June 7th is National Donut Day. Go to any participating donut joint in your area and you'll receive a free donut. http://nationaldoughnutday2013.com/ Seriously this event's been going on for 75 years and I've never got a free donut on National Donut Day.
"Fast & Furious" With 41 million likes on Facebook, "Fast & Furious 6" star Vin Diesel is one of the most popular celebrities on the social networking site.But how did the action star create such a successful online persona? He got in the game early.
This is what happened during Beyoncé's concert in Copenhagen. Some people call the guy who slapped Bey's rump stupid, dumb, says he has no class but I disagree. Front row tickets for that concert costs a small fortune and that man was just getting his money worth. He should have grabbed and squeezed it for a couple of seconds.
Universal's Fast & Furious 6 is racing for a franchise-best $122 million-plus Memorial Day debut after leaving The Hangover Part III in the dust. The action pic is also overperforming overseas, grossing $158 million and pushing the film's worldwide total to more than $280 million through Monday.
Inappropriate lyrics are causing rappers millions of dollars. The corporate companies that back them with big bucks are jumping ship quick! Just weeks after Reebok dropped Rick Ross over his "molly" lyrics, Mountain Dew has now kicked Lil Wayne to the curb over his lyrics referencing civil rights
In case you missed it: Just-left-of-mainstream rapper Danny Brown received oral sex onstage at his show on Friday at Minneapolis's West Bank. This has scandalized social media for most of the week. Click here to read more
Authorities say the comedian's black Mercedes nearly collided with a tanker truck. Actor/Comedian Kevin Hart was arrested on suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol on Saturday. (Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez) LOS ANGELES (AP) - Authorities say comedian Kevin Hart has been arrested on suspicion of drunken driving after his black Mercedes nearly collided with a tanker truck on a Southern California freeway.
Brian Helgeland's 42 is a smoothly paced, handsome, easily digestible biopic of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger who in 1947 became the first black player to join the major leagues. It's easy to imagine this movie being shown at a middle school during Black History Month, or even...
Magic Johnson's 20-year-old son, EJ, was spotted holding hands with his boyfriend while out on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles on Monday, and his famous dad couldn't be prouder. Earvin Johnson III, known as EJ, is a student at NYU and had not previously made his sexuality public.
If you're in a state where cousins can legally marry each other, but home brewers are forbidden to practice their craft, you must be in Alabama.
Indeed, Alabama now stands out as the only state where home brewing is illegal. Mississippi voted this week to legalize the hobby lager lovers and hopheads in America have enjoyed, even before George Washington and Sam Adams boiled up their first brews.
Alabamans don't just get slapped with a ticket if they start mixing up a batch. It's a felony.
But to a feisty band of Yellowhammer State tipplers, it's ridiculous for the government to meddle with their malt. They won't be satisfied until Alabama has the same rights enjoyed everywhere else in the country.
"This is not about alcohol. This is about civil liberties," said Kraig Torres, owner of Hop City Craft Beer and Wine in Birmingham. "If I went around in Alabama and said, 'you can't have a gun in your house,' I'm pretty sure people would be upset."
Residents who want to buy shotguns, rifles or handguns don't need permits, licenses or registrations. However, it's unclear how regulations apply to gunsmiths who forge firearms in their residences.
Torres lives in Georgia and operates his flagship store there. While he'd like to sell beer-making ingredients and cookbooks in his Birmingham venture, he has gotten into trouble with the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.
In September, before he opened Hop City, state agents inspected the store. Torres said they confiscated $7,000 worth of beer-making kits and cookbooks on a follow-up visit. A lawyer for the beverage control board told HuffPost that Torres removed them from the store after he was told they were contraband.
Alabama maintains a fervent temperance movement. It's been 80 years since Prohibition's demise, but there are 25 dry counties in the so-called "Heart of Dixie." Some teetotalers there wish the libations had never started flowing again.
"We're talking about a mind-altering, addictive drug," said Joe Godfrey, a pastor and executive director of ALCAP, a group that opposes loosening any restrictions on alcohol. "This isn't barbecue. People are killed on the highways. You hear all the time about people being killed under the influence of alcohol. You never hear about people getting killed by barbecue."
Torres' experience was a rare instance of the state enforcing the home-brewing ban, according to interviews with home brewers and an Alcoholic Beverage Control Board lawyer. Just this month, however, a prosecutor in Mobile County was disciplined for flouting the home brew restrictions, Al.com reported.
Home-brewing advocates said the felony status scares away some and forces others into the shadows even though the chance of punishment looks slim.
"Home brewers would like to be able to practice their hobby in the open. They have to be fairly secretive," said American Homebrewers Association Director Gary Glass. "It just doesn't make sense that it would be prohibited. Many of the Founding Fathers were home brewers including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson."
Bills to legalize home brewing sit in both houses of the Alabama legislature awaiting a vote. It's the third straight year legislators have proposed changes to the home brew law.
Partisan squabbling on unrelated issues may derail it again, according to observers and local media reports.
"We hope it passes so we can move onto more important business," said Bob Martin, an ABC board lawyer. "We really don't care. It's a hobby. It's not our real concern unless we found out someone was making it and selling it illegally. Generally, we're not going to go into their homes."
If passed, the bills would allow Alabamians to whip up limited quantities of intoxicating drinks like beer and wine. Liquor would remain off-limits. It would also pave the way for tasting events and competitions, advocates told HuffPost.
Home brewing was for outlaws and scofflaws throughout the country as a result of Prohibition until then-President Jimmy Carter signed a federal law decriminalizing the pastime in 1978.
Hobbyists cheered Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant for ending the state's ban this week.
"I'm going to have a pint with friends at our local bar in town and then open a bottle of home brew at home" to celebrate, said Craig Hendry, president of Raise Your Pints, a group that hired lobbyists to overturn the ban.
"We want to be talked about in a positive light, not as another state that was the last to do something."
Editor's note: To be fair to Alabama, 19 other states allow first cousins to get hitched too, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Kevin Hart may have just pulled off the biggest bargain basement divorce in Hollywood, because we've learned the gazillionaire has settled up with his ex-wife for relative pennies. Hart, who is worth a reported $9 million, will pay his ex, Torrei Hart a lump sum of $175,000.
Rihanna's tour buses were stopped at the border between Michigan and Canada ... and law enforcement sources tell TMZ ... authorities found weed. A total of 10 buses were stopped at the Ambassador Bridge, which separates Windsor, Canada and Detroit. Inspectors smelled marijuana on one of the buses and initiated a secondary, bus-to-bus search.
The groupie-transportation struggle is real. According to one woman, Colin Kaepernick, a player on the NFC Championship football team San Francisco 49ers, left one of his groupies stranded at an airport in Atlanta for more than six hours.
Pandora Is Now Charging Indies a Minimum of $1,000 for Promotion...
Thursday, March 14, 2013
by Paul ResnikoffThis is a letter from an indie label owner boxed out and frustrated by Pandora. It details some of the costs for promotion on the Pandora platform, which can include audio, visual, banner, or other slots. The smallest, shortest campaign starts at $1,000, which gets seriously expensive when a serious campaign is involved.
A representative for Pandora declined to confirm or deny the charges over email.
(bold from the original letter preserved)
Dear Paul,
Nobody's talking about the unintended consequences of the high royalty rates that these services are currently paying the major labels.
For example - when Pandora first started, they were easy to work with and you could engage with them to promote your artists. This was a boon to indie labels. Now that the majors are forcing Pandora to pay such high rates - Pandora in turn is trying to make up for it by charging artists money to be promoted through their service.
The minimum amount is $1,000.00, which is out of the range of most indie artists in a business that it is increasingly hard to make money at.
It's a combination of audio, tile, and banner ads, positioning, etc. It doesn't get you much. The way they spin it is you can target by Zip Codes, Cities/Regions, Gender, Music Preference, etc., to really dig deep and get to the fans that actually might buy your music.
It's actually kinda cool – but the problem is that more and more, people are dipping into the artist's (and my) pocket for visibility. Everyone has got their hand out to get a decent review in the larger indie publications (print and online), and it really sucks.
The Indies have been much quicker to adopt new technologies - but this is an example of how that's being impeded. I fear that what's happening with Pandora will start happening at the other online streaming services - which will just shift the old monetary impediments for Indies to break through from one paradigm to the next.
The streaming services are under tremendous pressure from their investors to show growth and stable revenue streams – so they are ultimately going to pass those high royalty costs along to either the artists/labels, or the consumer of the service – or both.
Until and unless everyone comes to the reality that EVERYONE has to be willing to take less and adjust their models accordingly in order for us to ALL grow in these new models - we will continue to muddle along at a snail's pace in this Brave New World of the recorded music business.
The majors are short-sighted. Greed and desperation are having (perhaps) unintended consequences that effect everyone, especially the indies.
As you can tell – I'm passionate about this – I don't wind you up on many things. But I see this trend developing and it's NOT GOOD.
It's just taking the same old "he who has the most cash wins" paradigm and shifting it onto the new models. We are never
really going to move forward and have a healthy and growing business for recorded music again until everyone takes a hit and agrees to take less in the short term for more in a few years once the new models take hold.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
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