In a medium-smart move of self-marketing (And I'm taking the bait!), this guy who shall remain nameless gets kicked out of this totally underground Microsoft Store show for dancing on top of some laptops (I just made up that rhyme!). Like him or not, you may find it therapeutic to channel all of the pent-up rage you've accumulated over years of using Microsoft products. Just imagine if it were you up there. This video was posted on September 29, has more than 175,000 views, with 612 likes and 285 dislikes, but, this being Line Out, the Land of the Needless Poll Post, we must have a poll!

Maybe! Probably not. No, they're not done, actually. But let's take some Dave Grohl quotes and make it sound like they are!

From NME.com:

Before playing 'Learn To Fly', the group's fourth song of the night, Grohl said: "Without making a big deal out of it, we don't have any shows after this. This is it, man. Honestly I don't know when we're gonna do it again…and this is the perfect place to do it."

However, fans of the band will take comfort as, at the end of a blistering set packed with crowd-pleasing anthems such as 'My Hero', 'Times Like These', 'All My Life' and 'Best Of You' and set-closer 'Everlong', Grohl told the audience: "I don't know when, but we'll see you again."

Of course, they said that earlier this year. So whatever.

In other Sort of News: Beiber puked on stage.

After throwing a hissy fit on stage Friday night, Green Day has announced that their set was not cut short, and singer Billie Joe Armstrong is checking into rehab for "substance abuse."

Yikes.

Take care of yourself, Mr. Armstrong. No more tantrums about Justin Bieber, okay?

You may know Ping as Apple's failed social networking feature that's been built into iTunes for the last few years. Or you many know it as "that annoying button in iTunes I clicked once and got this":

Either way, September 30 Apple is sending Ping to Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Heaven™ to take its place alongside the likes of Encarta, Google Wave, and Facebook’s IPO. What went wrong? We shall now conduct a Scientifically Inscrutable Line Out Poll™. And yes, I'm going to trademark all my bad slogans all day.

If you're a rabid fan of the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, you're already aware that today is the birthday of songwriter and guitar player Steve Gaines. Let me just get this fact out of the way right now, Lynyrd Skynyrd fucking rules.

According to a poorly written Wikipedia page, Gaines "saw The Beatles live in a baseball d in Kansas City." Gaines replaced original Skynyrd guitarist Ed King, who was also the guitarist for the Strawberry Alarm Clock. On top of that, Ed King co-wrote the psychedelic radio crossover, "Incense and Peppermints." In a crazy coincidence, it's Ed King's birthday as well. Today is everybody's birthday!

Ed King co-wrote "Sweet Home Alabama." For a reason that Wikipedia doesn't explain, King left Skynyrd during the 1975 Torture Tour. Steve Gaines had a sister named Cassie who was part of the Lynyrd Skynyrd back-up band called the Honkettes. She suggested her brother join the band during the search to replace King. Both Cassie and Steve Gaines were raised in Miami, Oklahoma. I'm pretty sure in Oklahoma, the town of Miami is pronounced Mi-am-a.

Steve Gaines only appeared on one Lynyrd Skynyrd LP, Street Survivors. The cover of the LP was a photograph of the band surrounded by flames, an ominous coincidence, as three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash three days after the release of Street Survivors. The fatalities included Steve & Cassie Gaines, as well as lead singer Ronnie Van Zant.

Gaines was buried in Florida, but his remains were moved in 2000 after vandals broke into his tomb. Alternative country/Southern rock band, Drive-By Truckers wrote a song about Steve Gaines entitled "Cassie's Brother," which has another poorly written Wikipedia page.

On a lighter note, renowned television actor Sally Struthers was arrested for driving under the influence in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Struthers was released after posting $160 bail. Struthers was born in Portland, Oregon in 1948 and has a sister named Sue. Struthers married controversial psychiatrist, William C. Rader, in 1977. Rader is known for his work with offshore fetal stem cell treatments in the 1990s. Rader was also the co-author of a 1977 episode of All in the Family called "Archie's Bitter Pill." In that episode, main character Archie Bunker becomes addicted to speed (?!?), but eventually recovers.

Hot tipper Anna Minard was reading the liner notes for Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill when she discovered that Flea (of RHCP) and Dave Navarro (of devilish facial hair) play bass and guitar, respectively, on "You Oughta Know"—that song about Dave Coulier. Please enjoy Flea's isolated bass track below.

Did everyone know this? They oughta. (HA HA HA!)

Charmingly sloppy and infectiously enthusiastic New York punk band Bomb the Music Industry just posted this on their blog:

This is a weird thing to write that I don’t want to write. But it was agreed on that it would be “mean” if I didn’t… I’ve been putting it off all day, and now that the record collection is alphabetized, all mail-order is done, and my groceries are color-coded seems like I gotta do it. (EDIT: I even waited a full day before posting this. oh boy.)

There’s a very very good chance this upcoming US tour is going to be our last time coming through most of these cities. We all still love each other and love playing music together. There’s no weird rifts or anything. To put it simply, the 9 - 10 months or our lives when we are not playing music are not fantastic. To put it complicatedly, those months are weird vortexes (vortices?) of time where we float in between weird jobs that further us in very little ways as human beings aside from you know, the thrill delivering ten sheets of plexi to celebrity photo shoots (glamorous!) or the satisfaction of doing sound for another Green Day cover band (very glamorous!)… it seems like it’s just time to see if there’s anything out there that can provide us with full-time joy instead of part-time joy.

NoooooOOOOOOOOooooOOooooo!

You can read the whole thing—including the part where they reserve the right to take all of this back and tour for the rest of their lives—here. They also posted a new song, “80s Through the 50s,” on their blog.

They'll be at El Corazon with Pretty Old and the Creakies on August 30th. Tickets are available here.

Gerard Cosloy's résumé regarding important music is long and varied. He started the brilliant zine Conflict as a youth. He probably saw the Freeze and the Proletariat more than a few times, but I'm just guessing on that one. He hung out with G.G. Allin, ran Homestead Records, is part owner of Matador Records, and runs an extremely celebrated sports-heavy blog called Can't Stop The Bleeding.

Yesterday on that blog he referred to Seattle's historic Kingdome as something "hardly anyone misses."

• DEREK ERDMAN

When I first read his post, my mouth dropped open in disbelief, causing Starbucks to dribble all over my North Face fleece. Then I remembered somebody telling me that the Kingdome was a total dump that was prone to drop concrete chunks on your head. Which begs raises the question, "Is Gerard Cosloy right? Does hardly anybody miss the Kingdome?"

This just in, via Reuters:

Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

Read more here.

We didn't need a study to tell us this, of course. Anyone paying any attention at all has noticed songs get louder, simpler, more generic. But it feels good to know that my lack of deciphering one Top 40 hit from another isn't because I'm getting old and jaded, but because, OFFICIALLY, there just isn't much of a difference there in the first place.

Get off my lawn!

According to this (admittedly speculative) piece in Wired:

Long considered home to the worst commenters on the internet, YouTube is in the process of upgrading its comment system in order to better tame its most loathsome members.

• K.C. Fennessy
• Throbbing Gristle's "Maggot Death" brings out the winners

It's about time, although I'll be curious to see how they do it. It's one thing for a user to say they dislike a video or to disagree with another commenter—that's engagement, that's community-building—but it's another to call people names and to unleash racist/sexist/homophobic diatribes. Where do you draw the line?

There's no question YouTube has its work cut out for it; its comment sections are widely regarded as cesspools. Meme harvester BuzzFeed called YouTube "a comment disaster on an unprecedented scale" with "the worst commenters on the internet;" online entrepreneur (and Wired contributor) Andy Baio called them "historically pretty bad;" and the online comic XKCD in 2006 imagined the moon landing being broadcast—and moronically heckled—on YouTube. "The internet has always had loud dumb people," XKCD illustrator Randall Munroe wrote in an accompanying caption, "but I've never seen anything quite as bad as the people who comment on YouTube videos."

A staff of human beings and not just some sort of computer algorithm could monitor all remarks—Amazon had workers maintaining customer review queues when I worked there—but that takes time and money. It also slows the process down, and users have grown accustomed to instant "look at me!" gratification.

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