Case in point: Music Xray. Music Xray will tell you they are providing a service to these musicians by offering “exposure opportunities”, that put their music in front of “Music Industry Professional”… for a fee. Right, so if you’re a musician, instead of buying that QuickStop burrito, you can pay $3+ to submit your music to one of these “exposure opportunities” and have your music reviewed by an “industry professional”. Of course, anyone can sign up to be one of these said “professionals”. Yup, anyone and their uncle can sign up as one and start creating “opportunities” that charge musicians a submission fee. Or you could just cut out the middle man and give your uncle Lenny $3 to tell you how great you are (thanks Lenny!).

Think American Idol, except all the thousands and thousands of contestants have to pay to have to pay each judge for every “opportunity” to perform for them and instead of Simon, you get berated by uncle Lenny (who was in a band once). And in this scenario, Music Xray would be the TV producers who get to make coin off the whole thing, while declaring their innocence of any wrong-doing. It’s not their fault Lenny is really a refrigerator repair man and can’t cary a tune in a bucket.

Want more proof? Music Xray are also prolific spammers. Once you’re on their list, they will email you constantly with “opportunities” from a range of email domains, so you can’t kill them off with a spam filter. You can keep trying to “unsubscribe” but it won’t do you any good. Classy! How much money would you give to a spammer?

And Music Xray also searches for, and responds to, articles that discus their business as being a scam (like this one). This in itself is an obvious mark of a shady business.

So, is Music Xray a scam? Maybe it depends on how much you like QuickStop burritos. Judge for yourself…

Our little requisite dance also gives them the opportunity to try and up-sell me on their phone service… with the ridiculous notion that if somehow I spend more money on their crap, I will save more money. Whatever. But my question is: are they completely stupid or some of their customer are. Probably a bit of both.

Long story only slightly longer… if you want cheaper internet and could give a crap about cable TV, this is the way to go and only requires about 4 minutes of your life biannually.

UPDATE: I received an email in response to this post from a manager at Charter (Eric K.). He informed me that Charter now offers an internet only, 2 year contract for $29.99. As I explained to Eric, I’m not a fan of contracts or companies that use them as they’re an obvious sign of poor business practices. That said, I would also prefer to just pay a fair price for internet and lose the cable TV altogether (free, over-the-air HD is more than enough TV for me).

So I’ve signed up for this contracted $29.99/mo internet-only service and canceled TV (though it did take two calls to make it happen; the first agent stating (incorrectly) that I needed a TV service to get the deal). Maybe in the future they’ll lose the contracts and promotions and whatnot… we’ll see. For now, my dance card is full for two years.

The auctioneer held out one of the muscle shirts to a young blonde with “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” hair: “C’mon, you gotta get a whiff of this!”… She did.

Awesome.

I also missed my chance at REO, Molly Hatchet, Joan Jett and the Beach Boys.

A man goes to the Chicago Bear ticket office and inquires about purchasing play-off tickets. The ticket teller replies that there weren’t any tickets for sale because the Bears did not make it to the play-offs.

The following day the same man goes to the Chicago Bear ticket office and inquires about purchasing Bear play-off tickets. The ticket teller politely replies that there weren’t any tickets for sale because the Bears did not make it to the play-offs.

This goes on for an entire week. The man goes to the Bear ticket office inquiring about play-off tickets and the teller says none are for sale because the Bears did not make it to the play-offs.

Another week of this goes by and the man still is asking the ticket teller about Bear play-off tickets. Finally the ticket teller in a loud voice says, I’VE TOLD YOU FOR THE LAST 2 WEEKS THERE WERE NOT ANY TICKETS
AVAILABLE BECAUSE THE THE BEARS DID NOT MAKE THE PLAY-OFFS!

The man replied, ‘I know.’ I drive all the way from Green Bay just to hear you say that!

To fix this, download the file, open it in a respectable graphic program (eg. Graphic Converter) and change modes from CYMK to RGB. Save the file, upload and you should be home free.

I digress… It seems that Yahoo will not rest until they suck better than their competition. Case in point; email. Now, it’s been quite a long time since I used Yahoo email for anything other that a junk mail catcher. But since they “upgraded” their email with all sorts of new “features”, I can’t even stand to log in. I mean how bad is that… I won’t even use their email to catch spam! And thanks to DodgeIt, I don’t need to.

Yahoo has lost my business for almost everything. They lost me for search the second Google was born. Maps, news, movies, groups, classifieds… all of these are done better by someone else (mostly Google) or are so ad-ridden and/or just plain lame, that I can’t stand to use them. The one thing I have always used them for has been TV listings. Today, as I looked up the listing for the Bears game, they lost me for that too… which then caused me to want to rant about it… which of course I am currently. Coitus? They changed their TV listings. Don’t worry though, you can still easily find any show that has left a few meager coins on their nightstand… but there is no longer a way to search the listings for a show that you might actually want to watch. No really. I COULDN’T FIND THE BEARS GAME! Bravo Yahoo… bravo. Using Google, I quickly found a rather nice TV listing site called MeeVee and I now have one less Yahoo bookmark.

So… you’d think Yahoo could find a way to suck less. I mean with the future of government-subsidized sodomic egg rituals looming, is it too much to ask that they stop hurting us with their whorish stupidity? Is it possible that they don’t know the term “heads up your asses” is not literal and will not prevent additional items from being inserted in that region? Keep up the good work Yahoo… I’ve only got one of your bookmarks left… and I could use the space.

Update: looks like I’m not alone in my displeasure with Yahoo