Last night on the local news they ran a story about a Murfreesboro woman who was shocked when her custom license plate was rejected by the state of Tennessee.

Her requested customized plate: ILVTOFU

Depending on your mindset that either reads I love tofu or I love to know you in a Biblical sense.

In the video piece on WMCTV, we are supposed to believe that the woman is naive enough to not know what FU means, she just innocently loves PETA and thinks we should eat tofu instead of tasty animals.

Immediately, my BS detector went off and a Google search confirms it.

This is a PETA stunt that was first tried in 2009 in Colorado. Expect to see this pop up in other states. It lead the news last night, it’s currently the lead news item on WMCTV, The Memphis Business Journal has it on their site so it apparently worked in Tennessee.

It’s brilliant marketing because it’s the kind of thing that’ll get tossed around at the proverbial water cooler, but it’s completely a fake story being reported as news. Textbook propaganda.

When Netflix upped their prices, I took to the nets to complain just like a million other customers. Now that the price change has taken effect, I’ve dropped streaming from my account. Here’s one of the reasons I’m ticked off with Netflix.

In 1998, when I got my first DVD player, you couldn’t rent DVDs from Blockbuster, so I went in search of an alternative and I found the newly launched Netflix.

At the time, their service worked just like Blockbuster, with late fees and all. When they launched their subscription service in 1999, I immediately signed-up and have been a customer ever since. For a while, my status as one of their original customers got me a better price and extra movies. I used to get 5 movies out at a time for what most folks paid for 3 at a time. But over time, they did away with that. And now that I just dropped streaming, the best deal I can get is 2 DVDs at a time, for about the price I used to pay for 5.

Fun kinetic type video from Al Yankovic. Pretty well-done, but with a couple of kerning problems early on (that's the designer in me).

There have been more than than a few co-workers I would've loved to have sent this to over the years. :-) 

One of my Facebook friends posted this graph on his wall illustrating the truth that while Republicans have talked a big game over reining in spending and the size of goverment, they have been huge failures at it over the last 30 years.

It goes ever further back than that graph. I was reminded of a great article called Republicans and Big Goverment by James Ostrowski that I’ve had saved in Evernote.

Every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope, or power–and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.

As I’ve blogged about before, I’m a huge music fan, so I was looking forward to the American launch of Spotify

I have a pretty voracious appetite for music. Financially, renting music makes way more sense for me than buying it. I listen to music pretty much all day at work using MOG. I like to listen through the new releases on Tuesdays, picking out albums to add to my playlist for the month.

Now that I have a few days use out of Spotify, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the two services.