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Arts & Culture

SMASHWORDS.COM

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Foreword by Stan Lerner: as I sit here at Break Espresso in Missoula Montana preparing once again to travel on the “Road To Nowhere” I can’t help, but to write about smashwords.com because much like I wrote of in my blog post “Go Buy A Kindle” it is the invention of websites such as smashwords, which afford me the luxury to be so not tethered to my home base in Los Angeles. And I will tell you now dear readers, that I will in the course of this blog post solicit your support of this site, not only because my own book titles are sold there, but because the success of smashwords.com will ultimately be all of our success.

What is smashwords.com? Herein lies our story. But first the simple answer: smashwords.com is a website that sells ebooks only and it sells them in every format, for every device on the market. Now that I’ve completed these most creative and literary sentences, let me expand to the wider aspect and explain how I came to not only discover smashwords.com, but became one of its advocates.

Regular readers of my work will recollect that I spent the waning months of 2009 in Las Vegas working on posts for blogsincity and my eventually to be released novella “Lerner’s Las Vegas”. A few particularly observant readers noticed that I did not post any new work during the month of December and the first two weeks of January and commented on such.

So as I cohabitated with a variety of things to write before the end of the decade (blogs, scripts, books and a business plan) in Las Vegas I took to the task of posting the downtownster.com Ten Best Blogs of the year. One of the Ten Best Blogs of the year, just so happened to be my blog post “Go Buy A Kindle”. This blog once reposted generated still greater readership and several more comments. But it was one particular comment that determined that the month of December would take a very unexpected turn. The comment, of which I speak, was one of concern that in my post about Kindle I did not mention the Sony eReader.

I commented back that I was not advocating one device over another, but I personally preferred Amazon Kindle over Sony eReader because of it’s 3G WiFi connectivity. This very smart reader then pointed out that Sony eReader, like Amazon Kindle, had WiFi and that perhaps I was confused or on drugs. Continue reading SMASHWORDS.COM →

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IS AEG BEHIND MICHAEL JACKSON’S MURDER???

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In an explosive report delivered this weekend by Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera…Rivera went well beyond implying that Michael Jackson’s concert promoter, AEG, had an interest in the King of Pop’s Death—he used context and comments by Michael Jackson’s mother, Katherine, to accuse AEG of having the man killed whose comeback tour they were promoting. At the root of Rivera’s allegation is an insurance policy for seventeen million dollars that he reports AEG wants to collect on. And adding a tanker truckload of fuel to the fire, is a deal between AEG and Sony to turn AEG’s footage of Michael Jackson’s preparations for his concert tour into two feature length motion pictures—GERALDO SAYS AEG IS TO BE PAID SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS FOOTAGE!!!

Of course AEG denies Geraldo’s allegations…And I know for a fact that AEG President Tim Leiweke has said that this story is going away today—I assume he’s pulling some of those power strings AEG has paid for or threatening Fox with legal action; take your pick. But what everyone has to be asking right now is why did this very same person said that AEG had no financial interest in Michael Jackson’s funeral event held at Staple’s Center? This lack of financial interest is how Mr. Leiweke justified sticking the city with a 1.4 million dollar bill for event related city services. Trying to dissuade ticket holders from cashing in 50 million dollars worth of tickets + 17 million in insurance money (according to Geraldo) + 60 million dollar movie deal = 127 million dollars of financial interest, if Rivera is right.

So, I’ve gone after AEG for a number of issues ranging from taking 300 million in tax credits from the public and not giving the community the events in the public space it promised to being a bad corporate citizen to being in the blogging business and not properly disclosing the obvious conflict of interest when making Tammy Billings the director of marketing for LA Live also the LA Live Examiner. But turning an enormous profit on the apparent murder of Michael Jackson? I write a pretty good novel every now and then and even I couldn’t dream this one up. Continue reading IS AEG BEHIND MICHAEL JACKSON’S MURDER??? →