Virtual Memories

Happy Good Friday to my Christian readers! To all other readers, Happy Everybody’s Working for the Weekend day!

Now let’s make with some linkage!

I tip pretty well at Dunkin Donuts, but it’d take a lot of orange mocha frappuccinos to add up to $105 million in tips at Starbucks?

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I used to trot out Carly Hennessy as an example of how the recording industry burns through money, but she only ranks as #15 on Blender’s list of the 20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time. (For the record, I felt that the giant deals given to REM, Aerosmith and Janet Jackson in the late ’90s were actually worse for the biz; Blender ranks the REM deal at #13).

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Pop charts: I’m partial to the Venn diagram of the Blur song, but that’s just me.

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While Borders was busy using big-box stores to demolish smaller competitors, the company got walloped by the Internet and reduced margins on book sales. Now it’s staring at bankruptcy, and some analysts think Barnes & Noble should buy it up.

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I haven’t given you a creepy post from BLDG BLOG in a while, so here’s one on submarines in the Arctic.

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And speaking of NYTimes and Cold War phenomena, Daniel Drezner corrects the paper’s editors on their use of the word “deterrence.”

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This seems like an awful lot of work — and a serious violation of Asimov’s 3 Laws — to get off of this mortal coil.