Today at Flavorpill, we stood by powerless as Lady Gaga decapitated our respective childhoods with her My Little Pony heads necklace. We followed along as Slate’s Chris Wilson attempted to solve the real mystery lurking in the chapel where Dan Brown set The Da Vinci Code. We discovered what typography has to do with cross-cultural understanding and linguistic minimalism. We met the very funny Al Madrigal, The Daily Show’s newest contributor, and some of the composers behind our all-time favorite TV theme songs. We decided that we find the locations and set design for X-Men: First Class way more exciting than the promos for the film itself — Emma Frost is so lucky! We liked these alternative posters for The Royal Tenenbaums. We read a short history of lady pirates. We enjoyed Cracked’s roundup of the five craziest buildings ever proposed with a straight face. And finally we were shocked on a few different levels to hear that Mel Gibson got a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes for his performance in The Beaver. Aren’t you?

1. According to Ian Ziering (aka Steve Sanders), your 90210 Day could have been epic. He was trying to put together a reunion show, but allegedly The CW dropped the ball. [via Movieline]
2. Facebook is testing a “Stalker Button” that would “allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.” [via Mashable]
3. Why are we not surprised that Dan Brown’s books are the most frequently donated to secondhand shops in the UK? John Grisham, Ian Rankin, Danielle Steel, and Helen Fielding round out the top five. [via BBC]
4. Evidently as tired of waiting as the rest of us, Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell has launched a campaign for the film adaption of the cult TV show on Twitter: “Mars fans-can we bug @wbpictures & tell em they must do a VM film?? new tactic. bombard em w/tweets, there’s evidence of fans they cant ignore.” [via Zap2it]
5. Harvey Pekar’s widow opens up about the final months of the famed cartoonist’s life. [via NYT]

Bonus link: The 11 Worst Memoir Covers Ever

After collecting data from 13,000 bookstores, websites and non-traditional book-selling stores, the Daily Beast has rounded up the top reads within 16 U.S. cities. While fiction picks seemed to waver between Dan Brown, Kathryn Stockett, James Patterson and John Grisham, the non-fiction reads offered some surprises. Why are Red Socks-centric Bostonites loving Joe Torre’s The Yankee Years? Who knew funny man Steve Harvey’s relationship advice book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man would be taken so seriously? And yes, we’re also extremely irritated with Houston, Cleveland, and Seattle (?!) — all spots where Going Rogue was number 1.

See how your city’s non-fiction picks fared after the jump.

Read More »

Today at Flavorpill, we liked Tiny Mix Tapes’ spiffy new look. We met “Markus,” America’s first legal male prostitute. He thinks he’s Rosa Parks. We had a ridiculous amount of fun watching a guy with a crazy mustache play with Legos. We were slightly jealous of Hollywood’s top earning couples. We peeped the Roitfelds’ family portrait. We loved these Evel Knievel-inspired uniforms for the U.S. Bobsled and freestyle ski aerials teams. We were sorry to hear that Dexter star Michael C. Hall has cancer — luckily he’s currently in remission. We were charmed by Wes Anderson as a thankful stop-motion puppet. We discovered Dan Brown’s top secret singing career. We were embarrassed by how excited the tracklist for Peter Gabriel’s upcoming indie rock cover album made us. And finally, we were oddly thankful for these obsolete movie cliches that technology will never kill. Long live the giant, floppy X-Ray.

1. Harry Potter could star in an upcoming Broadway revival of the ’60s musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. [via Variety]
2. Despite Dan Brown’s best efforts, book sales are down for fall. [via NYT]
3. The formerly confidential, behind-the-scenes account of the Jeremy Piven/Sushi-Gate battle. [via NYT]
4. Can’t score tickets to see one of the Pixies sold-out shows? You can buy live recordings from their London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris stops. 1,000 copies will go on sale 10 minutes after each show ends. [via NME]
5. Brooks Brothers is teaming up with Mad Men costume director Janie Bryant to release a limited run of suits inspired by the show later this month. [via Boston]

Bonus link: “Whatever” Named Most Annoying Word in American English

As a professional amateur sociologist, I’m always on the lookout for peculiar confluences of events. Of particular interest to me is what horse gamblers and NBA-play-by-play men call “the trifecta.” Most humans have a special affection for threepeats (they confer greatness), threesomes (they confer, um, juices), and three-legged dogs (we feel bad for them), and I’m no exception. And so I exhort all fellow trificionados to hustle over to Amazon.com’s Bestseller List, where at this moment a rare three-headed beast is visible in the consumer-goods cloud forest. Read More »

iTunes’ App Store is probably the only place on Earth right now where Dan Brown is not number one. Although The Lost Symbol sold enough copies for every man, woman, and child in Chicago in its first week alone, the Da Vinci Code author’s iPhone app is currently lagging at #18 in the Books section. The number one spot instead belongs to a new app by McSweeney’s. It promises new work by Spike Jonze, Chris Ware, and Jonathan Ames — which was enough to get us to stop fiddling with I Am T-Pain for a minute and check it out. Here’s what we thought. Read More »

Doubleday announced today that in the week since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol hit the shelves, it has sold more 2 million copies of the English language edition worldwide. Impressed, we decided to head over to Amazon.com to check out what the people are saying. (We already know that New York Times book critic Janet Maslin has got a fever, and the only cure is more Langdon. Granted, she didn’t have to pay for her copy.) Surprisingly, the customer reviews are not as positively skewed as we thought they’d be. The number one gripe: formulaic writing. After the jump, a sampling. Read More »

1. Through no fault of host Neil Patrick Harris, we fell asleep during the Emmys, but it sounds like we didn’t miss too many surprises. [via LAT]
2. Thom Yorke collaborated with Banksy on the video for his new solo song “The Hollow Earth.” (Watch the embedded clip after the jump.) [via NME]
3. Barack Obama visits David Letterman for the first time since becoming president tonight. [via NYT]
4. Sorry boys: Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard married over the weekend. [via MTV]
5. John Grisham empathizes with Dan Brown because he doesn’t write “literature” either. [via Telegraph] Read More »

1. Ida Maria has dropped out of the “Perez Hilton Presents” tour, with Semi Precious Weapons stepping up to co-headline with Ladyhawke. Does this video hint at why? [via YouTube]
2. The Damien Hirst market is finally showing signs of recovery, with values approaching boom numbers. [via Bloomberg]
3. Warren the Ape — a “mock celeb-reality show” and Greg the Bunny spin-off — is coming to MTV next year. [via Variety]
4. While the latest round of funding values Twitter at $1 billion dollars, the website has yet to implement a profit-making business model. [via TechCrunch]
5. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sold over one million hardcover copies across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on Tuesday, breaking one-day records. [via Reuters]