Understanding in a blog crash.

My apologies for my blog laying dormant for the past few days; I've been mostly disconnected from the internet, as the girlfriend and I spent the weekend visiting my parents, going to a wedding reception in the middle of nowhere, dealing with something like 14 inches of rain in Chicago in under two days, watching the Bears lose to Carolina (oh, come on! How did we blow a 17-3 lead?!?), seeing WALL-E (finally! This movie was too cute), etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, I am back now, and I have a few small thoughts (and one big explanation) for you.

1. The driver of the CTA bus I took Friday afternoon had a tattoo visible on his forearm that said "BORN TO KILL." Maybe the dude was just a big fan of Full Metal Jacket; I don't know. But that seems like a really bizarre thing to have inked on your body for eternity. And the choice to purposely roll your sleeve up so every passenger would see your tat upon paying fare? Either positively genius or unbelievably stupid.

2. Do I look like any of these people, all of whom are apparently named Tom King? After the reception on Saturday, the under-30 crowd moved the party to a local bar, and as I sat there enjoying my glass of water, two middle-aged men in suits walked in and immediately began waving at me. Thinking they were waving at someone behind me (as I obviously did not know these dudes), I ignored them. They then walked up to me and said, "Excuse me, you're Tom King, right?" I then had to break the news that I was not, in fact, Mr. King. The only question is, did the men mistake me for 19th century boxer Tom King, Olympic gold medalist sailor Tom King, or fictional British soap opera character Tom King? (Personally, I'm hoping it was the boxer.)

3. I have not gotten anyone fired from anything in my life. Last week, Dillinger Four's new album, C I V I L W A R, leaked, allegedly due to one person who was sent an advance online stream of the album by Fat Wreck Chords as they worked for a magazine (not AP) and then decided to share it with friends, who then shared it with more friends, who then posted it on various message boards around the internet, until someone tech-savvy enough decided to rip the streaming audio into MP3s and release the record for free to whoever wanted to use the bandwidth to grab it.

Not only is this illegal, it is immoral and immature.

When I asked a friend who worked for Fat where they think the leak came from, they pinpointed it to one specific person from a specific magazine (again, not AP) who had been begging them to hear the record. Upon hearing this person's name, I realized that same person had been emailing and IMing me incessantly for the past few weeks about trying to write for AP, and while his work was okay, I didn't believe it was up to par for our magazine, so I more or less didn't follow up with him, hoping he would get the point. Once I found out the label was holding him responsible for the leak, I promptly wrote him and let him know that AP doesn't use writers who leak records, so I would not need his services. This is a decision we've made at AP for a number of reasons, most notably being we would be held liable if a record we assigned to someone for review was leaked. Luckily, there have been very few instances of this happening since I've worked at AP, and we've tried to keep it that way.

Here's where the story gets wacky: Unbeknownst to me, the magazine which this guy worked for found out he was the alleged leaker, and they canned him. Somehow, this fact spreads across the internet as "Scott Heisel got [dude's name] fired." This is 100% false -- there is a long, long, long way to go from alerting Fat that the D4 stream had leaked (which I did, in hopes they could try and contain it) and getting someone fired from their job because they made an incredibly poor decision (which I did not do). This is the power of the internet: People don't want to actually seek out the truth; they'd rather have it handed to them in bite-sized nuggets on message boards and in comments of stories on music news websites. So let this be my feeble attempt to set the record straight. It probably won't help any, but at least I've told what little story there actually is. (If you want to read the alleged leaker's account of the events (as well as a whole bunch of digs at yours truly), you can do so here.)

If anyone out there still has any questions about this non-issue, feel free to leave them in the replies and I will be happy to answer them.

There. That's done with. Now, back to listening to this totally awesome Thursday/Envy split CD (Tim, you were right, this thing utterly kills). Time to go pre-order the vinyl!