Does a prank count if it backfires? Last week, when the bumbling Bonnie & Clyde of Brown University took out their aggression by throwing a pie at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during a college lecture, they couldn’t even land their toss. Also on the subject of pies, the Papa John’s pizza franchise’s attempt to rattle NBA star LeBron James with a wacky T-shirt campaign led to a major profit loss and an embarrassing national apology. Elsewhere in the world of sports, the Chicago White Sox are still reeling over the deflating blowup doll incident. Attempts by Pittsburgh Penguins fans to desecrate the Rocky Balboa statue in Philadelphia (an icon of the hometown Flyers) have already been thwarted by a leak. And though it has the makings of a prank — eating buttered cigarettes, waking with a mouthful of peanut butter, painting your house in the middle of the night — this piece in the Wall Street Journal simply details the surreal side effects of consuming too many sleeping pills. “A flurry of such cases prompted the Food and Drug Administration last year to require that Ambien, Lunesta and other ’sedative-hypnotic’ drugs carry strong warnings.” Turns out people are sending text-messages during dream-time, too. Sleep with one eye open!

The Texas exploits of the Chicago Bears running back Cedric Benson (he was arrested for boating while intoxicated in Austin) capped an unusual week of activity back on the homefront in Illinois. The legendary local landmark and “car kebob” known as the Spindle was dismantled in Berwyn. (Click here to view the Jurassic Park-like destruction.) A 67-year-old man in South Chicago Heights boasted that he has designed his own coffin, made to resemble a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. (”For now he plans to use it as a cooler,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times.) In the northern suburbs, the school bus driver Steve Kreuscher “wants a judge to allow him to legally change his name. He wants to be known as ‘In God We Trust.‘” His reason? Fear that atheists will succeed in removing the phrase from US currency. And last but yes, least: R. Kelly will offer some real talk about threesomes and sexual exploitation to prosecutors in his child pornography trial. (Jury selection begins this week.)

A start-of-the-week tonic from Lee Perry and the Upsetters. Drum break? Check. Dubbed out lazerface vocals? Check. The “Love and Happiness” opening guitar lick to set things off proper? Lee Perry literally doing an impression of a lion? Oh yes. If this doesn’t brighten your day just a little bit, I’m not really sure what will. A genie? You find a blog that has those, holler.

Audio — The Upsetters - Jungle Lion

Post by Ben Fasman

Remember this post? The trend — and the debate surrounding it — rages on. The London Times recently ran this piece, with quotes from a member of one of our favorite bands, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, advocating the partnership of musicians directly with brands. The thought being that as record companies have failed to deliver on so many levels for years and years, partnering with a brand actually makes more sense for some musicians - brands have the money to do more direct marketing with them, and the brands are less likely to care about owning masters or publishing rights. For musicians struggling to make a living plying their craft, it may not seem like a bad option. It’s possible that the notion of “selling out” and aligning yourself with a brand to get sales is a thing of the past. In a climate where some groups are getting fees in the 5 digits for a 45-minute show without ever having a single physical release (this is true, trust us), taking brand coin doesn’t seem so insane anymore.

Has the age of gotcha gaffes found its Holy Grail? Take a botched photo-op, add a dash of Curb Your Enthusiasm klezmer music and you’ve got the Clinton campaign’s worst nightmare (or at least a disturbing cat-nap). While the more extreme debacles (Obama’s pastor unhinged, Hillary’s decisive Iraq vote, McCain’s Beach Boys blunder) are raising ire, it’s this clip that has most recently skyrocketed to the top of the YouTube food chain: Hillary versus the Coffee Maker. The gas station gem joins the ranks of Obama’s Bowling-a-37-gate and McCain’s umbrella moment in Memphis. Will we really have over six more months of this nonsense? Yes, We Will.

Some sex scandals refuse to die. A couple weeks ago, a New York businessman spent $1.5m on a 15-minute film of Marilyn Monroe engaging in an oral sex act with an unidentified man. Was it JFK? According to a source in this piece, at one point “a team of nine individuals were analyzing the tape inside a lab. J Edgar Hoover brought in a few prostitutes who allegedly had been with President Kennedy and they tried to … see if that was really President Kennedy.”

Not to be outdone, Vivid Entertainment, the company that brought you the sex tapes of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Kim Kardashian and others, supposedly has unearthed a sex tape of Jimi Hendrix, though many refute the film’s veracity. Besides providing some biographical information about the rock legend, it apparently captures Hendrix doing the wild thing with two brunettes.

And when Harvard University recently acquired “an archive containing the definitive lowdown on Norman Mailer’s sex life,” it was yet another unfortunate violation of the armies of the night.

After years of agony and mental gymnastics, Dmitri Nabokov, the American-born son of Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (pictured here), decided he will publish The Original of Laura, the unfinished novel he was instructed to burn as a final wish to his father. The manuscript, written on a series of index cards, have been sitting in a Swiss safety deposit box since the author’s death in 1977. Dmitri broke his silence over this issue with the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by telling the Guardian, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess — just go ahead and publish.” He did not want to take on “the role of literary arsonist,” he told Der Spiegel.

Literary critic Ron Rosenbaum, a life-long Nabokov admirer, who had been publicly feuding with Dmitri to make up his mind in a series of columns (Part One, Part Two) on Slate, will certainly be thrilled (and may take credit for) this recent development.

Islamo-fascism, BRB? The New York Sun reports that the Bush administration “has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language.” Gone are the days of “mujahedeen” and “jihad.” The reason: “Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.”

Meanwhile, in America’s classrooms, a new study says that the informal style of electronic messages and email shorthand is showing up in schoolwork, and is bleeding into what students refer to as “real writing.” As the English language evolves, said one source in this piece in the New York Times, “some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.”

And a sad truth of this run-off: OMFG now passes — and is, in some cases, praised — as a bona fide marketing slogan.

Sloane Crosley’s first book — a collection of essays titled I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead Books) — has already debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. (You can read Wendy Walker’s review on the site today.) But Miss Crosley’s storytelling skills are boundless: To help illustrate some of the essays in her debut, she created dollhouse-styled dioramas out of Plexiglas. “In a way, these dioramas began long before I started writing the essays they represent,” writes Crosley on her website. “That would be in 4th grade. At least 4th grade is my first real memory of a Crosley Family diorama, though I feel certain there were labor-intensive crafts projects prior to that. Dioramas like the ones we built simply don’t appear from nowhere without a background of meticulous creativity. Either way, it was a fun extraction and one which allowed for a lot of inadvertent glue-sniffing.”

Check out an exclusive Sloane Crosley diorama video from the essay “Smell This,” a story about three college friends who she’s lost touch with. While hanging around her apartment, catching up, one of them leaves a surprise she won’t soon forgot.

Professor, writer, record collector, DJ and proprietor of the always-wonderful blog Soul Sides (and STOP SMILING contributor), Oliver Wang, sat down for an enlightening chat with Chairman Mao, co-founder of ego trip magazine and a legendary record collector and music scholar in his own right. From the sousaphone to racism to the Beatles to the new ego trip show, Miss Rap Supreme, the interview is not only a humorous look into the mind of one of hip-hop’s most impressive voices, but sums up much of how many of us aging hip-hop fans feel these days. (Bonus: Check out two of the other ego trip collective, Brent Rolling and Gabriel Alvarez, on the Sound of Young America podcast here).