BlackBook

Much hay has been made of the news that Internet dinosaur Yahoo! Inc. will buy the blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, allowing the company’s decrepit 26-year-old founder and CEO, David Karp, to finally retire to his private island made of American Apparel models. (Just kidding, David. Please don’t delete me.) But while Tumblr users and others have expressed outrage and threatened self-exile, as if we’d just reelected George W. Bush, we didn’t know what a Yahoo!-fried Tumblr will look like. Until now. Here are some highly confidential plans we intercepted. 

It’s so rare that the Oxford English Dictionary staff are willing to admit they’re totally stumped, and rarer still for them to be hung up on such a possibly titillating artifact. But at the moment, they are desperate to find a mid-19^th Century book called Meanderings of Memory by someone calling themselves “Nightlark.” Why the pseudonym, and why is it so hard to track down? Probably because it is pure smut.

You really have to hand it to the ultra-wealthy: when it comes to screwing others over, they can’t be beat. The latest scam is designed to allow their prep school brats to evade that great equalizer, the two-hour line for Space Mountain—because they’re sure not going to have to wait for anything else in life! 

Oh, now this could be fun: some well-meaning souls have taken to Tumblr to compile troubling dossiers on the culturally insensitive habits of those people you are most likely to reblog admiringly at some point: people like Amy Poehler, John Slattery and, uh, Barbara Walters? If they’re taking her sort down I can’t see why they even bothered with Dan Savage and Eminem, whose list of offenses scans like a Wikipedia page in need of a hard edit.

America's voted, and the winner of Lay's Potato Chip's "Do Us A Flavor" contest is…. Cheesy Garlic Bread. This choice is, by far, the least-offensive but still gross choice between the two other flavor finalists - Chicken & Waffles and Sriracha - which, while intensely nauseating, at least had the potential to be either a. interesting or b. another kind of spicy. Unfortunately, Cheesy Garlic Bread is neither of these. 

It used to be easy to pick the cool smartphone. In a world of BlackBerrys, anybody with an iPhone was suddenly a rock star. Not anymore. Apple's still around, of course, but it has a world of serious competition where once it stood alone. I had a couple of mobile-device experts from Sprint drop by the office recently with a six-pack and a bunch of phones. We sipped Brooklyn Lager and played with the latest and greatest devices from HTC, Samsung, and Kyocera, but not Apple. Why not? Because Apple only allows dedicated Apple reps to demo their toys. Probably something about "staying on message" and "not drinking beer while working" and other corporate stuff. Okay, we'll focus on Apple's competitive set for now, whose shiny new devices seem perfectly tailored to various personality types. Which smartphone is right for you? Keep reading and find out. (Oh, in case I forget to mention: in addition to all the cool things these devices do, they're also phones, so you can do that old fashioned talking-on-the-phone thing, just like they did in the '50s, you retro creature.)

I probably daydream about rich-guy stuff a little more than is healthy. The sports cars, the mega yachts, the penthouse apartments with a frickin' slide. By my moral calculus, I deserve it all. But there's one accoutrement of wealth that rises above all others: the ability to fly private. Sure, you can point the Eclipse toward St. Barths, but that'll take forever if you're starting out in New York, and time is money. If you've got a jet at your disposal, you have truly achieved freedom. Wake up and decide where you want to go, then go there as quickly as possible, avoiding all the hassles and indignities of commercial air travel. There's simply nothing more luxurious than flying private, it's the ultimate indulgence, enjoyed by an air-kissing slice of the 1% while the rest of us pile our shoes and belts into a plastic bin at LaGuardia and regret not stuffing that $12 bottle of sunscreen into the checked bag. But now, thanks to a company called JetSuite, private air travel is finally available to middle class people with regular jobs in the publishing and service industries and okay that's a huge lie. It's still expensive, and you, gentle reader, still can't afford it. But you're getting closer. A lot closer. You can't afford it, but your friend with a slightly better job probably can, and maybe he'll take you along on a trip to thank you for turning him on to this innovative new aviation company.

It’s the nature of human desire: you want something until you have it, then you complain. At the turn of the century, we asked where the jet packs and wearable head-mounted computers were; now, with Google finally supplying the latter, all we can do is ridicule it. Case in point: the Tumblr “White Men Wearing Google Glass,” which sprouted up to shame early adopters this weekend.