1. The Smoking Gun has unearthed Katy Perry’s 45-page concert rider, which in general is kind of boring (hates carnations, likes egg chairs), but also includes this misspelled gem for any of her drivers: “DO NOT STAIR AT THE BACKSEAT THRU THE REARVIEUW MIRROW.”
2. In case you missed last night’s Colbert Report, watch John Lithgow gives a dramatic reading of a ridiculous press release from the Newt Gingrich campaign here.
3. Amid all of his current personal drama, Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he’s putting his acting career on hold, which means we’re all going to have to wait that much longer to see Cry Macho. [via ArtsBeat]
4. Google has decided to ditch a project to scan newspapers for publication online because it would have been too expensive, and will instead focus on Google One Pass, “a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.” [via CNET]
5. Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than physical books, at a ratio of about 105 to 100. Says Jeff Bezos: “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly. We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.” [via TDW Geeks]
1. Did The Situation go around his Jersey Shore castmates and strike a secret season three salary deal with MTV last night? Yes, he did. [via TMZ]
2. The xx and Dizzee Rascal are among the 12 acts shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize. [via Spinner]
3. The American Customer Satisfaction Index has found that users rank Facebook right alongside the IRS tax e-filing system, airlines, and cable companies. [via WSJ]
4. Thanks to a drastic price cut for the Kindle, Amazon says it’s selling 80% more downloaded books than hardcovers. [via LAT]
5. So, thanks to a new heart pump, Dick Cheney is kind of a vampire. [via NYT]
Music has always been a tool for social change. Critical Beats, a project that promotes preservation of the Amazon rainforest, pairs producers with indigenous artists from the area to, “spread awareness about the critical state of our most cherished environmental resources and the communities which act as caretakers of these places.” Artists including DJ Spooky and L.A.-based electronic musician Jupit3r have remixed tribal sounds and rhythms to create mellow, danceable beats for a new album, Critical Beats for the Climate.
Flavorpill talked to the Jeremy Jensen, co-director of the program, about the dire state of the rainforest and the role of music in activism. Read our conversation, find out more about upcoming Critical Beats events, and learn how you can get involved after the jump.
Now that we’ve left the hall of mirrors that was the Apple-tablet rumor mill, we can finally take a deep breath and ask: What’s up with the iPad? (Seriously, we’re really all gonna call it that?) Seeing as we’re avid readers, let’s shake our magic eight ball and ask what it might mean for e-books. Our take after the jump.
In case you missed this story over the holiday weekend: WordBridge Publishing, a Christian conservative publisher concerned with “the phenomenon of manipulation based in white guilt” has given Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of Narcissus a thoroughly modern makeover. Their updated version, bizarrely entitled The N-Word of Narcissus, “addresses the reason for its neglect: the profusion of the so-called n-word throughout its pages. Hence, the introduction of ‘n-word’ throughout the text, to remove this offense to modern sensibilities.”
The blogshave been abuzz with anticipation for Kids Go!, the newest endeavor from sweet indie rock standbys They Might Be Giants, and it seems that satisfaction has come sooner than expected. Kids Go! mysteriously became available on Amazon October 24th, though its release date was set for November 3. According to the TMBG wiki, the book was also shipped early to brick and mortar retailers, though the band offers no explanation. Oh well, we’re not complaining.
As a professional amateur sociologist, I’m always on the lookout for peculiar confluences of events. Of particular interest to me is what horse gamblers and NBA-play-by-play men call “the trifecta.” Most humans have a special affection for threepeats (they confer greatness), threesomes (they confer, um, juices), and three-legged dogs (we feel bad for them), and I’m no exception. And so I exhort all fellow trificionados to hustle over to Amazon.com’s Bestseller List, where at this moment a rare three-headed beast is visible in the consumer-goods cloud forest. Read More »
Barnes and Noble is getting into the game with free WiFi in their stores creating what they are calling “the world’s largest e-bookstore.” The software will be available for free on the iPhone, iPod touch, smart phones, computers and the Plastic Logic E-Reader, which is expected to come out later this year. Read More »
In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s pop culture-obsessed protagonist posited that “What really matters is what you like, not what you’re like.” If we accept that our very identities are intertwined with our taste in music, movies and books, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle (now a steal at $299) does start to seem a bit worrisome. In August’s Vanity Fair, James Wolcott laments the passing of a time when every New York City subway ride presented “an opportunity to spy on the reading tastes of fellow passengers and make snap judgments that probably wouldn’t hold up in court.”
Wolcott poses an important question: “How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?” Tricky, but not impossible! We’ve got a few ideas. Read More »
As far as we can tell, here’s the one important piece of information you need to know about Amazon’s new Kindle DX: it costs a whopping $489 dollars. Well that, and some misguided souls think that it’s going to save the newspaper industry from ruin. As one Flavorpill staffer noted, that’s almost enough money to buy a real laptop. Which make it a crazy product to launch “in this economy,” right? Read More »
