite Philly fans for 23 years.

And counting…

A snippet of dialogue from the cheap seats* at last night’s Twins game.

wadE: “Who’s that #75 down in the bullpen?”
Alex (helpfully): “That’s the bullpen catcher.”
wadE (exasperated): “Yeah, but what’s his name?!”
Wade and Alex (in unison): “Amundson.”
wadE: “Ah yeah. It wasn’t coming to mind. Didn’t he explore the South Pole?”
Alex (chuckling): “Yes.”
Wade (deadpan): “Is that a euphemism for butt sex?”

Yes, we’re idiots.

*Actually the seats were really nice, courtesy of Michelle and her friend in the Royals’ front office (thanks!). However, any seats where we reside are by default the cheap seats.

So I was logging out of my hotmail account yesterday, which for those of you in the know ummm… know this… that the logout dumps your right to msnbc.com.  While there I can’t help but click on some of the trashy links, but one of them took me to CW TV.  If you go there today you get to see Alexis Bledel, but yesterday it had a promo for the new show “Runaway“, and the voice over said something like “and now they’ve moved to a house on Minnetonka Drive.  ???

For all of you management types out there.  When you are having some morale problems with your staff (they are over worked, have no time during the day that isn’t taken up by meaningless meetings or creating redundant and useless status reports), don’t think that scheduling a Potluck during the middle of the day is going to solve everything.

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I moved into the new Alex Living Facility (or ALF) in mid-March. I have yet to set an alarm clock. That’s six months of bliss, if you ask me. It’s amazing how much more relaxed my mornings are now that they don’t begin with a Screech of Death, followed by some mini-panic. Followed by the snooze button. Repeatedly.

Of course, the enabler in this whole scheme is Greta. She wakes me up around six-ish every morning with her list of demands, which she delivers by sitting on my chest and purring until I accede. Really, it’s only one demand. “Feed me!”, she seems to say. And during the week, that works out just fine. I need to be at work at 7:30, so waking up at six allows me to come alive naturally, stretch out a bit, maybe do some situps, and prepare for the day without rushing. This is in contrast to hitting snooze to grab those last moments of sleep, and then having to rush. I don’t really like to rush.

The weekends have been a bit trickier, but I’ve trained my body to be able to stumble into the kitchen for a scoop of cat food, and then back to bed without waking up to any noticeable degree. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

The bottom line is that I’ve eliminated one more stressor from my life, and it’s hard to complain about that. If you’ve got the opportunity to try and live without an alarm yourself, I’d urge you to consider it.