#1 Hits from another planet …Transmissions come in from outposts all over the universe…unfamiliar melodies stream into our radios…fronted by colorful aliens with big voices.  The music begins to catch on…it’s in our heads and refuses to leave and we like it.  

• How is it even possible that someone can send a 250-word email that contains absolutely no information?
• It turns out that the light I saw at the end of the tunnel was actually just the glow of a neon sign that read “Actual Light: 4000 Miles.”
• What I need to do and what I want to do are reaching new levels of disparity.
• Writing complaint lists on the internet. I mean who does that?

It’s the late show on a Saturday night in Columbus, Ohio. I’m halfway through my set and I mention Barack Obama. Some scattered boos. Which is normal. Somebody always hates the president, no matter who that president might be. In this case, the president is Obama and I am a fan, so I always ask they are so mad at him.

“Why are you mad at the president?”

Some common responses:

“Because he’s an idiot.”

“Because he doesn’t do anything.”

“Because he broke his campaign promises.”

That’s usually as far as people are able to go. They’re mad but they don’t know why. Which is always funny, at least to me. In fact, now that I think of it, nobody has ever given me a specific policy reason why they do not like our current president. I try to be polite about it while simultaneously making fun of them, then I give whoever I was making fun of a dollar, and we move on.

Last night, as I was talking about how much I love the president (because I do), somebody yelled out “Heil Hitler.”

Heil Hitler?

My immediate reaction was to crumple to the floor, which I did. I don’t know why, except that it seemed to me in that moment that the show had now gone south very quickly, and if bottles were going to be thrown, I didn’t want to get hit.

But then I stood up and asked the person (shrouded in darkness, as people who scream “Heil Hitler” often are) why he yelled that, thinking maybe he thought it was funny in some obtuse way, like maybe he though shouting that would be interpreted as clever satire. Or maybe he was being ironic. Grasping, I know, but I honestly had no idea why somebody would yell that outside of a Klan rally. 

But I am still being polite.

The guy in the dark says, “Because when you say you like Obama, that’s the same thing to me as saying ‘Heil Hitler.’”

The audience, predictably, starts booing. I ask them to please calm down, that I will handle this in a mature way. While I am saying this to the audience, I am thinking, How do I possibly handle this in a mature way.

So the audience settles down, and I turn to the gentleman and say, “Sir, I say with this all due respect -  you are a fucking moron.”

And then I kind of lost my shit.

I just started screaming at the guy. Screaming. I don’t even know what I was screaming, although the gist was, “How dare you compare Hitler to this president or any president? How dare you equate what he did with Obama is doing? Do you have any idea how insulting that is? Do you know anything about history? Do you have any idea what Hitler did? He killed six million of my people, which is six million more than Obama has killed. You’re a fucking idiot. You’re a fucking moron. You’re the fucking problem with this country. You and your reflexive retardation. You’re a fucking this-and-that…” and then I just basically started yelling “fuck” a lot at the guy. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Then he stood up and left.

It felt really, really great.

But now I feel bad. I feel bad because, in retrospect, that guy didn’t deserve that. Yes he said something incredibly stupid, but my response was just as stupid. I could have made my point a million different ways without screaming into a microphone in a room filled with drunk people. I wasn’t clever, I wasn’t thoughtful, I said nothing that would move the conversation forward. I just yelled because Nazis push my Jew button (my Jew button is located right below my tail).

It was a purely emotional response, the kind that I get upset at other people for making when talking about the mosque they want to build or gay marriage or gun violence or any issue that people use to piss each other off.

Hitler is just a buzz word. Which is actually part of my problem with him saying it in such a blithe way. In a weird way, by equating policy disagreements with a genocidal egomaniac, you’re actually disrespecting Hitler. You’re actually bringing his evil down to the level of the mundane, which we should never do. Obama is Hitler because he created a consumer protection agency? C'mon.

So yeah, I kind of lost my shit last night. And to that guy who shouted out “Heil Hitler,” I apologize. There was no reason to meet your idiocy with my own, even though you are a fucking moron.

We just pushed out 1.5.3 to the Chrome Extension Gallery. This adds support for SoundCloud Groups, Tracks and Search.

Check these pages out for some great new music -

http://soundcloud.com/tracks/hot
http://soundcloud.com/tracks/latest
http://soundcloud.com/groups/trance
http://soundcloud.com/search

We just released 1.5.2 to the Chrome extension gallery. This new release adds support for SoundCloud!

In their own words - “SoundCloud is a new online audio platform that lets music professionals receive, send & distribute their music”. In our words - SoundCloud has a ton of amazing music that you need to to listen to right now!

Support for SoundCloud works both on soundcloud.com as well as any site that has a SoundCloud widget embedded (like this one).

SoundCloud support is really exciting because it opens up a direct link from the artist’s studio into the listener’s music library. If we think back to when bands used to record music for ten’s of thousands of dollars in a studio, then produce millions of plastic discs, then ship those discs to thousands of stores, then have listeners spend 20 minutes trying to open the plastic surrounding those plastic discs, well anyway you get the point. Now artists can make music for the cost of a computer, upload it to SoundCloud and within seconds it’s inside their fans’ music libraries. Pretty incredible!

In addition to SoundCloud, this release also adds Tumblr oAuth support. Previously, logging into Tumblr meant giving us your username and password. With oAuth, you now just tell Tumblr you trust us and they give us a token to use on your behalf. You can untrust us (don’t know why you’d ever want to do that!) any time you want and the token will stop working. It’s a lot more secure this way. If you are already logged in to Tumblr inside the extension, you may want to consider logging out and then logging back in with oAuth.

We’d love to hear what you think about these new features. Leave us a comment here or on our UserVoice page.

Wow!  (Not sure why they don’t have stickers).  

Read the whole list 

Extension.fm is a Chrome extension that catalogs the mp3 files from the sites you visit into a web-based music library.  When you visit a site, the extension adds the site and its mp3 links to your library.  As the site is updated, the new mp3s are automatically added to your library.

Extension.fm provides an interesting way to discover music, as you have a constantly growing stream of music.  There’s also an iTunes like UI, which lets you access your library by song, by artist, or by source site.

By mapping song metadata to mp3 links across the web, Extension.fm is building a music catalog around which it can enable other features, like playlist sharing or a social recommendation service like M-Flow in the UK.  Of course, the catalog is limited to mp3s available on the web, but there aren’t any licensing roadblocks - since the sites hosting the mp3s are responsible for licesning, paying SoundExchange, etc.  This dynamic may change if Extension.fm’s usage grows significantly, particularly since the service won’t necessarily drive traffic to the underlying sites they way HypeMachine does (the source site of a track, while visible, isn’t really central to the product). 

Regardless, it’ll definitely be interesting to watch the product develop.  Dan Kantor, the founder, previously founded music-streaming service Streampad.  And the company recently raised a first round of funding from music-loving VC Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital) along with Betaworks and Founders Collective.

A nice addition to the NYC music-tech scene.

We just released 1.4.3 to the gallery. This new release adds some much-requested features as well as a few that take advantage of some new features in Chrome 5.

Desktop Notifications

You now have the option of receiving a desktop notification when a new song starts playing. The notification will show you the song, artist, album, site and cover art of the new song.

Notifications are off by default but can be turned on in the Settings page.

New Player Buttons

There are two new buttons on the bottom page player. This is the player that shows up on the bottom of the page if you are playing songs from that site. The first is the Home button. Click this and it will open up a new tab to the full extension (or focus the tab if it is already open). The second button is Remove. Click this and the player will remove itself from the page. It will stay off the page for the life of the tab. If you open the site on a new tab, the player will appear on that tab.

Undelete

You can now undelete a site that you previously deleted from your library. To undelete, just visit the site and click on the ExtensionFM button. You will see an option to undelete the site which will add the site and all its songs back to your library.

Unlimited Storage

Chrome 5 now allows extensions to have unlimited storage for its data. The previous limit was 5MB. Many people were hitting this limit as their libraries grew in size. Once the limit was hit, the extension stopped functioning properly. Unlimited storage fixes this problem.

As always, we’d love your feedback. Please join our Group and tell us what you think!