In a column celebrating the the 30th anniversary of Sugar Hill Gang’s seminal hit ‘Rapper’s Delight’, this Boston Globe column discusses how odd it is that the song is one of the few pop hits in recent history to not have a chorus, while barely touching on the fact that it’s probably the only pop hit in recent history to be 15 freaking minutes long.

Maybe the next time the Globe writes a story about how poorly behaved Boston cyclists are, we can point them to to this study.

But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes

Sure, I’ll bite. For your look at traditional media’s latest take on Hipsters, I present: The Boston Globe.

“Think of it as hipster fatigue,” Lanham says in a genial yet defeated tone.”A lot of people thought it would have its heyday and go away. But now it seems we’ll need to learn to live with the hipsters.”

Adam has some good ideas to save newspapers (specifically the Boston Globe) in this post in which he says he hasn’t bought a newspaper in 5 years, which made me wonder the last time I bought a newspaper. I can’t remember. It seems impossible that I never have, but I also can’t ever remember a reason why I would have. FWIW, I slung a Globe delivery bag over my shoulder for three years (except on Sundays when Pops helped).

In the latest “The Future of the Music Business” article that I can’t seem to avoid linking to and writing about, James Reed in The Boston Globe writes about artists relying on fans to fund the recording of new albums. The article mentions Ellis Paul and Jill Sobule who have both gone to the fans in the last year to raise $90K and $80K respectively for albums.

I don’t know why you need $80K to record an album in this age of Garage Band, but Sobule says is it’s for publicists and what not. Because, really, why shouldn’t the fans pay to tell other people about the music they paid for?

Not mentioned in the article is Josh Freese who paid to record his album himself, but is looking to recoup some of the costs by selling album packages to fans for between $7 and $75K. (The $10K package that includes Disney Land and Freese’s Volvo is unsold, as is the $75K package that includes shrooming with Freese, though the $20K miniature golf game with singers from Tool and Devo did sell.) I’m thinking Freese was inspired by the Nine Inch Nails packages from last year. Kottke commenter Jeff Stern says of this model “instead of 1,000 true fans, 1 wealthy fan”, a reference to Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans model for artists. (A model that is criticized here, by the way.)

When I was touring with Addison Groove Project, we were selling all of our merch in one package for $75. This deal included 1 t shirt, 1 sweatshirt, 5 CDs, stickers, a beer coozie, a bottle opener, a foam finger, and a trucker hat and represented a savings of about $40. We sold a bunch of them, too.

I’ve been saying for a while that the future of record labels is not to distribute and promote records, but to manage communities of fans. Artists are proving that they can rely on fans for funding, they can rely on iTunes and other online sellers for distribution, and they can rely on bloggers for coverage. All the real money is in ticket sales and merch, anyway.

Plus 2 bonus articles from Portfolio. Record Labels Get Real (except not really) and a discussion of The Celestial Jukebox.

Exciting news as Open Bicycle celebrates it’s Grand Opening tomorrow with deals, demonstrations, and parties. Open Bicycle is about an inch outside of Union Square, and even better, about 300 feet from my house, on Washington and Hawkins. They join Metro Pedal Power (even closer to me) and The Dutch Bicycle Company as the newest members of what bike aficionados should (but probably don’t) call Bike Mile. You know, like Auto Mile?

The Bicycle Exchange, Broadway Bicycle School, ATA Cycle, Park Sales, Ace Wheelworks, and Paramount Bicycle, Cambridge Bicycle Shop, and the 3 shops above, are all jammed into a little Cambridge/Somerville corridor making it possible to visit all of them in one swoop if you’re so inclined.

Also, check out this 4K word Boston Globe article about whether Boston is ready to become a first class city for biking. We are.

These Big Picture pictures, clickable to allow you to see the before and after for last weekend’s Earth Hour, are interesting because the smaller lights that don’t go out completely change the composition and focus of the image.

I don’t know how to reconcile this Boston Globe article naming Somerville the ‘Top Spot to Live’ for hipsters with this Somerville real estate description saying, for the past 15 years the “hip” and the “unhip” have flocked to its squares”. I think of the quotes around hip and unhip as air quotes, which is fun.

I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but Monday’s Big Picture about Somali pirates works relatively well to illustrate William Langewiesche’s Vanity Fair article about… Somali pirates.

Two lengthy excerpts from the interesting article:

If you added up the assets already available, or soon to be, the display of French power was impressive indeed. And it was arrayed against what? A band of barefoot natives, Fuzzy Wuzzies in rags, hip-firing their Kalashnikovs with poor aim, and worshipping some filthy G.P.S. as if it had fallen from the sky. They should have surrendered days before, even to the Canadians…They were not particularly bellicose or arrogant, but they refused to be impressed when they should have been. A warship coming at you is supposed to present an intimidating sight…It raised disturbing questions about the relevance of governments and the exercise of power. More specifically, a suspicion crept in that these pirates knew exactly what they were doing, and that they understood the forces at play with more sophistication than had been assumed. Fuzzy Wuzzies they were, but until Paris decided it could accept casualties among the Ponant’s crew, they had stymied the French national will.

Today, almost one year later, Somali pirates continue to ignore the increasingly urgent displays of national power. One of the ironies of the concern being shown is that the shippers being provided with naval protection are the very same people who for years have made a mockery of the nation-state idea. They know that whatever pirate tolls they pay will always pale in comparison with the taxes that would be imposed if global law and order ever actually prevailed. But there is little danger of that. In its place a convoy system has been instituted for crossing the Gulf of Aden. CMA CGM has ordered its cargo ships to use it when practical… Because of an increase in crew pay, insurance, and other piracy-related costs, the company has imposed a $23 surcharge on every standard-size container that it takes through—amounting to a quarter-million dollars for each trip by the largest ships. Given the margins built in, and despite the need for the occasional payout, this means that CMA CGM, its insurers, and its crews are profiting from Somali piracy.

The pirates are professional and don’t typically harm the crews they capture because they know that the ship owners will pay a ransom, covered by insurance companies (AIG in this case) as opposed to allowing the military to mount an attack. This is especially so because everyone is profiting from the current arrangement.

A chance encounter hipped me to the fact that it was four years ago yesterday that Hargo built The Somerville Gates. At which point, the internet went crazy and 4 million people looked at The Somerville Gates’ website in a week. The site had to be taken down to cool the viral internet’s greedy bandwidth needs, but the entire installation is now happily back online where it should be. More coverage from The Boston Globe, Big RED & Shiny, msnbc.com, The New York Times, and of course Boing Boing.

The Feeding Gates