Police Love, Rock U and iCommons Summit awaits

My friend Derek Sivers, who runs CDBABY is currently staying with me at my place in London. On his first night, with him all jet-lagged, we took a walk around Covent Garden around midnight.

He and I got to witness British wit firsthand, where a somewhat drunk man was being arrested by the police. What was unusual is that he was loudly mocking the police as they did this, and he was quite good at it. First they handcuffed him and then put in the ground face down, continuing to “man-handle him”, and among the things he said:

“Oh officer, I know you love to put your stick there”
“Oh officer, I didn’t know you cared”
“Oh officer, I love it when you hurt me”

at which point they started to “hog tie” him (tie up his feet to his wrists) and took off his tie, and the patter continued:

“Oh officer, a little bit more to the left please”
“I don’t care about my liberty, but I care about my tie”

A crowd of a dozen comedy appreciators looked on, until the performance was sadly over when the police wagon arrived.

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On monday, Derek and I are visiting the Academy for Contemporary Music, the only university with a burning electric guitar on its home page. The ACM is the main UK school for people who want a career in contemporary music (ie, rock, hip-hop, etc)I’m giving a presentation at the ACM about Magnatune entitled “How to Piss off the Music Industry for Fun and Profit”

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In a few days, many of the main actors in the Open Culture movement are getting together in Croatia for the iCommons summit. This is the 2nd year of this annual conference/party, and it’s such an insane success that I received multiple requests from other participants to please arrive two days earlier for some pre-conference networking. I’ll be blogging from Croatia next week.