Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

Steampunk-themed sex toys. There is nothing else to say.

(A dolphin fetus, from National Geographic, found here.)

Getting your doctorate in the sciences usually takes four or five years. Sometimes a bit longer. But how long would it take without all the failed experiments and dead ends? David Ng asked this question, and the answer (for him) was six months.

We have all done it — blown across the opening of a bottle to make some beautiful music. Now a beer-maker has helpfully designed their labels to assist you in this endeavour.

Beyonce has recently won a Grammy for her song Single Ladies, featuring the memorable line “If you liked it you should have put a ring on it.” Rather than simply not caring about it — my normal reaction to an awards show — I instead found myself disappointed and a little bit angry at the choice made by the panel of “industry experts” this year.

It should not have been surprising. The music industry uses the Grammy’s as a reward to the artists that toe the company line, or to make up for past mistakes — for instance, they finally got around to Neil Young, who spent his 50 year career being insufficiently commercial — and the song’s a hit with a superstar behind it.

But from another perspective, Single Ladies is simply awful. Not musically, but lyrically — it is about a young woman who broke up with a boyfriend of three years because he did not propose. The verses imply that she’ll be happy to come back, if he changes his mind and will “put a ring on it” and own her. Her words, not mine.

It’s not the commitment — it’s the ring. Buy me. Own me.

A strange message to be sending in this day and age, and not one that should be celebrated and showered with awards. But somehow the LA Times felt that the chorus demanding a ring somehow promotes the empowerment of women. The Toronto Star went a step further and declared it to be an “anthem for women” in the tradition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, or Aretha Franklin’s Respect, reporting that the position the song takes — essentially that love doesn’t matter and a woman can be purchased — “has a powerful feminist message.”

Part of my taking such umbrage with the selection — giving a Grammy to a huge hit by a huge star is hardly off the wall, after all — can be found by placing this in the context of my own situation.

Having recently proposed myself, the suggestion in the song — that had I not done so, a “strong” woman would leave for lack of receiving a ring — angers me.

Doing pre-shopping research for the ring I bought led me to site after site which suggested (either politely or bluntly) that if I fucked up the ring choice, Karen would say “no”.

They were aiming, like Beyonce, to tell me that the ring is the thing.

The ring is not the thing. An engagement ring is a token, something to remember the moment in which two people agreed to get married. It is not merely jewelry, like a birthday gift might be. The woman does not say “yes” or “no” to the ring. They say it to the proposal.

Or they should.

Perhaps Beyonce and the Big Bad Blog have just teamed up to identify a contributor to a high divorce rate.

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)