Hello Again/What is On the Internet/My Future Musical Career

Allow me to forego the apologies I frequently make after months or more stretches of blog inactivity. Instead, allow me to direct your attention to something. But first: An introduction.

Like any place on the Internet where lonely people gather, yearning desperately to fill the hedonic vacuums of their lives, Amazon.com has a forum or - more accurately - a number of forums. I'm not going to bother explaining the organization of these forums because I do not know how many sub-forums there are, or how many people are on them, or what the thread counts are. All these statistics probably amount to a bunch, a lot, and too many, respectively, which is good enough for the purposes of this post. Now, Amazon's forums exist primarily as a location where customers can discuss products, an idea that sounds wholly reasonable when taken at face value. Amazon is a massive retailer of everything, asking questions of other people who own a product you're considering the purchase of makes sense, informed buying is wonderful, etc etc. The trouble is, of course, that no internet forum ever operates as it was intended to by those who arranged for its existence, like everything in the universe designed by Man or God internet forums function briefly before entropy takes over and destroys them entirely. So far I've told you nothing you don't already know.

But what if I told you that, while trying to compile a list of TV shows to order for a library, I found a thread on the Amazon.com customer discussion forums that has Changed My Life Entirely? I am telling you this right now. Let me show you:


Go ahead and click on that picture if you're having trouble reading it. The thread is here.

Okay.

Now, imagine an enormous stage at the center of a stadium filled with roaring, bloodthirsty Metal fans. Rising from behind the stage, 40-feet high on a projection screen, the image of a dog that is completely and unrepentantly on fire. A disembodied announcer's voice echoes off every surface of the colossal structure, until its words are barely decipherable to the thunderous throng in the bleachers: "Ladies and gentlemen: DOG CREMATION!"



And so it is settled. I will make the most popular metal band with a name originating from an Amazon.com customer forum ever. There are a few challenges I must overcome, it's true. An abbreviated list of them:

• Listen to a lot of metal music (difficulty: medium)
• Learn and understand the differences between the various Metal sub-genres (difficulty: hard)
• Find someone who can play the drums and who has his own drum set and who isn't hopelessly stupid (difficulty: Sisyphean)
• Buy a cool-looking guitar (difficulty: easy)
• Learn to play the cool-looking guitar really really really well (difficulty: impossible)
• Write awesome guitar stuff (difficulty: easy, probably)
• Write lyrics about the cost of setting a dog on fire (difficulty: N/A - it is already done, I just have to find the .txt file)
• Become enormously famous (difficulty: ?)

PROJECT DEADLINE: 7/14/2010.