I equate today to other Amateur Hour holidays like Hallowe'en and New Year's Eve, when people that aren't very good at something (e.g. being scary or drinking) go and do it anyhow. New Year's is especially hateful for me, as my work in Chicago virtually ensured that I would be spending that night with about 3,000 drunk stock brokers instead of my wife and friends.

So anyhow, today is the day when the music industry inflicts fake (and, let's be honest, somewhat stupid) press releases on itself. As a true hallmark of proper planning, it coincides with the first day of Messe, so we're left to wade through a metric assload of press releases to decide what's fake and what's just plain ol' fashioned dumb. This is a good example of the "is it real or is it a prank" problem. I'm pretty sure it's real, even though it's unbelievably silly, and the pedal equivalent of "straight to DVD."

Anyhow, I've slogged my way through all the releases I could find today, both real and fake, and I haven't found anything that either made me chuckle or made me think it was a massive step forward. This is, of course, the sort of economic climate that makes companies hunker down and pull in the second-most expensive part of being a business, R&D, so we won't see anything truly new for the foreseeable future, I don't think, but even so it's kind of sadcakes.

Anyone seen something that was anything but "meh" yet? Do tell.