Variety reports that “Fox has found a way to help struggling small businesses as they downsize in this tough economic climate. Sort of.” How so, you ask? A reality show about getting laid off. No, seriously. “The network has picked up the reality competish ‘Someone’s Gotta Go,’ which enters real businesses across the country and gives employees the power to decide which one of them will be terminated.” Read More »

Let us get this straight. So this month’s Rolling Stone cover can show two barely legal Gossip Girls suggestively licking the same phallic ice cream cone and that’s cool, but when teen girls take pictures of themselves in their bras it’s a felony? Something about that just doesn’t seem right. Read More »

As the London Times reports, several Larry King viewers emailed in to last night’s show to offer Natalie Cole a kidney donation after the singer revealed that she was suffering renal failure. (Cole contracted Hepatitis C in the ’80s, but was only diagnosed last year.) Her response to her crazy generous fans? “There are some great human beings out there. That’s all I can say.” Read More »

When we read this funny post on Gawker about a woman who discovered her husband was cheating on her via Google Maps (which if you’ll remember, is still relatively new in the UK), we weren’t surprised. Per the original item in The Sun, because it sounds better in British: “The hubby had claimed he was away on business, but his missus recognised his motor immediately because of its blinged-up hubcaps.” Read More »

AdFreak just turned us on to a controversial gym ad in Netherlands that seeks to gain new customers by shaming them. How so, you ask? “It has a scale in the seat and displays the sitter’s weight for all to see. We’re sure Fitness First is expecting a huge spike in membership from this, but the effect is ruined the moment two people share the seat. That and, you know, trying to win people’s business by humiliating them.”

It’s like The Biggest Loser meets public transportation.

What we’re wondering is:

[Thanks for the tip, Anne!]

Allow us to present David O’Reilly’s Golden Bear-winning short Please Say Something; we agree with Indie Eye’s take, “‘In a Lonely Place’ by way of Atari’s ‘Crystal Castles’…with a touch of Chris Ware.” BTW, kudos to O’Reilly for putting this online where we can all enjoy it.

Maybe you’re sick of talking Kindle. If so, stay away from the Atlantic’s Web site, where two writers are currently going head to head on whether the literary device signals the death of reading as we know it or is just a natural adaptation in the evolutionary process.

On one side of the argument you’ve got Sven Birkerts, an essayist who’s resisting the siren call of the Kindle: “For me the significance of this is not whether people end up reading more or less, or even a matter of what they read. At issue is the deep-structure of the activity. My fear is that as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature and the humanities: a one-stop outlet, a speedy and irresistibly efficient leveler of context.”

And on the other, the aptly named Matthew Battles, a librarian who thinks that the Kindle will promote cultural understanding, not kill it off. “Technologies shift — and with those shifts come changes in our consciousness,” he explains. “We read differently now than did the contemporaries of Johannes Gutenberg or Jane Austen. By the nineteenth century, books were no longer individually crafted works of art, but products of industry — no longer richly bound and ornately hand-decorated, but serviceably assembled using interchangeable parts. Yet despite these far-reaching shifts, the sequences of words themselves have been handed down more or less intact from age to age.”

What we’re wondering is:

According to a report in today’s Irish Times, “a survey, carried out on the World Book Day website in January and February, found two-thirds of people lied about reading books they have in fact not read.” Not surprisingly, most people who admitted to lying explained that they only did it in order to impress the person who they were talking to.

Also not a shocker, the most fibbed-about titles are all classics: 1984, War and Peace, Ulysses, The Bible, and Madame Bovary. Oddly six percent of all respondents admitted to falsely claiming that they had read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father — proving that Barry’s almost as popular in the UK and Ireland as James Joyce!

What we’re wondering is:

And if you answer is yes, do us a favor and leave the title in the comments. We’re not going to judge you; we’re just curious. In fact, we’ll go first and admit that we’ve lied about reading Infinite Jest more than once.

Oh the irony of this whole Gandhi auction. On one side you’ve got the Delhi High Court, who was hoping to halt the sale of the icon’s personal memorabilia — which includes a pocket watch, steel-rimmed eyeglasses, and sandals — by paying a “reasonable negotiated price” for the items. On the other you’ve got LA-based collector James Otis, a self-proclaimed pacifist who reportedly hopes the “publicity surrounding the sale would inspire the Obama administration and others to pursue nonviolence.” He’s not biting.

Hmm… this might have something to do with it: “The reserve price for his belongings at the Antiquorum auction house is $20,000 to $30,000, although some predict the collection could sell for 10 times as much.”

What we’re wondering is:

We were getting ready for work this morning and had the Today Show playing in the background, as is our habit. The fact that they ran segments on Casey Anthony, Chris Brown/Rihanna, and the danger of owning a chimp as a pet made us feel like we were watching something that would be more correctly titled the Yesterday Show (if you have the pained look on your face that our roommate did when we made that joke at 7:45 this morning, apologies). What can we say, we’re suckers for old people on Smuckers jars and Uncle Willie Scott. Fatal flaw.

But it did make us wonder:

If none of these answers work for you, feel free to comment in your reponse.