I've been following the CD baby contest issue at James Brausch's blog regarding the facts stated by James and the stupidity defense presented by Derek Sivers, which are interesting to say the least!

Derek Sivers has claimed on several blogs that he has worked everything out with James and that he has won the contest by far.   This seems to be news to everyone except James himself who has repeatedly stated that CD Baby is still incommunicado.  We seemed to be faced with a staggering counter diction here. 

Would James lie to his readers over a silly contest to make Derek look bad?  I seriously doubt it.  Would Derek lie in an attempt to cover his own butt which is snowballing out of control?  Nah, he must be an upstanding guy, therefore I believe I have deduced the most logical explanation.  It is simply a misunderstanding.  Let me explain further how this miscommunication has likely come about. 

James was sitting at his laptop in tropical paradise Costa Rica and just clicked the record button to create an info product when at that very second he was zapped into space by extra terrestrials.  They then replaced James with an exact duplicate and zapped it back to Costa Rica an hour later.  The Automaton James was contacted by Derek and was told the good news about winning the contest.  "James" was very agreeable with everything that was discussed because the duplicate James was only functioning on the most basic cerebral levels.  After the conversation with Derek, the duplicate James began malfunctioning and was soon skipping down the street in his underwear singing show tunes from the '60s.  

The extra terrestrials were immediately alarmed by this so they zapped the duplicate James back to the mother ship and returned the real James back to earth.  They erased all memory of the event from James' memory to prevent psychological trauma of course.  James then glanced down at his laptop and noticed that there was an hour of silent serene sounds of the Costa Rican outdoors that had been recorded in his absence.  James not being the type of guy to waste a CD or an opportunity decided to release this wonderful CD to the public and launch a 24 hour special.

So my conclusion is that in reality, nobody is at fault.  Come to think of it, since Derek has the ability to change history, maybe he's an E.T. too!  Hmmmmmm!