heard last night while playing the new star wars lego game on xbox:

“Wahoo! Mommy, i just kicked the bad guy’s ass!”

“Joshua! We don’t use words like that.”

“oh, sorry…i just kicked the guy’s ass!”

bah-dum-dum.

he sure showed me. showed me that i need to teach my son to use the word bum. or bum bum. or tooshie. or butt, even. or heiney. or behind. or bottom.

just not ass. please.

Some of you may have noticed – and some of you may have alerted me to it – and some of you may have stuck around while i was panicked and psychotic – that my site went down on Friday.

and not only did it go down…but when you (or I) tried to access it..you may have seen this old chestnut:

Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

so, it seems that i’m not as anonymous in the blog-o-sphere as i’d thought. It seems that i used an image – of Britney Spears in her completely horrific and offensive Halloween costume, in case you were wondering – that was copyrighted.

the irony of this is that part of my job is permissioning photos. Paying for the usage of images. I do it every day. I spend hours and hours searching for photos. I spend thousands and thousands of dollars buying the rights to use them. Corbis, Getty, Firstlight, AP, i have besties at all these places. (and sometimes, since i’m so good to them, they buy me presents, like ipod shuffles or ticketmaster gift certificates.)

and i didn’t get any sort of warning. no email that said, “please take down your copyrighted image”. nothing. they just went in and shut me down. i couldn’t even access my wordpress page to remove the photo. my host-who-should-be-sainted couldn’t even access it.

anyway, the host-who-should-be-sainted got me back up and running by late friday night. and i love him for it. (yoohoo…benefits of a small host. you’re not just a number) and i took down the image (so don’t you go searching for it. it’s gone with the wind).

my point? yes, i do have one. just be careful what you use on the internet. you never can tell, no matter how small and insignificant you think you are, who’s going to rat you out, or who has watermarks on their photos. just be careful.

so, if you’re thinking of stealing, oh, say, a photo of a little girl with a cow…don’t even think about snatching up this one

even if it’s the cutest, most hilarious girl-and-cow photo you’ve ever laid eyes on. it’s mine, folks. all mine.

just a wee bit of housekeeping…

yesterday i spent an ungodly amount a little bit  of time on a brand-new plug-in for this site.

if you look down in my sidebar, under my tunes, you should see this:

and it should tell you exactly what i’m listening to. kind of like the MSN one. come on, it’s pretty freakin’ cool….