I can't believe it, I am so ashamed.

Most who know me, know that I am a huge Weird Al Yankovic fan. Massive. It was fantastic seeing his show a few years ago when he finally came and did a proper tour here down under.

I am so ashamed that I have seemingly missed all the latest exciting news. Al is going to release another album next month, entitled Straight Outta Lynwood. Even better is that he has made a few new songs totally available for free download.

Firstly is a parody of James Blunt's You're Beautiful, called You're Pitiful. This won't be on the upcoming album due to a kerfuffel (spelling?) with Blunt's record company. Al always gets an artist's permission first to do a parody of their song, and although he got permission from Blunt himself, after Al recorded his version Blunt's record company protested against it. So instead, Al's left it out from the upcoming album, and instead made the song 100% publicly available as a free download from his website (see this story for a good summary). 😀 That'll teach them.

Since it's freely distributed, i've also made the song available for download: get it here (right click, Save Target As).

Now that Al's album is soon going to be released, he has made the first song off the album also publicly available for free as a download. Purposefully ironically entitled Don't Download This Song, it's a 'Save the World' type of ballad; you can download it as a high quality mp3 from the Sony Music Australia website here. (it's so strange actually downloading a full song for free from a record company's website :?)

Needless to say, both songs are fantastic stuff, especially for a geek like me. I love it.

In addition to his own website, Al also has an extensive MySpace page (probably as a result of a promotional deal with them). Which leads me to my next rant:

MySpace, now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd. What is the freekin deal? Never have I seen a more ugly, randomly laid-out blogging solution/site. Any site that automatically plays music when a person hits a page is just so frustratingly annoying. Commercial promotional sites I can half understand, but blogs?

So yeah, I can't stand MySpace. Nevertheless, it is growing exponentially in popularity, headed by famous people (especially bands etc) having their own pages and blogs on there. I just don't get it. It's easily the worst community/blogging solution out there. I'm not the biggest fan of LiveJournal either, but LiveJournal makes MySpace look like the most mutated ugly venereal diseased prostitute in the business.

So people, please don't create a blog on MySpace, because unless I really really really really like you, there's no way in heck that I will be able to bring myself to read it.