Imagine it: You're a 40's-ish Irish musician and member of one of the most successful bands in rock music history, one of the biggest, most loved groups in the world. You've had an incredible run--some 20-plus years of touring, platinum records, awards, pop hits and critical acclaim. Your last album was a Grammmy winner. It was a beautiful thing.

Now, you've just spent the last two years writing and recording songs for your next album--your band's first new collection of songs in over four years and the record is almost finished. There are just a few tweaks left to perform in the studio and with those the disc will be done. All the songs--the so-called "rough cut"--are on a single compact disc. The title of the new album is rumored to be "Vertigo."

You keep the disc in your bag, which you take with you to the balmy South of France where you and your band mates will finish recording the album using the tracks on that CD. While you're there you do some press, a photo shoot, to supply publicity images for the media maw. During the shoot, you leave your bags unattended, naturally, as you go to work mugging and posing for the camera.

After the photo shoot, you come back and notice that the rough-cut CD is missing. It's gone. Vanished. You look around you everywhere. You ask around, "Hey, anyone seen a CD lying around here?" You start to worry. You get a little pissed off. You get a little scared.

You think, "Two years of work is on that disc. An entire album--OUR entire next album--digitized on a single round piece of plastic, which is gone. Did I mislay it? Did I forget it? Dear God--PLEASE!--Tell me I left the disc back in Ireland!"

No, that's not it, matey. The logical conclusion is someone took it. Thieves . Or a thief. But who? Why?

Technically the disc (or rather, its contents) doesn't even belong to you; the rough-cut tracks are property of a record company, the corporate entity to which you are contractually obligated.

"Holy sh*t!" you think.

Oh yeah, and it's 2004 and there's that thing called the Internet, upon which are run peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, connecting millions of users via personal computer via which the digital contents of an audio compact disc can be easily copied and transmitted via a few simple mouse clicks. And at last count you heard there were something like, maybe, 40 million Internet users worldwide.

"F**************************ck!" you think.

But the French police are on the case, hunting for the missing disc and the culprit, if any. Your loyal and adoring fans sympathize. The press is all over this news, especially the entertainment media. Britain's vicious, rabid music journalists are frothing at the mouth on this one. Your homeland's newspapers give the story big play, after all, you're among Ireland's biggest, most famous native sons. The media in general have a field day whipping out pun-filled headlines that make heavy use of some of your back catalog's most popular song titles.

You make some comments to the media about the incident. You say, "A large slice of two years' work lifted. It doesn't seem credible but that's what's just happened to us... and it was my CD."

Your band is named after an American spy plane made famous by an incident in the 1960's in which one such plane was shot down over Soviet Russia. You don't use your real name; People call you "The Edge" or sometimes just "Edge," minus the definite article. Your band is named U2.

And, yeah, you still haven't found what you're looking for.

--Ivan "Micropundit" Corsa

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We haven't been this excited about a big new magazine launch in a long time, not only because Swindle magazine looks so fresh, but also because it's largely the brainchild of Shephard Fairey. If you don't recognize the name, you may recognize Fairey's street art-turned-brand Obey Giant--its logo is designed around an iconic image of the late great wrestler Andre the Giant.

Obey Giant became a worldwide street-marketing phenomenon in the 90's. In a few years it went from a guerrilla sticker-art campaign to a global commercial brand in a way that has become a textbook study for marketers and culture-jammers alike. Now the same mind behind Obey Giant brings us Swindle magazine.

According to the Swindle Web site, the quarterly magazine aims to be "the definitive pop-culture and lifestyle publication for young men and women." That's Cool. But that's also quite an ambitious statement.