• Bic thought it would be a great marketing coup to come out with a ball point pen “For Her.” (The package says, “Easy Glide: Feel the smoothness.” The Amazon snark-comments begin in 3… 2…
• Sony will sell home TVs with the same ultra-high-def resolution as the top digital cinema projectors. Why, tell me again, are we expected to still go to theaters?
• “Hipster” bashing is officially passé, now that it’s being used to sell Toyotas.
• Just as the political right seems to be collapsing into a black hole of hardcore hate, Fisher Broadcasting decides to bring right-wing talk back to KVI.
• If you really need more anti-Republican ranting (the proverbial fish in the proverbial barrell, shot with the proverbial smoking gun), there’s some here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

chandler o'leary, tacomamakes.com

• A group of artists, including our ol’pal Art Chantry, has collaborated on what looks like something truly lovely—Tacoma landmark playing cards!
• Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard, having moved back to Seattle following end end of his Hollywood marriage, writes for a McSweeney’s-affiliated site about reasons for re-electing Obama. Gibbard’s reason: his sister and her lesbian fiancée.
• A “Russia analyst” warns westerners of getting too fond of the Pussy Riot women and their radical-punk protest agenda: “…these young people are as contemptuous of capitalism as they are of Putinism.” And that’s wrong how?
• Naomi McAuliffe at the UK New Statesman suggests that folks who are aghast at a Republican politician’s “legitimate rape” remarks should also not tolerate Julian Assange’s rape-case denials.
• Newsweek cover-story Obama basher Niall Ferguson is, though the magazine doesn’t state it, a professional Republican operative. And here’s a step-by-step demolition of his rant.
• Phyllis Diller, 1917-2012: The original queen of standup comedy was already past 35 and a mom when she first broke into the business. At the time, there hadn’t been a major solo female comedian (as differentiated from actresses or singers who also told jokes on the side) since the vaudeville days. Diller was all jokes, and all woman, confident and brash even when delivering gags of self-deprecation. What’s not as well known is she was one of the few comedians to buy material from outside gag writers, providing career breaks for countless younger comics.

slate.com

• The images used to sell prog-rock LPs are often more intriguing than the noodle-y music itself.
• Jonah Keri at the ESPN/McSweeney’s site Grantland lists 27 notable things about Felix Hernandez’s perfect game. That’s one item for each out.
• And here are some clips and GIFs of Hernandez’s feat, and a video compiling all his 27 consecutive outs.
• When Metro Transit dumps the downtown “ride free area” next month, ride times and congestion could get significantly longer/worse. That’s in addition to the impact on people of all economic castes getting around in the city’s center.
• Tuition at Washington’s major colleges and universities more than doubled over the past 20 years, while average incomes stayed flat.…
• …while state-government employment dropped by more than 15,000 people this past year.
• Bill Maher says outright that “voter ID laws are racist;” while a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri suggests repealing the Voter Rights Act.
• Unknown artists spent a lot of time creating a big installation piece using stuff found inside an abandoned Detroit church.
• Tony Scott, 1944-2012: The director of Top Gun died from a depression-inspired suicide, just like too many of our real-life troops.

amnesty international via pickadolla.wordpress.com

By now you’ve heard and/or read about the Russian protest/music/performance-art collective Pussy Riot.

About the group’s carefully staged protest at a Russian Orthodox church against Vladmir Putin, the political boss of Russia’s current crony-driven, corrupt regime.

About the regime’s rote reaction against the protest.

About the two-year labor-camp sentences dutifully dished out to three Pussy Riot members; following five months of imprisonment and a farcical show trial tainted by allegations that the women were beaten, denied food, and weren’t allowed witnesses to speak in their defense.

About the protests throughout western Europe and elsewhere in support of the group.

I found it all to be an extremely well thought out piece of real-life theater.

The group’s English language name and song titles were clearly intended to generate a global support network.

Their act was inspired both by 1990s U.S. “riot grrrl” bands and the recent Ukranian activist group Femen (who’ve staged topless protests against “sex tourism” in their country).

The concept was to put human faces (albeit sometimes masked faces) on what had been a year of mass protests, in Moscow and elsewhere, against Russia’s increasingly oppressive and even neo-Stalinist system.

This face is young, dynamic, colorful, defiant, female, and (even when fully dressed and masked) openly sexual.

It was crafted as a deliberate contrast to a regime that willingly depicted itself as old, staid, grim, mechanical, humorless, and, yes, patriarchal. A machine as repressed as it is repressive; appealing to fear and bigotry to maintain support among older citizens nostalgic for the days of Soviet predictability.

Anti-Putin and anti-Putinism protests are not confined to Pussy Riot. Mass marches have been held in major cities for more than a year. Putin’s somber bureaucrats have issued increasingly suppressive laws to stop them.

Russia’s opposition is broad and deep, cutting across ethnic and class as well as gender lines.

Pussy Riot gives this opposition a face and a voice the outside world can see and hear.

craig hill, tacoma news tribune

• A Tacoma News Tribune writer finds a retreating glacier on Mt. Rainier looking, from one angle, like the Nike logo. Snark ensues.
• The new Blue Scholars music video combines Sonics nostalgia with good ol’ Seattle diversity, visually expressed in the form of working-class food joints.
• Shell’s building an oil-containment barge in Bellingham. But the thing’s leaking oil. (This is the kind of “oops!” moment anti-corporate performance artists can’t fake.)
• The University Bridge has to be closed to cars and sprayed with water once an hour when it gets this hot.
• Remember, boats shouldn’t get too close to whales.
• Apple has finally responded to the federal lawsuit claiming it and five of the top six U.S. book publishers conspired to fix e-book prices. Apple alleges Amazon was the real “driving force” behind the suit, not any government concern for the book buying public.
• Heidi Kelly at Crosscut believes “suburban women” will go for Romney/Ryan, or at least the “Generation X” women of the “Seinfeld generation” will, for reasoning I am unable to interpret/comprehend.
• Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. The bands’ members see Ryan as embodying the machine they’re raging against.
• Joshua D. Foster and Ilan Shrira at Psychology Today try to explain why people can be so easily seduced by conspiracy theories, no matter how far fetched those theories can be.
• An Oregon couple is charged with a multi-state murder and crime spree, done with the intention of racially “purifying” America.
• Meanwhile, Juan Cole insists that terrorists are terrorists even when they’re white.
• Mississippi’s scheme to outlaw abortion turns out to be remarkably similar to tactics the state used to use to prevent blacks from voting.
• Lost in the “vinyl revival”: nostalgia for the first mass-market recorded sound medium, the Edison cylinder.
• ESPN’s sports talk show Pardon the Interruption posted this mashup illo of Felix Hernandez’s perfect-game victory dance. (Wild Thing, I think I love you….)

maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

For reasons known only to the Gods, I not only didn’t read David Guterson’s novel Ed King (Oedipus as a Seattle software mogul!) when it came out, I also didn’t notice last November, when it won a British lit magazine’s annual Bad Sex In Fiction award. Don’t be as ignorant as I was—check out an excerpt from the “winning” scene.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• Today’s lesson in what’s horribly wrong with the Romney/Ryan economic plan comes courtesy of Al Franken.
• Matt Hasselbeck doesn’t like the CenturyLink Field visiting-team lockers; says they’re so small they risk violating “man-rules.”
• What happens when allegedly pro-pot people try to start a political campaign against the legalizing-pot initiative ain’t pretty.
• In Illinois, a Bain Capital-controlled company is not only firing its workforce and shipping the equipment to China, but is making the fired workers train their Chinese replacements.
• Consumer scandal of the day: “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10-Year-Old Daughter and Didn’t Care.”
• Folks under the age of 33 are now buying more books than the legends-in-their-own-minds baby boomers. The boomers will almost surely ignore this, and will continue ranting about how everyone younger than themselves is a subhuman idiot.

theatlantic.com

Brown was already 40, and settled down in marriage with the future co-producer of Jaws, when her breakthrough book Sex and the Single Girl came out. It took the Age of the Pill for Brown’s simple message (sex is fun, for both genders, with or without a wedding ring!) to be considered major-publishing-house material.

(Imagine: Women sleeping around, and not only not heading toward certain doom but having good, clean, healthy fun!)

That led to a stint of over 32 years helming Cosmopolitan magazine.

In those pages, behind the cleavaged “Cosmo Girl” cover models, Brown forged a solid formula of libido and materialism mixed in with traditional women’s-mag fashion and self-help fare.

Whole books have been written about the world of Brown’s Cosmo, its influence, and its contradictions (independence/man-pleasing, confidence/size-ism).

I’ll just say it’s hard to imagine the First Avenue bar scene, with its gaggles of high heeled, well heeled young ladies out for FUN, without Brown’s aesthetic and social vision showing the way.

buzzfeed.com

• As we leave the mythical Mount Olympus, let us attempt to forget the particularly bizarre spectacle that is synchronized swimmers’ makeup.
• The first big motif of the Olympic closing ceremony: nostalgia for newspapers.
• By now you’ve heard all the deliciously inappropriate, wrong-for-America economic and social stances of would-be-veep Paul Ryan. And you know that Ryan is a rabid disciple of selfishness goddess Ayn Rand (as are so many right-wing operatives these days). What it all adds up to, according to Markos Moulitsas:

Democrats are campaigning with a swagger, having fun. They know they’ve got the advantage.… We need to embrace reality and shove reality down the GOP’s throats. Because yeah, we are ahead, objectively so. We’re winning and we’ve got to own it. They can whine about biased polls and biased media and biased everything that doesn’t conform to their little Fox News bubble world, all the while we do the work necessary to seal the deal.

• Meanwhile: “Decline of good jobs linked to workers’ decreased bargaining power.”
• Meanwhile, meanwhile: Kudos to Jon Talton for getting the phrase “depredations of the plutocrats” into the Seattle Times.
• Wash. Post pundit Aaron Blake feels GOP deliberate distortions and misquotes of Obama constitute exemplar horse-race style campaiging. Jay Rosen feels, well, differently.
• Harvard’s Steven Strauss explains why the 21st century was supposed to bring us techno-utopia but instead meagerly spits forth gimmicky social-media sites promoted as “revolutions.” In such an environment of “incremental innovations,” Strauss adds, corporate bureaucrats will be more valued than hotshot entrepreneurs.
• Mississippi has a county where school kids who get in even minor trouble are automatically sent to prison.
• A Las Vegas Denny’s is going to feature its own in-house wedding chapel. “With this onion ring….”
• Port of Seattle officials were for (or at least indifferent toward) the Sonics arena scheme before they were against it.
• One of the West Seattle Water Taxi boats caught on fire.
• An ex-UW pediatrics prof is accused of waterboarding his own daughter.
• Google’s making it harder to search for free downloads of copyrighted media. Finally: a market advantage for other search engines.
• Austrian archeologists, rummaging through an ancient castle, found some 15th-century vintage bras. No, they weren’t worn by (insert name of over-40 female celebrity here).
• I disagree with the Sight & Sound magazine poll putting Vertigo atop the greatest films of all time. But I understand why the poll’s “programmers, academics, and distributors” would pick it. Vertigo is eminently open to academic interpretation. It’s full of “meta” themes about identity and illusion; all within the context of a big-budget Hollywood thriller in luscious Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount’s sideways-film process, a precursor to IMAX).

• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.

visual.ly

• According to the “Geek Zodiac,” I belong to the Year of the Astronaut. (I always liked astronauts.)
• Forbes.com freelancer Zach Slaton traces the roots of Seattle’s soccer mania back further than the 1974 NASL Sounders, to British and European immigrants who’d come here starting in the 1950s.
• A southwest Wash. man was recently discovered attempting to pass some particularly “high quality fake money.” Who says Americans have lost their manufacturing edge?
• More than 80 million Facebook accounts are really spambots or other varieties of fake, Facebook management admits.
• The Seattle Times (an old-school advertising medium) disses new-school advertising medium Yelp.com. The paper alleges that the “customer review” site promises to promote positive reviews of shops and eateries that buy ads on the site, and threatens to promote negative reviews of those that don’t buy ads on the site.
• It’s crop circle time again!
• Frank Elaison at Social Media Today would really like Net users to “focus on being positive,” and stop brutally insulting people they’ve never even met.
• The Onion (with which the Stranger has a shared pre-history) has found today’s third rail of bad-taste humor.
• Back in 2005-2006, a locally-owned small town daily in eastern Idaho (an area more heavily Mormon than Utah) ran an exposé of a boy-abuser within the adult leadership of the local Boy Scouts. The local business and governmental leadership quickly jelled their outspoken support—not around the victims or their families, but around the Scout leaders who’d conspired to cover up the crimes for years. It’s news now because one of the conspiracy’s most outspoken defenders, the head of the area’s biggest company, is now on Romney’s fundraising team. And he’s doing to Romney’s critics what he did to the newspaper back then—threaten to sue them into oblivion.

The Seafair Torchlight Parade is more than a relic of “a simpler time,” or an opportunity for Seattle merchants and restaurants to make money from visiting suburbanites and exurbanites.

It’s an opportunity for all of us to get back in touch with the values and aesthetics that helped make this city great.

At a time and place where these values are often scoffed at, Seafair proclaims there’s still plenty to admire in squareness.

Squares gave us the Space Needle. Squares gave us Boeing (and, hence, the “international jet set”). Squares gave us computers and software.

Towns at at least a little removed from the metro core still understand the positive aspects of squareness, and revel in them. I come from one of these.

Remember: Square DOES NOT necessarily equal boring or white. Values of family, tradition, and togetherness cut across all ethnic and subcultural lines.

There are three special things to mention about this year’s parade. The first is the Seafair Clowns’ heartfelt tribute to Chris Wedes/J.P. Patches.

The second thing was something I’d previously noticed last month at the gay parade—spectators using cam-equipped iPads to get a better-than-the-naked eye view of the proceedings.

And finally, what was Grand Marshal (and Fastbacks drummer #2) Duff McKagan doing in a horse and buggy? Wouldn’t a bitchin’ vintage muscle car be more his flavor?

'jseattle' at flickr, via capitohillseattle.com

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted any of these tender tidbits of randomosity. Since then, here’s some of what’s cropped up online and also in the allegedly “real” world:

• There’s still no official hint on what the proposed Sonics Arena might look like. But the wannabe developers of East Pine Street’s “Bauhaus block” have released a drawing of their proposed mixed use development. At least in its idealized-drawing form, it’s not as monstrous looking as some other recent structures in the area.
• In other preservation battles, Seattle’s people again rally around a thing about which the elites don’t give a darn. They’re striving to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
• Meanwhile, a study claims if the viaduct-replacement tunnel charges tolls high enough to pay for it, drivers will clog the surface streets rather than pay those tolls.
• Seattle Opera faces a $1 million shortfall, and will mount fewer new shows in future years. But don’t count ’em out yet, folks. It’s not over until, well, you know.
• The late writer-director Nora Ephron had many major achievements. Sleepless in Seattle, let us all admit, is among the least of them.
• Did you know there was a real hostelry in Fife called the “Norman Bates Motel“? Emphasis on the was.
• America’s cities: they’re back! (Of course, some of us knew this for some time.)
• In a pleasant surprise, one of the Supreme Court’s pro-one-percenter flank betrayed his masters and voted to uphold Obamacare. In response, some members of the Rabid Right’s noise machine claimed the great American Experiment was over and they’d hightail it to Canada (which, uh, has had universal health care in place for some time now).
• If you’re on liberal/progressive websites at all these days, you’ll find a lot of comment threads hijacked by folk who claim to be lefties disgusted by Obama’s centrist tactics, so much that they won’t vote this November, and want you to not vote either. At least some of these comment trolls turn out to be paid employees of right-wing dirty tricks outfits.
• Rupert Murdoch’s splitting his News Corp. into two companies. One will contain his print properties (including HarperCollins Books, The Wall St. Journal, the New York Post, and his besieged London tabloid operation), plus the iPad “newspaper” The Daily. The other will hold his “entertainment” properties. Yes, Fox “News” goes with the entertainment half.
• Paul Krugman tells the PBS NewsHour all about his “cartoon physics” theory of the American economy.
• Google’s putting out a tablet device with a 7-inch color screen, just like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the exciting part of this Wall St. Journal link is at the bottom, where they mention another forthcoming Google hardware product. It’s a streaming-media player that attaches to TV sets, and it’ll be made in the USA!
• Ann Althouse looks at a famous parody of trashy sex novels, and asks rhetorically if those who make and read such parodies are really bashing the potboilers’ readers (i.e., women).
• Nordstrom’s opening a branch in New York City. Make way for NYC media outlets to describe it as a brand new startup.
• Headline: “The media covers Kardashians, not climate change.” Comment: The media covers the-media-not-covering-climate-change more than it covers climate change.

udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

• Brendan Kiley tries to parse out what exactly we should call the busters up of stuff on May Day. How about “testosteronic dorks”?
• Joel Connelly, meanwhile, calls the window-breakers “the worst enemies of worthy change.”
• Seattle Times business writer Jon Talton proclaims that “what we have witnessed in recent years in America is not capitalism,” but rather destructive cronyism.
• Ex-Microsoftie turned political activist Jeff Reifman has launched an initiative campaign called I-103. It would establish a “community bill of rights” and a set of workers’ rights, take a symbolic stand against “corporate personhood,” and restrict corporate campaign contributions for city elections. We’ll see how far it gets in a town that likes to be “progressive” only as long as business interests don’t feel threatened.
• Could Microsoft’s investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division finally give MS a toehold in the tablet market?
• The thing about Amazon Kindle e-book readers is that people really need to see them in person in order to understand/appreciate/want them. That’s the one thing Amazon’s not built to provide. So it sells Kindles through chain stores. Only these chains are getting tired of folks looking at stuff in their stores then going to buy it online. One of ’em, Target, will stop selling Kindles in retaliation.
• There’s a new intercity bus line in town. BoltBus will take you straight to Portland in 3.25 hours. Buses leave four times a day from 5th Avenue South near the transit tunnel station. Fares are $27 but with discounts for early reservations and low-demand runs. It’s not really a competitor to Greyhound, because the latter is operating the route under contract.
• Another female teacher, another teenage male student, another sex scandal. This is getting beyond the cliché stage.
• In today’s China, HuffPost blogger Tom Doctoroff writes, many forms of non-marital sex are still illegal; but more and more people engage in them anyway, often openly. Doctoroff says this illustrates China’s current vacillation between “prudence and prurience,” between “‘comfortable’ domesticity and extra-curricular indulgence.” What Doctoroff doesn’t mention: sexual behavior is like that everywhere, in all eras.
• A creative-writing prof claims he’s isolated the 12 winning ingredients of successful bestselling novels. Only thing is, those same ingredients also appear in a lot of works that don’t sell.