Like many other sites on the web, we pay for the amount of bandwidth we use. We’re happy to accommodate all the folks who want to visit the site, read our blog, download tunes, etc… We’re less eager to accommodate people who hotlink to our images to display them on other sites. It’s not cool — they’re offloading their costs onto us.

Being the obsessive that I am, I periodically peruse the raw web logs for the site, and when I see someone stealing our bandwidth, I do something about it. Many of the folks who do this do so because they don’t know any better. Therefore, a gentle lesson is sometimes in order.

Case in point, a young gentleman from Los Angeles who used our image of the first Minor Threat album cover on his myspace page. It came from a post I wrote a while back about Nike appropriating the artwork from the first Minor Threat record. I love Minor Threat as much as the next bluegrass mandolinist, and I’m glad that kids still listen to `em, but principles are principles, and a lesson was in order. Which brings us to the second reason why you shouldn’t hotlink to images: you have no control over the image. Someone can pull a switcheroo on you.

Being the upstanding citizen I am, I chose not to swap with a goatse-style smut pic, but, rather, something potentially more embarrasing to this self-proclaimed porno fan. I found a picture of a beanie baby set against a rainbow background, and added ‘World’s Greatest Grandma’ to it in photoshop. I renamed the Minor Threat pic, copied over the grandma pic, and, voila — our wee hardcore lad is now the world’s greatest grandma. Congratulations.

You can click on the images to view a full-size version and, until he wises up, see the original myspace profile. No hard feelings, kid. Just get an image hosting account, OK?