In honor of the spicy, bold taste of the brand’s signature KFC Hot Wings, the world’s largest chicken chain announced today that Americans living in cities and towns that record temperatures hotter than those in Hell, Mich., have a chance to win free Hot Wings. The “Hotter than Hell” offer is for a five-day period beginning today and ending July 4.

Via Food Industry Market (Disclosure: KFC is a client of my agency)

This awesome WordPress theme makes me desperately want to start a business blog with the tagline “I am going to kill ALL OF YOU.”

Via Kung Fu Grippe.

During a recent business trip to Vancouver — my first visit to Canada — I stopped at a Safeway to see if I could find a boxed pastry that a Canadian friend of mine told me to look out for. I saw no Passion Flakies there, but when I took a turn through the cereal aisle I was seized with a sense of profound disorientation as I beheld something I haven’t seen since I was a kid in the 70s: Sugar Crisp cereal.

Sometime after 1979 (Lazyweb?) the cereal’s name was changed to “Super Golden Crisp” in the U.S. But not, apparently, in Canada.

Given how taboo the word “sugar” is in kid’s products now, the Canadian version felt kind of subversive to me. It opened a window onto an alternate world of strange possibilities, where the names of foods highlight their main ingredients instead of concealing them.

Me with my new copy of the 4th Edition D&D Player’s Handbook. The last time I bought one was 1980.

I’ve posted my interviews with Christa Terry, aka “Never Teh Bride” at the blog Manolo For The Brides at Writing For Pay. Check it out!

The shows track the arc of her writing career to date thusly:

Part One: Journalist

Part Two: Professional blogger

Part Three: Book author

Speaking of music subscription plans, Magnatune - which offers high quality DRM-free music downloads and podsafe licensing - announced two new ways to enjoy their music this morning:

Now available for the very first time, Magnatune Memberships allows you to hear Magnatune music without any announcements or interruptions between songs! Starting at just $9 a month, you can stream over 500 albums and mixes into iTunes or player of your choice. Listen online all day, every day wherever you are. For serious audiophiles, we recommend our Download Membership, an “all you can eat” plan that lets you download any of our music, whenever you like, as many times as you like, and in any format, including CD quality WAVs. BONUS: BOTH PLANS include access to our new two hour, talk-free podcasts.

I checked out the details of the two plans. For $9 a month you can stream the company’s entire catalog of music, and for $18 a month you can download the company’s entire catalog of music. Let me repeat that part: for $18 a month, you can download every album on the site to your computer. (Magnatune only asks that you not strain its servers by using a downloading robot.) You also get access to streaming audio and members-only music podcasts. Under both plans, 50% of your subscription fee goes to the musicians whose songs you downloaded and/or streamed. Pretty sweet.

I do not recognize a single one of the artists listed on the site. But what I do recognize is if I really want to expand my musical horizons, Magnatune is a great way to go - particularly if I want to explore baroque, classical, medieval, and electronic music. And there are some fascinating oddities, such as Professor Armchair and his “demented 19th century children’s music“.

I’ll have to think about whether membership is right for me, or whether I’d prefer to cherry-pick tracks that I like. But I’m really impressed with the company’s pro-customer, pro-artist policies.

Tech podcasts frequently debate the best model for consuming digital music via the Web. Is it buying and downloading songs and albums, as with Amazon and iTunes? Is it a subscription model with unlimited access to an entire catalog of songs as long as you pay a monthly fee? Or is it a hybrid such as eMusic, where you pay the service a fee in exchange for a certain number of monthly downloads?

Usually these discussions end with someone saying, “Well, the perfect setup would be a subscription service where you had unlimited access to all of the music that’s out there. It would supply you with music the way the water company supplies you with water. Then there would be no need to own anything.”

The sudden removal of the Rolling Stones catalog from eMusic less than a month after it was uploaded is a great example of why that proposed model gives me the heebie jeebies as a consumer: If I don’t own my music, then someone else does. And they can turn off the tap any time they please.

Thankfully I grabbed three Stones albums before eMusic’s deal with ABKCO went pear-shaped and it had to pull the entire catalog. Once again the message from the music industry is unmistakable: fans don’t matter anymore, lawyers do.

It’s getting to the point where I can’t buy music at all anymore without feeling bad about it. Like the joy has been sucked out of the whole thing.

Feh.

These Rolling Stones boys are pretty good, though.

At the urging of Ms. Teresa Valdez Klein, I’ve registered for the Gnomedex 8.0 tech conference. w00t, as the kids say.

Look, I have a JPEG and everything.

By “everything” I mean…I have a JPEG.