I'm home and the (surprisingly wonderful) computer hiatus is over. Not even a newspaper -- at least an English-language newspaper -- was touched while gone. I'm not giving up email like The Guardian's Tom Hodgkinson say he is doing, but it was nice to be free of it for a while.

Initial thoughts upon returning to the wired world:

• Sub-100,000 album chart leaders are the norm of 2007. Frankly, I'm surprised labels have put up such a tame fight in the CD market. When was the last time an innovation in the CD was introduced to the market? (DualDisc barely counts.) Consumers are obviously moving toward digital, but they're being given no reasons not to make the switch. Granted, it was a slow release week, but c'mon. Oh, and Diddy's Press Play finally passed the 500,000 mark in its 20th week of release.
• Bryan Ferry has an album coming out June 19 through the Capitol Music Group. If there's a guy who doesn't need a record label, it's Ferry. Would Bob Segar's comeback -- through pre-CMG Captiol -- have been any less tepid if he self-released? Maybe he would not have sang at the World Series, but the release probably didn't win over any new fans. These days, an older artist on a major label should be winning over new fans. Otherwise, what's the point? The seniors' tour circuit can survive without major label involvement.
• Hugo Chavez has installed some pretty heavy nationalistic quotas for Venezuelan radio -- far more than Canada has (I was on vacation in Venezuela.) I was told that half of all songs have to come from Venezuelan artists, and 20% or 30% of those are to be folkloric in nature. Plus, the national anthem is played at both 6pm and midnight. It all makes for some interesting (and wildly varied and often disjointed) set lists. On the bright side, as a friend told me, many local artists are able to be heard that otherwise would get pushed aside by more popular artists from elsewhere in Latin America. I did some Googling and came up with this decent article on the quotas. And here's an NPR broadcast on the quotas from June of 2006.