Let's start with Sherman Alexie, author of a fair number of popular (and quite good!) books, including Reservation Blues and Flight. He's known for his sense of humor, but he's dead serious about ebooks—specifically, about how they will destroy literature, forever, or something: His points are as follows:

1. Ebook readers are a threat to privacy
2. Jeff Bezos makes cryptic comments about "changing how people read," which is sinister, even though it's fairly obvious that he's speaking literally
3. The music industry was crippled by piracy; therefore the book industry will be crippled by piracy
4. Once books are digitized by publishers, they will be stolen (this part is true)
5. The "open source" culture destroys the concept of ownership

The way he throws around the term "open source" seemingly without knowing what it means, the way he cites unease with how much personal information is stored on the Kindle (does he have nightmares about cellphones, too?), and his apparent lack of understanding about the mechanics of piracy makes me think he's just a bit misinformed about the details of his case, which he obviously feels very strongly about. If he had his facts straight, I'm not sure his case would change, and I think he'd still be able to make good points—this is zeal, not malice.

Which brings me to Alan Kaufman, poet, novelist, and maker of unfortunate analogies:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term "hi-tech" I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people.

That's right, people. Ebook readers are like war criminals. It's uncanny!

Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay.

Crematoria lit? Seriously? What's especially vexing here is that buried underneath all the Godwin's Law-ing, there's a real point: It's scary that Amazon can reach into your pocket and delete a book that you've purchased, and, though to a much lesser degree, that they know what you're reading. (I mean, so does the dude behind the counter at your totally not-genocidal local book store, right? Your library?) Plus, Kaufman fails to make a distinction between a regime that would have like to have control over all books so it could censor them, and companies that happen to be gaining more control over books because they want to make money.

And seriously, do I really have to point this out? Nazis didn't burn books because they though paper was wasteful and dumb—they burned books to destroy ideas.

Tune in next week, when I'll be explaining why Steve Jobs is nothing like Pol Pot, and how it would be in poor taste to invoke the Rwandan Genocide to explain why MiniDisc didn't succeed. It's possible to talk about consumer electronics without exploiting our century's greatest human tragedies. Try it! [HuffPo via TechDirt]

This tunnel is actually one of eight built by the British government during World War 2 as a network of bomb shelters to protect citizens from the German blitz. They could hold 8,000 people and were designed to function for five weeks without any assistance from the outside world. This "protection" even included "a bar and two canteens, not in use, and a billiard room, not to mention functioning water and electricity supplies," reports the New York Times.

However, after their completion, the tunnels were held aside to serve as secret bases of operations for soldiers. They were never used as shelters. Instead, they served as a temporary base for D-Day troops; one even became the European HQ for U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later, in 1944, the tunnels became bastions of counterintelligence, as members of the secret service used them to coordinate resistance movements in Nazi-controlled countries. The tunnels, once filled with Normandy invaders, were decked out with spy gear, telephones and teleprinters.

Today, though, the tunnels are empty, and waiting for some rich playboy real estate tycoon to swoop in and buy them up. Won't you take up that standard, and invite us poor gadget-loving folk to a few parties below the busy London streets? Please? [New york Times]

Yes, lyrics. I know. Weird. We didn't know ourselves that the classic John Williams Indy theme song had lyrics, until we learned about it a few days ago in Alex's Tumblr page. According to Alex, Williams confessed in an Q&A with Radar Magazine that before he "composes a score he comes up with lyrics in his head first and then writes the music to them, even though he knows no one will ever hear the words." The iconic composer then went on to reveal the secret lyrics to Raiders of the Lost Ark to el Sr. Balk.

When asked about the veracity of this story, Alex declined to comment. The lyrics he posted sounded about right, but just a little bit off-beat at the end. I then chased the story like a fake LEGO boulder rolling behind an archeologist with a dog's name, and managed to get John Williams' assistant Alan Smithee to fax me the secret lyrics under condition of anonymity.

The lyrics are very similar, but the last verse of the first strophe is actually the real one. This updated version also includes more verses, as well as new references to the Soviets in the movie, and beloved teen star Shia LaBeouf.

We debated internally about publishing the story, and we finally decided to share them with you in this video, as a sing-a-long. I hope you sing them today in the theaters, and they stay in your mind for the next five days—at least, that's what happened with me.

Enjoy.

[NOTE: needless to say, we made this thing up so you can sing along in the movie theaters (in your mind, that is. Whoever sings this next to me in the theater today gets smacked. Hey, we named our dog Jones after Indy.]