Bradley Cooper is The Crow Now

“Does this Crow person enjoy polo? Because I like polo.”

After Brandon Lee died filming the original Crow, every single sequel sucked to the point that the last one went straight to video and somehow starred Edward Furlong. So naturally Hollywood wants to remake the first one to capture all that magic money and are already off to a tremendous start by casting Bradley Cooper in the iconic role of Eric Draven because apparently finding Brandon and his dad’s graves and pissing on them was too far of a walk. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

In the adaptation of the gritty black-and-white indie comic by artist James O’Barr, Cooper will play a rock musician who is murdered while trying to save his fiancée from thugs. He is resurrected by supernatural forces and seeks revenge. The role was originally played by Brandon Lee, who was killed by a freak accident during production in 1993.
Relativity is flying fast with Crow, with Fresnadillo only officially boarding the project a week ago. The Spanish director of 28 Weeks Later is said to have met with Cooper in Spain recently, where the two hit it off and shared a vision for the character and the film. Relativity would not confirm the talks but sources say Cooper, currently in theaters in Relativity’s hit thriller Limitless, is keen to board the project.

STUDIO EXEC #1: Going down the list of recognizable brands to quickly flip into movies, and apparently it’s time to remake The Crow.
STUDIO EXEC #2: Wow. Okay. But who could possibly play the Brandon Lee part?
STUDIO EXEC #1: Hmm… What about Bradley Cooper?
STUDIO EXEC #2: Why him?
STUDIO EXEC #1: Their names both start with “Bra?”
STUDIO EXEC #2: Works for me. GREEN LIGHT.

Photos: Getty

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Catherine Zeta-Jones is Bipolar! Of Course.

In a shocking twist to the Michael Douglas beating cancer story, Catherine Zeta-Jones reportedly checked herself into a mental institution to deal with a bipolar disorder that no one knew she had until now. ABC News reports:

“After dealing with the stress of the past year, Catherine made the decision to check in to a mental health facility for a brief stay to treat her Bipolar II Disorder,” her publicist said in a statement. “She’s feeling great and looking forward to starting work this week this week on her two upcoming films.”

Of course, the obvious and tasteless joke is to insinuate that’s why she’s with a man a quarter of a century older than her, so I’m just going to stop right there because I don’t know how else you interpret this. They might as well have put it in the press release.

Photos: Getty, INFdaily

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General Grievous Electronic Helmet [First Look]

Hasbro sent us one of their customary new product image dumps over the weekend, and after a bit of digging we discovered one particularly interesting product—the General Grievous electronic helmet.
No details have been released thus far, but it seems as though you’ll be looking and talking like Grievous in no time. Check out the packaging shot after the break.

Tagged as: first look, general grievous, helmet, star wars
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Natalie Portman Quit Being a Vegan

By the way this news has been breathlessly reported over the past hour you’d just assume the Earth has spun off its axis, or worse, Charlie Sheen came up with a new catchphrase. Anyway, Natalie Portman has apparently given up being a vegan while pregnant, but only to become just a regular old vegetarian, so naturally the drama is palpable. Us Magazine reports:

“I actually went back to being vegetarian when I became pregnant, just because I felt like I wanted that stuff,” she said during a Monday phone interview with the Q100 Bert Show in Atlanta. “I was listening to my body to have eggs and dairy and that sort of stuff.”
“I know there are people who do stay vegan,” she added, “but I think you have to just be careful, watch your iron levels and your B12 levels and supplement those if there are things you might be low in in your diet.”
The Oscar-winning actress — who became a vegan in 2009 after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals — doesn’t regret her decision to become a vegetarian again.
“If you’re not eating eggs, then you can’t have cookies or cake from regular bakeries, which can become a problem when that’s all you want to eat,” she laughed. “I actually wanted eggs at the beginning and then they grossed me out after awhile.”

So basically Natalie Portman has gone from one pretentious lifestyle to a slightly less pretentious one. My, God, she’s practically Hitler. An ironically Jewish Hitler, but Hitler nonetheless. Now, quickly, hide Anne Frank in the attic with the eggs. Herr Führer wants macaroons!
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Keen On… George Friedman: Did the Secret Police Invent Twitter? + Book Giveaway

Why does the American media love Twitter and Facebook so much? According to George Friedman, the author of the New York Times bestselling The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been…and Where We’re Going, it’s because these social media networks reflect American values. When the world uses Twitter and Facebook, Friedman explains, it simply confirms to the American media that everyone “wants to be just like us.”
But, for Friedman, the truth about Facebook and Twitter is much more complex than the way in which the fawning western media portrays it. Twitter is a wonderful tool for secret police to find revolutionaries, he explains. The truth about Facebook in Egypt is that it was a pawn in an undemocratic army plot to get rid of Mubarak. While in Iran, he says, the fact that the vast majority of tweets about Iranian politics are in English reflects the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of Iranians don’t use Twitter.
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Sasquatch snowboarding

Sasquatch snowboarding
From UndeadMonsters, your online purveyors of fine "ultra-realistic" Sasquatch costumes. Something about that sentence just makes me giggle a lot.
Thanks to Madalene Fetsch!
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Windows App Store? I Swear I’ve Seen This Before…

With a tide rapidly shifting towards mobile and tablet devices, it should be no surprise that work is well already underway on Windows 8. An early build circulating apparently hints at a more unified OS to combat what Apple is doing with OS X/iOS and what HP is doing with Palm webOS. And some screenshots are starting to leak out. And a few appear to include, what else, an app store.
WinRumors posted the shots this morning while noting that they’re unverified. But actually, the shots in English were previously out there, what’s new are the ones in Chinese that Cnbeta found that seem to verify the design. And what a design it is — I swear this looks familiar…
Last year, we ripped Google for ripping off the design of Apple’s App Store for their Chrome Web Store. This actually might be worse. It looks almost as if Microsoft is ripping off Google ripping off Apple. Again, allegedly — the shots aren’t confirmed.
Let’s hope Microsoft isn’t actually doing such a lame copy job with their actual store. Rushing to release a store baked into the OS months after a competitor is bad enough. At least nail the design or bring something new to the table.
Stop me when these look familiar.
Windows App Store:

Mac App Store:

iOS App Store:

Chrome Web Store:

Android Market:

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Streaming or Buying Books: Will Readers Choose a Subscription Model for E-Books?

When Amazon launched its new Cloud Drive a few weeks ago, it prompted a debate in the ReadWriteWeb editorial room about whether or not the future of music involved downloads and ownership - as supported by Amazon's cloud stage - or streaming and subscription - as provided by any number of music startups, like Rdio and Spotify. The ReadWriteWeb writers kept our discussion focused on music, but the debate could easily extend to any number of digital media now in Amazon's catalogue: movies, magazines, books.
We're familiar with these streaming and subscription services when it comes to music and movies (Netflix, Hulu for example). But books? Will we (can we) rent books?
Lit Subscriptions and Banner-Ad Books?
A Spanish startup called 24symbols is launching this summer with the promise to do just that: provide a subscription service and become the "Spotify for e-books." (Much like Spotify, 24symbols won't be available at launch in the U.S.)
24symbols will offer an ad-supported and a subscription-based access to e-books, the latter running about 10€ per month. The books are all DRM-free, but 24symbols is entirely cloud-based. In other words, books are streamed, not downloaded for reading.
While we can probably wrap our reads around a Netflix or Spotify for e-books, that bit about ads in our literature might be anethema to many. I mean, how dare they! I poked around on the 24symbols website, but I don't see examples of how those ads will appear. Flashing banners in the margins just won't do, and it will be interesting to see how 24symbols - now in beta - will actually look.

What's on the 24symbols Bookshelf?
As Bookspring notes in its review of the new service, one of the most interesting things about 24symbols isn't simply that it's offering books by subscription. It's how it's splitting the revenue. On some levels, it's actually adopting the funding model that fuels much of the Internet: pageviews: "The company says it will create a standard page measurement as a specific number of words, and apply that to all texts equally when splitting up ad and subscription revenue."
As the reading is all done online, 24symbols will have some fascinating data about readership -- like, at what point in a novel do people just chuck it aside. It's not clear that all of that information will be shared with authors and publishers, but data about page views will serve in part to determine revenue share.
Will this ad-supported, pageview oriented model help keep content farms out of e-books? After all, it would be difficult to make much money with your spammy, scammy e-books if people don't get past the opening paragraph.
The content farms may steer clear of 24symbols, then, but will book publishers join? That may be the thing to watch, for as GigaOm's Michael Wolf suggests, publishers may be better served by a Hulu for e-books, where they set the terms of the publications.
Book Buyer or Book Subscriber? What About Loans? (What About Libraries?)
E-book subscriptions may sound like a new and exciting model for readers, authors, and the publishing industry. But there's already an "all-you-can-eat" model for books: libraries. That library card gets you access to all the books you want, for free.
Libraries are already finding themselves at odds with some publishers when it comes to e-books - not notably HarperCollins with its 26 checkout limit. If a new model for the publishing industry becomes a subscription-based one, how will library loans fit in?
It will be interesting to watch the launch of 24symbols this summer and to see which publishers and authors play along and how many customers are interested. As my ReadWriteWeb colleagues and I debated with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive - we may be moving away from the idea of "owning" our digital content. Will e-books be the next content that we subscribe to and stream?



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Steve Jobs Official Biography Arrives in Early 2012

It’s official: the first official biography of Steve Jobs will be making its debut sometime in early 2012.
The book, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, is being penned by Walter Isaacson, famed biographer and the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time. While very little is known about the contents of the book, Isaacson did manage to obtain unprecedented access to Apple, Steve Jobs and even Jobs’ family. Simon & Schuster will publish and distribute the book.
This will be Isaacson’s fourth biography, following Kissinger: A Biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world’s greatest innovators. Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius,” Simon & Schuster Publisher Jonathan Karp said in a statement.
Apple’s CEO is famously secretive about his personal life. Some of the details of his past have been unraveled in unauthorized biographies such as iCon: Steve Jobs and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, but none of them paint a complete picture. Isaacson’s book should hopefully provide some concrete answers to unresolved questions about Jobs’s life, along with some new insights into how Jobs runs the world’s most valuable technology company.

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No One Needs Permission to Be Awesome

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there.
And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be. Because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.
[…]
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

None of us should ever have to face death to accept the inflexible and, too-often, novel sense of scarcity that it introduces.
In fact, it'd be great if we could each skip needing outside permission to be awesome by not waiting until the universe starts tapping its watch.
A simple start would involve each of us learning to care just a little more about a handful of things that simply aren't allowed to leave with us--whether today, tomorrow, or whenever. Because, I really believe a lot of nice things would start to happen if we also stopped waiting to care. A whole lot of nice things.
If that sounds like fancy incense for hippies and children, perhaps in a way that seems frankly un-doable for someone as practical and important and immortal as yourself, then go face death.
Go get cancer. Or, go get crushed by a horse Or, go get hit by a van. Or, go get separated from everything you ever loved forever.
Then, wonder no longer whether caring about the modest bit of time you have here is only for fancy people and the terminally-ill.
Because, the sooner you care, the better you'll make. The better you'll do. And the better you'll live.
Please don't wait. The universe won't.
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Turn your home into a billboard in exchange for your mortgage payment?

Turn your home into a billboard in exchange for your mortgage payment?David Pescovitz at 3:32 PM Friday, Apr 8, 2011 

 Imaginary Foundation's Nick Philip just IM'd me: "Would you turn your house into a billboard to be free of mortgage payments for a year?" He's referring to the marketing gimmick/PR stunt of Ad firm Adzookie, who are looking to pay people's mortgages in exchange for turning their homes into giant advertisements for the company. (Mock-up seen here.) They haven't painted a single home yet, but the campaign seems to be working anyway. (Ahem.) According to CNN, the company only has $100,000 budgeted for the whole thing, so I'd imagine chances of getting chosen are slim. Anyway, to answer Nick's question... No. I would not. "Turn your house into a billboard, get free mortgage"
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Toronto's Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West

Toronto's Silver Snail to leave Queen Street WestCory Doctorow at 7:25 AM Sunday, Apr 10, 2011 
The Silver Snail, Toronto's iconic Queen Street West comic shop, has sold up and is moving to new digs. The owner is selling to the wonderful George Zotti, who's been manager there for for years and years. The Snail was practically the last shop left on that stretch of Queen Street from its glory days, before it became, essentially, a megabrand mall selling the same junk you could buy at the Eaton Centre. Things are still interesting as you push further west on Queen Street, but the whole road is fast turning into a blighted corporate wasteland -- a kind of extended strip mall.
No word yet on where the Silver Snail is moving to, but I'm betting they end up in the Annex, nearby the great new digs that Bakka Books (the old science fiction bookstore that used to be situated across from the Snail) has ended up in on Harbord Street.

 The vibrant, cavernous store will remain on Queen St. W. until at least February 2012. But it will move to a new neighbourhood, says Zotti.
"Queen Street is not the book-friendly place it used to be," he says. "If you want shoes or $300 jeans, it's a good place to go. It's lost that browsing, literary feel it used to have."
The store is legendary for hosting indie artists as well as comic book royalty -- including Simpsons creator Matt Groening and Sandman writer Neil Gaiman -- at store events. With its proximity to Much Music, it's also had drop-ins from a litany of celebrities with comic fetishes, including KISS's Gene Simmons, actor Robin Williams, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Burton Cummings of the Guess Who.
"We've opened the store early so Harrison Ford and his kids could shop," says Zotti, who has worked at the store on and off since he was 15. "Mark Hamill came in when I was 18."
Then there was the Friday afternoon Bob Dylan strolled in.

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StumbleUpon Hits 1 Billion Stumbles Per Month

StumbleUpon is hot. The discovery and recommendation engine that makes web browsing a lot like channel surfing just announced it’s now handling 1 billion stumbles per month.
On top of that impressive number, StumbleUpon just closed a second round of funding in March, wrapping up $17 million of series B financing.
That 1 million stumbles-per-month statistic represents explosive growth, especially when you consider that since just a month ago, that number has grown by 200 million, judging from the fact that StumbleUpon publicized 800 million stumbles just last month, according to Business Insider.
Why is StumbleUpon growing so fast? In my opinion, because it’s fun. Moments of serendipity run rampant as you click the Stumble button to go to the next selected site, and every site you see is picked because of the detailed preferences you indicate in your profile. It gets even smarter about your preferences as you vote for sites by clicking either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. And, because I’ve been using the service for the past six years, it’s gotten to know my preferences quite well, and its ability to predict what sites I’ll like has become positively uncanny.
In addition, it’s hard to tell you’re being advertised to, because StumbleUpon uses your same preferences to determine which paid sites to show you. I think any business model that can figure out how to advertise to people without them being aware of it has a great chance of survival.
How about you, readers? Tell us about your experiences with StumbleUpon.

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Charlie Sheen Wants Mila Kunis Now

Apparently Charlie Sheen watched Black Swan recently because now he can’t shut up about making Mila Kunis one of his goddesses. Also, cocaine makes you a delusional egomaniac. Probably should point that out, too. RadarOnline reports:

“Here’s the good news – my goddesses have already f**king approved her. She’s pre-approved!” Sheen said. “I would have great tolerance for many missing items provided it involves Mila f**king Kunis: If Mila Kunis is stealing your s**t , trust me, you’re still f**king winning, you’re still winning at that moment.
“I’m going to go on her Facebook page and discover her likes… I’m going to buy them all and then she can come steal them. A super f**king hot thief named Mila Kunis. Mila, please, we we have a warehouse full of your favorite s**t to steal.”

It really says a lot about Charlie’s relationship with his goddesses that his first reaction to bringing Mila onboard is he won’t care if she steals his shit. Clearly these chicks are robbing him blind and there’s nothing he can do about it because how else is he going to get laid? Go on dates? AHAHAHAHA! You can’t pull a knife at Olive Garden. He’s tried.
Photos: Getty, Splash News
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So Who Wants to See Chris Noth’s Balls?

One of these men is about to flash his testicles. Which will it- Oh, right, the headline.
Being a world-renowned journalist, I get lots of e-mails, comments, stripper-grams, tweets, etc. from female readers saying I don’t post enough eye candy for the ladies. So to remedy that, here’s Mr. Big himself Chris Noth flashing his fruit basket at a charity event in New York last night. Of course, like any time I try to please a woman, you’ll probably say, “My vagina’s not in my butt This isn’t what I had in mind,” but just yesterday you wanted to repaint the kitchen, so I think we can all agree you’re hysterical. Probably from filling that pretty little head of yours with thinking and the like, you poor thing. *puts fingers to your lips* Shhh… There, there. There, there….
Photos: INFdaily
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LeAnn Rimes: ‘If I’m So Skinny, How Can I Fit in this Bikini? BOOM.’

LeAnn Rimes has been under increased criticism over her weight with fans concerned that she’s not eating. So to shut them all up she tweeted a photo of herself in a bikini from the navel down to prove… I have no fucking clue. On top of that, the woman apparently writes 5,000 tweets/second so for all we know she just has a coke problem, but here she is babbling about how much she loves Girl Scout cookies and pizza. Via Huffington Post:

“LOVE Thin Mint Cookies! I never know where to buy GS Cookies, so I’m always elated when someone I know has them! Love Thin Mints frozen!”
@KarlaHoffman @lindseyg696 you don’t know me, you have NO idea what I weigh or eat, so why should you have any opinion about my weight?
@KarlaHoffman @lindseyg696 I own that I am healthy and take dang goof care of my body, that’s what I own.
@KarlaHoffman last time we ordered pizza for the boys at our house you were there and I didn’t pass it up. You’ve witnessed it!

Yeah, Karla, you watched me eat that slice of pizza. I took at least two, maybe three, nibbles, God, I felt like such a fatty. But you witnessed it! You fucking witnessed it! I could make you testify in court of law, you know, but I won’t ’cause we’re besties. *rubs nose* Alright, now who wants to hear my life story in 140 character bursts? I’ve got 15 minutes to spare. *type type type type type* Me me me me me me me. SCREEEEEEEECHHHHHH!!
Photos: Bauer-Griffin, Flynet, Splash News
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JWoww Wants to Have a Baby

One of the few, if not only defense for Jersey Shore was always, “Hey, at least they’re not squirting out babies like those kids on Teen Mom.” Granted, they’re spreading disease and pestilence to an entire seaboard, but at the end of the day they weren’t violently reproducing. Until now. Life & Style reports:

Hopefully I’ll be able to settle down and have kids within the next couple of years — maybe even the beginning of next year,” she tells Life & Style exclusively. “I don’t see myself going to the Shore in the next five years or so. I don’t want to jinx it — I haven’t really talked about it — but it would be nice.”

Just to put things in perspective, JWoww is going to bring a child into the world and then essentially force it to suckle on the equivalent of a beach ball yanked out of a Fukushima reactor while at the same time Republicans want to shutdown the government because they think there are too many abortions. I mean, what the- Have we entered some sort of alternate, parallel dimension? If I step outside will a talking dog tell me I need to find the Star Child? WHAT IS THIS STRANGE LAND?!
Photos: INFdaily, Splash News
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Web Studio Wants To Hire Nude Female Programmers

A web studio in Buckinghamshire, England, put out advertisements to recruit female web coders who want to work in the nude.

The aptly-named Nude House, where staff work naked in a “warm and private” naturist environment is also seeking to hire naked male and female sales staff.
Speaking to tech website The Register, company spokesperson Chris Taylor said: “As far as I am aware this is not only the first UK office job for naturists in web-coding or web-selling, but is also the first worldwide facility for naturists to earn substantial sums of money from work that incidentally provides them with the capability to work entirely without clothes.
“Because it is the first establishment in the world it is difficult to advertise – many seem to confuse the issue of being without clothes as being a place without concerns for personal freedom, where sex is paramount in its many varied forms.
“Sex does not play a part in naturism – yes one is aware of differences in sex and size and shape and age of everyone, but the concern is on sales and technical ability, not availability.”
The company requires its workers to work fully in the nude from the time they arrive at the office until they leave to go home.
Source: Orange
Tags: girls nude programming web
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