“For those of you who are super observant, you may have noticed some changes on my blog over the last few months. Tumblr posts went away. Fiction Groupie disappeared. I deleted most of my Pinterest boards. The Boyfriend of the Week has changed format. And all my previous posts from the past three years–all 700 of them–now have new photos on them . . .”

“Well on one random post, I grabbed one random picture off of google and then a few weeks later I got contacted by the photographer who owned that photo. He sent me a takedown notice, which I responded to immediately because I felt awful that I had unknowingly used a copyrighted pic. The pic was down within minutes. But that wasn’t going to cut it. He wanted compensation for the pic. A significant chunk of money that I couldn’t afford. I’m not going to go into the details but know that it was a lot of stress, lawyers had to get involved, and I had to pay money that I didn’t have for a use of a photo I didn’t need.”

If you ever post anything on the internet with pictures. you need to click on the link above and read Roni’s story and the comments. She gives a great rundown on what you can and cannot do with pictures on the internet.

That’s the lawsuits part. On to the Fifty Shades part . . .

I had never heard of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ until I was in the hardware store. Some professional painters were complaining about all of the extra, degrading work they were having to do to get their money these days. I asked them what could make them so depressed about their jobs, and they told me about the book-gone-viral.

Me: “You mean Fifty Shades isn’t the latest hair care line from L’Oreal?”

Apparently not. Frankly, after learning about the sadomasochistic nature of the book, I’m far more likely to spend my limited time reading ‘Fifty Shades of Gray Matter’ by Stephen Hawking. Instead of reading either of them, though, I decided to go for the laugh and search YouTube for the parodies. These were some of my favorites.

We’ll start with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey Karaoke’ from ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’. It includes actual excerpts of the book so we can understand just what we’re making fun of here.

In case you’re still wondering what the book is about, here is Ellen DeGeneres doing a reading for us.

Now that you have the idea, Selena Gomez shows us why those painters were so unhappy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br5Tf7tJ2Uk

All the best to all of you for a week of keeping your house painters happy.

You Can Follow PiperBayar on Twitter at   and Her Blog at http://piperbayard.wordpress.com/

 

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