Here’s info on the annual celebration of putting the needle in the groove. It’s increasingly a lost art, but still, no one’s going to ever feel as fondly about the cassette tape or the CD, are they?
The Guardian is one of our favorite publications — we look to their take on Coachella, in part, because British bands of yore Blur and the Stone Roses are the Day 1 headliners (above Yeah Yeah Yeahs, even), and because it’s also very hilarious. Best line’s a toss-up between the Twitter assessment of Blur from an attendee (“Crowd loved Song 2. American fella behind me said ‘these guys are gonna be big!'”), and the opening salvo, “You don’t need an artfully retro Instagram filter to make Coachella look like the capital of Planet Hipster.” (Well, for these two weekends, at least.)
Here, with track-by-track commentary in between songs, is the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album Mosquito in its entirety.
(Swoon.)
It’s April Fools’ Day — a day that the Internets is rapidly transforming from a day of “Kick Me” signs and “Is your refrigerator running?” prank calls to a day of sophisticated, multi-media offerings, where the likes of Google, NPR, and Twitter have at the ha-ha. TechCrunch has thoughtfully put up a page (being updated throughout the day) with all the jokes surfacing throughout the day. (And yes, Google has “introduced” smellable Internet today, in case you were wondering.)
So, half-watching the NBA All-Star Game last night, waiting for the game to get interesting, and halftime rolls around. Alicia Keys is doing the halftime show, which seems sort of expected and non-spectacular. Plus, the NBA trying to do something spectacular in an arena is just doomed to fall short when doing it when compared to the Super Bowl halftime show, especially now that Beyonce dismantled the entire State of Louisiana’s power grid with her “Single Ladies” dance routine.
But there was something about Alicia Keys’ performance we noticed, and not in a good way — her voice seemed to be leaving her in spots, and the dance routine looked less than inspired, and the song selection seemed a little off. Disaster in the making? Well, observers like Idolator seemed to think so, though some defenders used the “She’s obviously sick; it’s hard to run around in all climates and promote yourself” line of justification. Career-ending? Probably not. But career-hiccuping? Most certainly.
What do you mean, a retiring, controversial-yet-beloved NFL player doesn’t want to talk about new allegations about using performance-enhancing drugs or old allegations about his role in a double murder? Really, Yahoo! Sports? (Related: Jim Harbaugh wears a Sharpie as a necklace? Tell me more!)
So, OKCupid, which is probably the least creepy of the online dating sites, created a new site called Crazy Blind Date, which allows you to set up random dates with random people — even more so than the regular OKCupid site. How it works — you register, it “scrambles” your photo unconvincingly, you pick locations, dates and times where you’re willing to meet, and then the magic will or won’t happen.
Venture Beat’s Christina Farr tried it out and documented it for the site — the highlight might be telling prospective first-daters to “step their game up” and suggest something better than Dunkin’ Donuts for a first date. She also mentions that all the user photos for OKCupid went dark for a day to promote the new venture — we do know, possibly from empirical evidence, that one photo ended up being LeVar Burton as Tuvok from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (We might have contacted that user just to let her know that was happening.)
Coming as a total relief/somewhat of a bummer, Kim Kardashian has announced, per Jezebel, that the Fruit of Kimye’s Joint Loins will not be entering the world with cameras in his or her face. You would totally expect the birth to be filmed by E! cameras, but apparently, there are some very few things that should be kept private in the world of Kim and Kanye. (Though one of them is going to tweet the birth as it happens. That seems a given.)
Pop Culture Diary 