Odds & Ends

• Soul Sides is one of my favorite MP3 blogs because it's a prime source of rare (or at least uncommon) '70s funk and soul tracks, but now I see that DJ O-Dub has created a soundtrack to the Adam Mansbach novel Angry Black White Boy which shows off his equally proficient skills at finding the top-notch hip-hop tracks. Be sure to check out the sampler mix! Friends pressed the novel upon me a while back, telling me to ignore Nathaniel Rich's mixed blessings in the NYTBR. Maybe the soundtrack will light a fire under me. (I gotta admit, I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find any review that made anything out of the fact that the novel's protagonist, Macon Detornay, has a last name that sounds an awful lot like one of the fundamental principles of Situationism, which seems oddly appropriate for a white kid appropriating black culture...)

• You might think I've got it in for Judith Regan, but my scorn for her imprint's cozy relationship with p6 is nothing compared to the full-on loathing you'll find emanating from other bloggers. (Warning: You're probably not going to want to look at that first link at work...)

• All the hoopla and right-wing outrage over Paul Ruditis' YA novel Rainbow Party and its potential to inspire teenage girls across America to perform lots and lots of oral sex? Like, totally bogus, says Kara Jesella (Nerve), who points out: "These parties might not even exist, at least not on any epidemic scale. We don't know how many of the fifty girls interviewed for Oprah's show had actually been to one. As a health writer and editor for a major teen magazine, I've interviewed hundreds of teenagers over the last three years, and none of them know anyone who has." She also compares the book to Reefer Madness, and not in a nice way.