EVANGELINE LILLY PHONE SEX AD: Fifteen clips of Lost stars, before the Island.

Related: surprising voiceover work by 2010 Grammy nominees.

PERHAPS NOW WE'LL FINALLY GET THE ZANY ANIMATED 3-D ADAPTATION OF CATCHER IN THE RYE WITH SHIA LABEOUF VOICING HOLDEN CAULFIELD: J.D. Salinger is dead at the age of 91. A friend of mine on Facebook may have said it best: "Let's hope there are no phonies in heaven."

"I JUST HAPPENED TO PLAY IN AN ARENA WHERE THERE WERE BIGGER CHIPS": Does this blog believe in bringing Lenny Dykstra down, and then repeatedly kicking the frequent ALOTT5MA bête noire once he gets there? Yes, when there's still more bad news. Excerpt below the fold:

"IT'S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN PUT ON A STICK. IT TASTES THAT MUCH BETTER, I THINK": The Minnesota Twins' new (outdoor) baseball park will be serving pork chops on a stick, fried walleye on a stick and cheese curds among its food concessions, as well as a cheese-on-the-inside burger which carries an unfortunate local appellation which I hope is not visited upon my daughter.

SHE WENT INTO THE LIGHT: Zelda Rubinstein, best known as the pint-sized ghost buster in 1982's Poltergeist, has transitioned over to a different sphere of consciousness at the age of 76, which incredibly means she around my age when the film was made (as a teen I would have guessed she was no younger than 100). Rubinstein, who also memorably played the church organist in Sixteen Candles, will presumably be buried in a cemetery and not in an sacred Indian burial ground beneath a suburban Southern California swimming pool.

And in case you missed it while you anxiously toggled between Gizmodo and EndGadget for iPad rumors, Trapper John left the Bonanza Ranch earlier this week.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT ACTUALLY BEING SMART WAS INCOMPATIBLE WITH KNOWING YOUR IQ: At the risk of drawing criticism for the laziness inherent in posting fluffy lists two days in a row, here's a ranking of the paid talent on last night's American Idol, from least stupid to most appallingly stupid:

6. Simon Cowell
5. Ryan Seacrest
[extremely large gap]
4. Randy Jackson
[gap]
2. Kara DioGuardi [tie]
2. Katy Perry [tie]
[large gap]
1. Avril Lavigne

Can we agree that the guest judge thing just isn't adding anything?

IF A TREE IS FELLED IN THE WOODS TO MAKE A BOOK THAT NOBODY READS: A few questions and observations I had after reading the iPad comments, which moved quickly from the tablet itself to a discussion of e-books (or ebooks, see below) and the future of that industry:

1. Should it be e-books or ebooks? I know that the dictionaries have adopted email, but ebooks looks weird to me. I need a ruling from the style manual.
2. Multimedia content seems incompatible with paper-screen and the cheaper processors that I assume Kindle uses. If iBook becomes a real competitor to Amazon, we're looking at VHS vs. Beta or Blu-ray vs. whatever the other standard was called, I've forgotten already.
3. There is a wide range of what people make available as add-on content for DVDs, but most of it seems either low-cost (commentary tracks, maybe a cheap "making of") or sunk-cost (deleted scenes, bloopers, audition footage, storyboarding). The multimedia content you would have to add to a book seems both high-cost and outside what you ordinarily expect would be within a traditional publisher's competence. It seems like a very risky move to try to add that content just to move an e[-]book from a $10 price point to a $20 price point.
4. What is the unit manufacturing cost and shipping cost of a book, anyway? I always assumed that the available unit profit margin from an electronic book (i.e., price) is greater than the available profit from a physical book (price minus manufacturing, distribution, and remaindering), leaving aside the issue of how profits are divided up between the publishers and retailers.
5. Which leads me to this observation: as long as most consumers buy and read physical books, the threat of e[-]book piracy is relatively minor. If the publishing industry were to move to principally electronic distribution, wouldn't we expect the same seismic changes we've seen in the music industry? Huge loss of revenue to piracy, meaning that content costs have to be spread over fewer units, creating pressure to pay most authors [even] less and to cut costs [even] more? Lowered barriers to entry leading to market-share loss by traditional giants, counterbalanced by rise of smaller independent publishers and some successful self-publishers, which translates into publishers losing power to critics as the principal mediator between artist and audience?
6. And will (not would) that be a good thing or a bad thing? Do you prefer the current music industry model or the old one?
7. Incidentally, in an e[-]book world, what happens to children's publishing?