PC Magazine's Digital Edition and "street" prices

As I understand it, one purported advantage for publishers in "going digital" (besides the whole cost-of-dead-trees thing) is that the content can stay fresh. Links updated, minor corrections made, stuff like that.

It appears the folks who work up the product guides for PC Magazine haven't quite adapted to this online thing just yet. Unless "$500 street" is the going rate for a stolen one, in which case you'd be more likely to see it on Craigslist these days.

Coolest Kodak ad ever.

Or it would be, if Kodak had made it...

The Olympus Pen was a popular, small rangefinder camera back in the 60s, when the other photographic choices were "complicated and expensive" and "plastic and cheap". Nice gear, but I don't recall them ever attaining the level of cultural status this ad retroactively conveys upon them.

The ad campaign is for the new Olympus Pen Digital. At $900 and up, those memories are going to be pretty damn precious, indeed.

Some hotties just can't catch a break in life. Just ask Erin Andrews.

How to enhance fame as a world-class babe without pulling a Paris:

1. Be famously hot ESPN "sideline reporter" Erin Andrews.
2. Do your hair while naked in your hotel room. (Apparently this is not an uncommon phenomenon, although I suspect the likelihood of nude self-coiffeuring is directly proportional to how hot you are. Or how hot the hotel room is. I personally have never done this, as far as you know.)
3. Take your time preening and admiring your very healthy female body in the hotel room mirror, to allow plenty of time for some cretin outside your door to capture a video through the peephole.
4. When the resulting grainy and distorted video is released on the internets, announce through your employer's attorney that you will prosecute anyone posting this NAKED VIDEO OF YOU IN A HOTEL ROOM, even though there was no way to know for certain it was actually you in said video without your confirmation.

Watch your popularity -- as measured by Google Trends -- go through the roof...

Whoever did this is a scumbag of the lowest order. And Miss Andrews has every right to take any action she feels is necessary to find and prosecute whoever was responsible

But something about this feels a little ..off.

I've spent the last couple of hours searching the web -- no, not for the video (I'm willing to stipulate that she has a smokin' hot bod, that they may be fake but who cares, and she probably keeps the lawn well trimmed; I don't need video confirmation), but for any historic evidence that there was any level of net chatter about an "Erin Andrews video", or any words to that effect, that would have justified the nuclear option.

"Erin and the Curling Iron" was apparently first uploaded to a French video site called Dailymotion sometime in March, where it languished, barely noticed, until last Friday. Deadspin has detail on this along with a screen cap of the listing for the posted video, clevery titled "Hot Blonde (view in original format)" and labeled "Sexy and Hot Blonde shows us her all!". The original file, along with the uploader account, is long gone, but..

Once it's online, it's forever, right? Surely there had to have been some buzz.. something on the blogs.. at TMZ... right?

Nothing.

I found various salivating encomiums.. references to her fashion-forward appearance at the ESPY awards, being hit in the face with a baseball at a Dodger game, and.. her apparent proclivity towards use of the legal process to discourage rumors (over the winter, a rumor -- by all accounts absolutely false -- was planted regarding a sex tape starring Andrews and alleged Mets superstar David Wright).

But references to the video? Nothing.. until the ESPN legal press release.

Although web sites now abound that will direct the cluetards seeking this video online to virus farms, and nobody deserves to have their system infected more, the original file will live on forever as a torrent. It's available, in virus-free unedited glory, on sites like the infamous Pirate Bay, where it was posted on July 18 (as of tonight, the 20th, there were several thousand active seeders on the torrent).

There's no legal process in the world that can "remove the file from the Internet".

Andrews, with a degree in telecommunications from Florida, is probably smart enough to know this. ESPN is damn well smart enough to know how this publicity thing works. The best way to ensure something will be widely disseminated is to announce you want to suppress it. They might as well have put a crawl on the bottom of the ESPN national feed: "ERIN ANDREWS NAKED VIDEO!!! ONLINE NOW!!! AUTHENTICITY GUARANTEED!!!"

If she'd just ignored it, chances are the video would have lived forever as "Hot Blonde (original format)". Maybe some pimpled losers would send out a tweet now and then -- "Look here, is this Erin Andrews?"

But.. think of it. The perfect oppo for buzz. It's not a sex tape. She was completely innocent. Just fixing her hair! How awful of those bad people to do this! It's only right to clear her name!

I'm just cynical enough to believe that Andrews and her handlers calculated this out and decided there was a bigger payoff to coming out against the video, thus guaranteeing its longevity and association. No scandal, so no notoriety, no risk of catcalls from the sideline drunks -- well, no more than usual -- and no possibility that she'll become unemployed. (As if.)

(As usual, EDSBS has the best speculative take: A coworker was responsible.)

It's not easy to not write good

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

-- the winning entry by author David McKenzie, of Federal Way, Washington, in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where multitudes annually submit wretched opening paragraphs to imaginary works of fiction. Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton is memorialized in this contest for apparently being the first to open a story with the timeless "It was a dark and stormy night.."