Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Smithsonian acquires original painting of iconic Obama "Hope" image
Did you know that Shepard Fairey, the artist behind the now-iconic red-and-blue Obama "Hope" poster, was the same mastermind behind the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker phenomenon of the '80s, as well as the commercial "OBEY" campaign and those "Man In The Moon" Andy Kaufman posters? He is; and it turns out in fact that this week no less than the freaking Smithsonian acquired the original painting of the "Hope" design, and will be hanging it in the National Portrait Gallery on Inauguration Day. That right there I think is hopefully a good omen of things to come under an Obama administration -- I like seeing a deserving underground artist have such a wide mainstream impact with a smart, innovative project they've done. Better than another day of reality television, poop-joke movies and "Girls Gone Wild," the norm for the mainstream arts over the last decade of Bushism.

"You are Number 6!" Watch entirety of "The Prisoner" online for free
Rejoice, nerds, rejoice! In preparation for their undoubtedly cheesy remake coming later this year, AMC has the entire run of the 1967-68 headscratcher "The Prisoner" online at their website for free viewing in streaming form. If you've never watched this ground-breaking, countercultural sci-fi classic, you absolutely need to, or else forever hang your head in shame at all future Comicomicons.

Enquirer: "Pill-popping alcoholic Michael Jackson has only months to live"
The National Enquirer is reporting a pretty sensational story this week indeed -- that pop idol Michael Jackson is less than six months from death, due mostly to have becoming a runaway alcoholic and painkiller addict over the last couple of years of his disastrous life. Easy to first dismiss, of course -- it's the Enquirer, after all -- but let's not forget the whole string of legitimate news stories they've broken in the last year, including John Edwards, Patrick Swayze and Paul Newman. They can potentially get sued back into the Stone Age for saying something like this, so you have to imagine that there's at least a bit of truth behind such a high-profile allegation.

Executive Musical Chairs officially begins at nearly bankrupt Borders
So if you didn't know already, Borders Bookstores (the largest book chain in the US) is just a few steps away from bankruptcy at this point; and so of course this is finally when all the filthy-rich corrupt white guys in charge start getting replaced with yet other filthy-rich corrupt white guys, who just got fired from their last jobs for screwing THOSE up. In this case, it was their previous CEO and CFO, with more announcements to come; this after an 11-percent sales drop during Christmas '08. Oh, and by the way, that outgoing CEO will be receiving a $2 million "severance payment," basically a big giant bonus for the privilege of screwing up the company and getting fired for it. And you wonder why our economy is in a complete freefall these days?

Holy crap -- 75 million people are daily Facebook users
Yow. Even more astonishing, when you add the casual users, total membership right now is 150 million. Or put another way, if Facebook was an autonomous nation, it'd be the eighth largest on Earth. Yow!

Irony defined: Americans' newfound savings is wrecking economy faster and faster
So what's the biggest irony of a capitalist society? Well, since the entire economy is based on buying and selling, it's actually a disaster when its citizens save too much and spend too little; like what's exactly happening these days, for example, as it's come out this week that personal savings are up for most Americans for the very first time since the government started keeping track, right after World War 2 when the US became a capitalist superpower to begin with. It's good from a short-term personal standpoint, explains this WSJ article, but ultimately a wreck for our free-market society, and the hundreds of millions of jobs that rely on it; how ironic that every dollar we put in the bank these days is actually making the national situation a little worse and a little worse.

Cox on RNC: "It's embarrassing to watch grown men brag about Twitter friends"
Ana Marie Cox turns in another nice editorial for "The Daily Beast," talking about the sheer ineptitude displayed at yesterday's "debate" among candidates for head of the Republican National Committee; how in all their talks about "the Twitter," and bragging over who has more friends at their social networks, pretty much every candidate displayed a woeful lack of understanding about how any of this stuff practically works (or what I mean is, how Obama managed to actually use all this stuff to win the election), all of them seeming to act like technology is some kind of magic wand, and that all you need to do is pick it up and wave it around to get some sort of electoral miracle to occur. Also, she opines, it's embarrassing to watch grown men have a bragging fight over who has more Twitter friends, something that makes most rational adults roll their eyes even when listening to teens argue over the subject.

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