Filed under: Sirius Satellite Radio (SIRI), Marketing and advertising

Howard Stern, the reason why many people subscribe to Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI), has upset country legend Dolly Parton.

The singer is madder than a rattlesnake trying to bite a fencepost at the self-styled King of All Media for splicing together audio segments that made it appear that she was saying nasty things about celebrities including Kenny Rogers, Linda Rondstadt, Burt Reynolds and Johnny Carson, according to the Associated Press.

In a statement posted on her Web site, the singer/songwriter stated she had never been so “shocked, injured and humiliated in my life…Please accept my apology for them and certainly know I had nothing to do with this. If there was ever going to be a lawsuit, it’s going to be over this.”

I am sure that any lawyer Parton contacts — or an law student for that matter — will tell the writer of “I will always love you” that she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of prevailing against Stern. The First Amendment gives performers the right to say vile things about celebrities in what’s obviously a parody. Remember Jerry Falwell’s fight against Hustler magazine which he lost in the Supreme Court? The same concept applies here.

Parton also seems to be getting some bad public relations advice.

Had she just ignored the bit, most people would have probably simply forgotten about it and Stern would have moved onto his next victim. By picking a fight with Stern, she’s creating a publicity gold mine for the “shock jock” and his boss Sirius Chief Executive Mel Karmazin. This also is good news for Sirius shareholders because it shows that Stern is worth each penny that the company pays him.

If Parton really wanted revenge on Stern, she should hire some comedy writers and sound engineers and splice together sound bytes from the author of “Private Parts” that make him look stupid. I’m sure it would annoy Stern but like Parton there would be nothing he could do about it.

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Filed under: Business, Productivity, Troubleshooting

Things, the popular personal organization application from Cultured Code, is still in testing, but it already has a massive userbase that is thoroughly addicted to its attractive to-do list features. It’s no surprise, then, that when the clock turned to midnight in Australia and Things suddenly expired, users were up in arms. Hours later, users in the US experienced the same problem. Several people congregated on the official Things help forum, which had nearly 50 postings on the problem as of 2:30 this morning.

Cultured Code hasn’t yet responded with an explanation of why Things was set to expire. The application is still free, but users have already come to rely on it, with more than one person posting that they would gladly pay the $49 pricetag Cultured Code will charge for the 1.0 release to continue using Things right now. Why the expiration, though? We anticipate to see either a swift fix or an update pushed out this morning — as the app is currently at version .9.1.1, the highly anticipated 1.0 release is possible, but not likely.

If you’re a Things user, visit the help forum for some unofficial ways of resolving the problem. So far, most people are either setting their computers’ dates back or using a hex editor to change the expiration date. Despite all the fuss, this could end up working in favor of Cultured Code. Our take: any publicity is good publicity when people are this frantic about your product.

Update: Version 0.9.1.2 is now available.

[via Duncan Riley]

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