If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: the teen detective queen, Nancy Drew.

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Today at Flavorpill, we were fascinated to learn the last words of some of our favorite writers. We were thrilled to hear that American hikers Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal have finally left Iran after being held in a Tehran prison for the past two years. We wondered if there’s anyone out there who will actually listen to all six hours of the Flaming Lips’ new song (probably, right?). We enjoyed reading Steve Martin’s unsolicited letter of advice to future Oscars host Eddie Murphy. We joined in the heated debate on who are the 50 greatest video game characters of all time. We looked at how the design of some famous logos might evolve in the future. We couldn’t believe that Nicholas Sparks has sold a show to ABC about a lovelorn angel. We were totally amused this Tumblr that spotlights the kids who have played the flashback versions of famous actors. We found out a few things that Apple is worth more than. We took an interactive tour of the United States of smartphones. And finally, we fell madly in love with Alessandro Novelli’s stop motion animation alphabet — and not just because it’s in Helvetica.

We’ve never been big fans of Rolling Stone‘s readers polls, but for once whoever reads the magazine regularly have got it mostly right. In their latest list, they’ve picked out the 10 worst songs of the ’90s, and their rankings do indeed include some major stinkers: Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart,” and Los Del Rio’s once-unavoidable “Macarena” all get shout outs. (We will, however, take exception to the inclusion of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” — an excellent karaoke song.) Perusing the list, it occurred to us that most of the songs were one-hit wonders, which got us thinking about the considerable number of one-hit wonders from the ’90s we actually enjoyed. A list of our 10 favorites is after the jump. No, drunk girl dancing on the bar, “Baby Got Back” is not included.

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1. P.J. Harvey has taken home this year’s Mercury Prize for her album Let England Shake, making her the first singer to ever win the award twice. [via ArtsBeat]

2. News that we’re ashamed to admit makes us excited: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis have just closed deals to take on “substantial” roles in The Expendables 2. [via Deadline]

3. The Flaming Lips are recording “Found a Star on the Ground,” a song that’s a whopping six hours long, to benefit the Central Oklahoma Humane Society and the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma, and for $100 a pop, you can have your name included in its epic lyrics. [via Pitchfork]

4. Yesterday Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired over the phone, and now “people familiar with the matter” are saying that the company is “open to selling itself to the right bidder” — which many think could be Microsoft. [via Techland]

5. An intruder broke into Celine Dion’s Quebec mansion on Monday afternoon, and then proceeded to make himself a pastry snack and draw a nice, warm bath. [via E!]

Bonus Buzz: The 5 Stages Of Vacation Grief

Apart from the really important news of the day — the important breaking story about Ke$ha’s new necklace — Rolling Stone also reminded us yesterday that it was 32 years ago this week that U2′s debut EP, U2-3, was released. The three-song 12″ has become something of a Holy Grail for fans — it’s been reissued several times, but the original releases change hand for shitloads of money. All this despite the fact that like most of U2′s pre-Boy material, it’s not really all that good — two of the three songs (“Out of Control” and “Stories for Boys”) contained on U2-3 would end up in markedly superior forms on the band’s debut, while the last (“Boy/Girl”) slowly slipped out of their setlist and into obscurity. Anyway, the fact that it’s the band’s first release got us thinking about other bands who overcame relatively unpromising debuts — not necessarily terrible albums, mind, just comparatively unimpressive — and went on to bigger and better things. Here are 10 of our favorites. (And no, Radiohead’s Pablo Honey isn’t one of them — we really quite like that album.)

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For all that rock ‘n’ roll is full of songs that involve large, hirsute males boasting about their sexual prowess and remarkable ability to metabolize alcohol, rock songs that actually examine what it means to be a man are very few and far between. This, of course, is hardly surprising — men have never been encouraged to express their feelings, and even in our enlightened post-feminist world where everyone is supposed to be in touch with their emotions, there’s still a pretty substantial societal pressure on men to be strong and silent and emotionally inscrutable. Happily, here at Flavorpill, we don’t buy into gender-related bullshit of any description, so here are ten of our favorite songs about masculinity. We’d love to hear yours.

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Remember those side-by-side concerts that we told you that Weezer and the Flaming Lips were doing? Well, the first one took place last night at New Jersey’s PNC Bank Arts Center, and as River Cuomo tweeted, “Rolling in the bubble was a dream come true for me.” Thanks to a tip from Vulture, we’ve got footage of both bands playing “She Don’t Use Jelly,” with Cuomo taking the lead vocals. Click through to watch it now, but be warned: you might find yourself wishing you’d bought tickets to see them play tonight at Jones Beach.

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1. The Flaming Lips and Weezer are planning to play two New York City-area shows together — as in side by side, trading off songs back and forth for the entire length of each concert. We don’t know about you you, but we’d love to see this trend catch on. [via Brooklyn Vegan]

2. The popular 2007 documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is going to be remade as a mockumentary. Director Seth Gordon explains: “I’ve done some work on Modern Family and The Office and have worked in this doc style, and so that inspired me to say, instead of doing a traditional narrative feature script, what if we did the remake in the doc style? What doors would that open? What opportunities? What additional story could we tell? And that’s essentially the approach we took.” [via The Playlist]

3. “Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era much as the great works of the early Modernists did theirs.” – The New York Times looks at the headquarters of China Central Television designed by Rem Koolhaas

4. Is the first teaser poster for The Dark Knight Rises everything that you’d hope it would be? While we know that we’re looking at the destruction of Gotham City, all we can see is a different Christopher Nolan flick — Inception. [via Slashfilm]

5. What do you think of TNT’s first look teaser for its Dallas reboot? We find it interesting that the primetime soap, which is scheduled to premiere next summer, includes several of the actors from the original series, but given how poorly Melrose Place did on The CW, that’s probably not enough to keep it afloat. [via TVLine]

Bonus link: 15 Cartoon And TV Characters Voiced By The Opposite Sex

Despite composing an Academy Award-winning film score, Trent Reznor isn’t done with Hollywood yet — his long-dormant HBO project has finally found its screenwriter. As if the thought of a Reznor-helmed television project isn’t bizarre enough, the long-in-the-works series titled Year Zero will be based on the 2007 Nine Inch Nails album of the same name. Yes, the HBO-developed, Jim Uhls-penned show will take a dystopian concept record as its source material. Now, the news has us thinking about albums we would want to buy the TV rights to. Check out our suggestions after the jump, and leave yours in the comments.

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Today at Flavorpill, we wished that we could move into one of these incredible looking treehouses for grownups. We found out that The Daily had it wrong when they said that Dave Chappelle was plotting a return to TV. We were surprised to hear that Rob McElhenney, who plays Mac on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, will be 50 pounds heavier when the show returns next fall because he thinks it will make his character funnier. We were excited to hear that Blair Underwood will be making his Broadway debut in an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire next spring. We liked the idea of a phone that would automatically turn off when you’re at the movies. We watched Matt & Kim run around the streets of New York City in their new “Block After Block” music video. We weren’t sure who to root for in this faceoff between the old Justin Timberlake and the current Justin Timberlake. We wished that we’d been there in person to see the Flaming Lips and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros play “Do You Realize??” at sunrise in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. And finally, we loved BroBible’s video roundup of the best TV dads through the decades. Cliff Huxtable FTW!