It’s cool that the U.S. Women’s National soccer team will win the World Cup today, as part of the Fourth of July weekend. Thanks, ladies! Let’s nutmeg the headlines.
“41.9 million Americans expected to leave town for Independence Day”: Wow. What town would that be?
“Amazon to pay ebook writers by pages read”: This week, the company implemented a new policy that it will pay authors — in its Kindle Library — by the number of pages read and not the number of times a book is checked out. Hmm. So your Kindle is recording your reading, page by page, — or lack thereof? Does that mean the customers have the option to buy a book one page at a time? No, only Amazon gets to be that cheap.
To be fair, the policy is only for authors who are part of the Kindle Direct Publishing Select program, which features self-published titles that are exclusive to the Amazon platform. If you’re a self-published author, often you’ll take whatever pay you can get. But like Twitter “followers” and Facebook “friends,” someone will figure out a way to fool Kindle, and make it look like someone has made it through all 1,254 pages of your Beanie Babies “memoir.”
“Jim Carrey goes on twitter rant over California’s vaccine bill”: Two of Carrey’s movies come to mind: “Dumb and Dumber” and “Liar, Liar.” And blame USA Today and CBS News, among other traditional media outlets, for reporting this latest celebrity anti-vaccination rant as “news.” Such celebrities have done enough damage, as have the media outlets that cover them. For crying out loud.
“How to get a real meal out of instant ramen”: Uh, by adding real food to it?
“Why BlackBerry isn’t dead yet”: Because the people who make and create things don’t listen to online “sages” who are always predicting the death of something? And because the people who buy things don’t always listen to the Internet “sages.”
“Your 8-year-old can hail a ride Uber-style with this app”: Oh, boy. The service is called “Shuddle,” which is in keeping with the app trend of naming your app with a misspelling, or ending it in a “y.”
If this is supposed to be a time saver for parents, it’s hard to understand how. According to the article, “Children between 8 and 16 can use the app to order a ride at least one hour ahead of when they want to be picked up. When the reservation is booked, both parents and children get a photo and bio of the driver and car description sent to their smartphones. Parents can watch the car with their kid driving along its route through the app thanks to GPS tracking technology.”
If a parent is going to spend the entire time monitoring the ride, what’s the point, exactly?
“Skinny jeans can lead to nerve and muscle damage, doctors say”: Just add some high heels for a complete killer outfit!
If warranted, give someone a yellow card this week for “persistent infringement.”
Carol MacPherson: 425-339-3472; cmacpherson@heraldnet.com.
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