125 Records

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Enter the Nest of Vipers

125 Records loves Danny Plotnick's twice-monthly podcast, Nest of Vipers. Danny is well known to Loud Family fans as the guy who directed the "Live 2000" DVD, and as the husband of LF keyboard player Alison Faith Levy. Nest of Vipers is basically just an hour of Danny and some of his hilarious, talented friends sitting around and telling stories -- it's like hanging out with a bunch of super-cool and funny people. Alison appears in the podcast entitled "Artists' Formative Moments," and 125 artiste Gil Ray is one of the guests in the current 'cast, "Tour Stories." Hear astonishing true tales of Gil's disco debauchery! Listen to wild accusations of Liquid PaperĀ® huffing! NoV can also be downloaded from iTunes; you can listen to it on your iPod or just play it on your computer.

Most people have heard that postage rates went up on Monday, but if you only use the mails to send the occasional letter and pay bills, you may be amazed to learn how much they went up. The rate for a one-ounce letter only went from 39 to 41 cents, but a CD in a Digipak that cost 87 cents to mail last week now costs $1.47!!! That's quite a leap. It looks like 125 will have to raise our postage rates -- pretty much all the other mail order retailers whose web sites I checked have already done so. CDBaby, whose prices and policies I've always considered extremely fair, now charges $2.25 to ship a single CD, $4 for 2 CDs, $5 for 3, and so on. Amazon.com charges a $1.99 flat rate for each order plus $1 for each CD in the shipment. I haven't even looked into international rates, but I expect they've jumped as well. No more bargains from the USPS!