If you haven’t been following the whole Transportation Security Administration body scanner/pat down controversy this ought to get you up to speed. I had no idea former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff was working for the RapeScan corporation now. The more you etc.

“Washington State Penitentiary will be one the state’s eight major prisons locked down today as part of a budget-cutting exercise.” [Related: the Walla Walla Union Bulletin’s own budget-cutting exercises include omitting words such as “of.”] But yes, going forward, the state prisons will lock down once a month to save money — though good news, prisoners “will be allowed out for meals”! Though they “will not be able to attend education classes, participate in treatment programs or go to work assignments.” So it begins! Now with staff furloughs and full-on shut-downs, we can stop pretending that even America’s non-privatized prisons are about reforming, when they’re really just about incarceration.

Bruce Springsteen appeared on the Jimmy Fallon show last night, and played “Because the Night” with who-woulda-thunk-it backing from a supergroup combo of the E-Street Band the Roots. It was a little tepid in the beginning, but at the end, it got very rocking!

Meanwhile, Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson makes a nice point in his review of the reissue of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness On the Edge of Town and the archival material released as The Promise.

“Still, there’s something odd about these ‘making of’ documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young’s Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It’s easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it’s also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen’s fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made.”

Basically Richardson says, “You’re not the boss of me, Boss!” A sentiment that I think Springsteen would probably himself approve.

UPDATE: Also on last night’s show, Springsteen (in costume as younger, early-’70s Springsteen) joined Fallon (in costume as Neil Young) on a cover of Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.” Here is a clip of the surprisingly effective weirdness that ensued:

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS, you guys: “This is what a receipt is supposed to look like. Instead of the big ‘F you’ the top, it’s got the order number, not only right there, but underneath the host’s name.”

We Are More Excited about Girl Talk on Everything than the Beatles on iTunes

by Mat Honan

Crazy technologist Anil Dash likes to talk about the end of the canon, as it applies to everything from Lady Gaga remixes to forked software on GitHub. Meaning: Increasingly we experience slightly different versions of the same thing. There is no more canonical version.

This is especially true of media. My favorite version of “Paper Planes” may be different than yours. (Yours sucks.) You’re rocking the DFA remix and I’m all about the Afrikan Boy & Rye Rye version. Even live media events are fractured, splintered through the lens of FoxNews or MSNBC or Autotune the News. It takes something huge to crash through the filters and clutter of modern life to get us to all experience the same thing simultaneously.

The new Girl Talk, released on Monday, did that.

For a moment at least, we are all talking about the same thing, at the same time. When Bill Wasik tweets “#favoritegirltalkspots Track 11 1:32–2:50,” I can go hear exactly what he’s talking about. It’s a water cooler moment for the era of weak-ties!

And then there are The Beatles. Apple made a Big Fucking Deal about a Tuesday announcement, hyping: “Turns out tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget.”

They meant the Beatles on iTunes. Oh, that! So it turns out, The Beatles aren’t already on iTunes or Amazon MP3 or Rdio or whatever. We’d done forgot about that. Thanks for the reminder, Apple.

It was like seeing some kid win Chutes and Ladders, then rub it in everyone’s face. How proud you must be of your triumph! I’m sure Apple will trot out some impressive number in the next few weeks to demonstrate just how many people were totally Yoko for the Beatles. But so what? Meet the Beatles? We’ve already met.

Look, I long ago stole everything I wanted from the Beatles catalogue. (Or ripped the CD. Same-same, but different.) And I’m not the only one! Plenty of people managed to play it on iTunes and iPods and iPhones and, for gosh sakes, even their Zunes before today. I mean, OMG: The Beatles were the top played band on last.fm charts last week! But how‽

It doesn’t take The Beatles’ participation to legitimatize digital distribution. Nor did it prove the artistic merit of it. Both of those happened long ago. It was merely a long-coming business victory for Apple.

And so the reaction to Apple’s announcement was basically a shrug and a collective shuffling on to whatever is next. Which happens to still be Girl Talk.

The Girl Talk album is a straight-up event, precisely because it’s a moment in time. It wasn’t released, as much as it was loosed upon us. You don’t know it’s coming and suddenly it’s just everywhere — saturating its market, in full. “All Day” is all over Twitter and Facebook and email and blogs and bulletin boards. On Wikipedia, people promptly built a database of all the samples. Over at Rdio they’re using that data to build a playlist of all the samples in order.

The new Girl Talk even comes with scarcity, something we’ve barely seen since the days of vinyl. You couldn’t download it for much of Monday because the server was overwhelmed. Sorry folks, Illegal Art is all sold out of bandwidth today. You’ll just have to fucking wait. Or have a friend upload it to his iDisk.

I’m not saying “All Day” is better than the “White Album,” or that Girl Talk is the greater artist. Pshaw, homie! The fervor delta has nothing to do with artistic achievement. But clearly Girl Talk won the week in terms of getting inside people’s heads. Greg Gillis — not Steve Jobs or Paul McCartney or Yoko Ono — gave us this week’s never-forget musical moment.

“All Day” felt fresh and alive and (unlike Apple’s surprise announcement) unexpected. The scofflaw samples and jarring juxtapositions that make us nostalgic for the past (like The Beatles!) while cluing us into something new and showing an entirely different way for artists to make a living around the digital distribution of their work (not like iTunes!).

My favorite Beatles moment today? It’s the sample of “Imagine” that hits at 2:58 on track 132 of the new Girl Talk.

Mat Honan is a co-founder of Longshot magazine and contributing editor to WIRED. He is Choire Sicha’s favorite Monkee.

Berate people in style with Chris Christie-branded merchandise that the New Jersey GOP has made available at its new online store. Yes, you too can unleash the blustery fat man within by decking yourself out in your choice of T-shirt, polo, sweatshirt or hoodie. “There’s a grassroots demand,” says party Executive Director Robert Cressen. “It’s all part of supporting his image as it grows here in New Jersey and throughout the country.”

I’m pretty sure that when Salon decided in a meeting to “reinvent sexy” they didn’t mean redefine it as “not sexy” but here we are, with a “world’s hottest men” list that is topped by Russell Brand. (Oh sure, I’ll give them Austan Goolsbee though.)

In a move seen as an attempt to form a coalition of grizzled ’60s relics and disaffected thirteen-year-old boys, outgoing Republican Florida governor Charlie Crist said Tuesday he wanted to pardon the late Doors singer Jim Morrison for his 1970 conviction on charges of indecent exposure and profanity at a concert in Miami.

“My heart bleeds for he and his family that this may not have even ever happened, yet it’s unfortunately currently part of his record,” Crist said, proving once and for all that he’s just the kind of liberal Florida voters do not want in office. “The more that I’ve read about the case and the more I get briefed on it, the more convinced I am that maybe an injustice has been done here.”

Crist, who lost his bid for a U.S. Senate seat to Tea Party upstart Marco Rubio in this year’s election, was once known for being tough on crime. But he tacked left during his recent campaign, and some political analysts believe Tuesday’s decision may be an effort to court the wide and free-thinking fan base of Morrison, who was also known as “The Lizard King.” Some people still believe Morrison is in fact alive, and hiding out on island off the coast of Africa, waiting for just such a moment to return to the spotlight like Eddie Wilson in Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives. It has long been speculated that Crist harbors presidential ambitions.

Morrison died in 1971, before serving the six-month prison sentence he received. Here is a video of him being interviewed around the time of the trial:

Crist is doing the right thing. But if he really wants to champion Morrison as a way to become more popular with voters, he should lobby for him to receive an honorary acceptance into Florida State University. You can see how sad the future rock star was upon learning of his rejection as a teen.

Just kidding. Morrison did get into Florida State, and made that promotional film with the administration while he was there. Charlie Crist went to Florida State, too.

The End.

It’s all who you know: “OUT TODAY — MAYOR BLOOMBERG, on the cover of a special Marvel comic book, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man: YOU’RE HIRED!’ The Mayor, Marvel Comics CEO Joe Quesada … and Spider-Man will unveil the full-color, eight-page comic book. The story features an out-of-work Peter Parker (Spider-Man), frustrated and at a loss about how to find a new job. A serendipitous meeting with Mayor Bloomberg, who tells him about the free job training and placement services available through the city’s Workforce1 Career Centers, helps to put him on the right track.”

“Lidl is destroying the magic of Christmas by selling dead reindeer.”
 — Animal rights activists are protesting the British supermarket chain Lidl’s selling of reindeer steaks. Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef from “Hell’s Kitchen,” makes a stew out of Santa’s beloved pets. (Sounds tasty, actually. With red wine and chocolate. Dark chocolate, of course, Hmm-hmm-hmmwaah-ah-ah-ahhh.)