Ill-mannered Grandiloquence

Having been born under the sign of Aquarius, I’m fairly open to believing anything is possible until it’s proven impossible. This would of course include astrology. I hang out regularly at the Blochworld forums – Bloch being a manufacturer of dance products – and today someone was bored and posted a link to an astrological page she came across. It’s a very good site and has the most comprehensive personality analysis I’ve seen anywhere yet. I was going to just paste parts that I thought especially applied to me, but it is very long, and it all applies. Even the parts that are typically Aquarian that don’t apply to me, they mention the atypical behaviour that suits me to a tee – I’ll let you figure out which of those cases apply, and which don’t, for yourself.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, if you want to know anything about me, look no further than here: http://mizian.com.ne.kr/englishwiz/library/names/zodiac/acquarius.htm#_Toc6672050

This week my brother had been visiting to go to soccer camp with Gryphon as they’re only 2.5 years apart. We took him home today and found ourselves stuck in traffic, so we rolled down the windows and cranked the radio. Big Sugar was the CD playing and Mike turned around and asked Rowan if he liked the blues. Gryphon responded before Rowan could:

“Yeah, but the blues were eliminated and the yellows won.”

Ok, so I like the musical competition shows. I’d say it’s a guilty pleasure, but I really don’t feel guilty about it. I enjoy seeing the good and the bad, rooting for a favorite and finding out who ends up staying and going. I HATE power voting.

I understand getting behind someone from your community, even if they suck, but this isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a job interview. Winning these contests does not guarantee a successful career, it guarantees a shot at a career. Putting someone into the winner’s circle because they are from a particular province not only cheats more talented people out of the prize, it wastes the time and money invested by the sponsors and the record execs that have to put out an album that only 10, 000 people want, even though there were magically 2 million votes cast for said album.

People, please, just because you want your person to win really bad doesn’t mean you should vote 10, 000 times a night to try and make it happen. If you feel you have to vote all night to keep your person in the competition then you need to recognize that this is not the person that should win. Unless you are going to buy 10, 000 albums, t-shirts and concert tickets, DO NOT VOTE 10,000 times.

Vote for the number of albums you are willing to buy!

If you are going to go down to the record store and buy all their copies of your person’s album to inflate their album sales, by all means vote that many times. But if you’re just voting for the cute boy because nobody likes him, and you have no intention of buying his album, DON’T VOTE FOR HIM!

Contests like these are our opporunity to tell record companies what music we really want to hear, what artists we really want them spending their money on. For years we have complained that the music record companies put out suck and they only care about formulaic artists that follow the current fad. Surprisingly their response was to let us audition and choose someone we want to hear from, but they’re not going to keep doing it if we chose people and then don’t buy the damn albums.

Power voters: STOP FUCKING BLOWING IT!!

I will never forgive you for compelling me to power vote, myself. Fuck, can’t we all just vote ONCE instead of all of us having to sit on the phone for two hours to make sure our own votes carry the same weight?

I would be very happy if these shows went back to charging for votes. $5 is not an unreasonable down payment on an album. If $5 is not worth it to you to see your person through to the end, then you shouldn’t be voting. But it would be much nicer if we could all just vote once and go home.