Buying an earful

Hear it out

Forget the Napster blitzkreig in the Swades season. Here?s your own online music store, smelling of brown earth and dollops of ghee with a catalogue of over 40,000 tracks for those willing to shell out a few bucks. CrimsonBay.com, the cyber music portal, has launched its first Hindi music download service, complete with all-time classics from Umrao Jaan, Aradhana and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Basically, everything from Saigal to Sehgal. The portal has tie-ups with music labels like Saregama India, Ishq Records and Yatra Communications, but that?s not where the gravy train stops for CrimsonBay. Music in regional languages like Tamil, Telugu and Bengali is to follow soon. Balle, balle!!

 

Okay, we agree he looked like a demigod as Achilles in Troy. But from hero to outlaw? Well, that?s what Brad Pitt plans to do, playing notorious 19th-century daredevil Jesse James in a new movie. Looks like Pitt favours loners.

Stick savvy

There?s more to Indian hockey than K.P.S. Gill and astroturf, or that?s what the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) would have you believe. As if hockey and cooldom could ever go hand in hand. But to prove precisely that, the new Indian Premier Hockey League has been put into place with help and inputs from ESPN and Star Sports. The half-baked idea in operation here is that reviving the flagging spirit of hockey in the country should be as simple as getting Geoffrey Boycott and Sunny Gavaskar to ham together on TV. There?s reportedly a Rs 71-lakh prize money to boot, but we?re sure that no one wants even one session of extra time.

 

Dad?s day out

The lengths a child can go to keep his family together! A Chinese teenager recently rented out his father?s flat when he was away on a week-long business trip. The reason: he wanted to stall his father?s second marriage and bring his parents back together. The dad got a shock when he returned and found strangers in his bedroom. But a court has played spoilsport and declared the rent contract null and void. The heartless father can get married after all.

Sorting the mail

Mail alert

Do you hate to wake up to grouchy voicemails waiting on your mobile phone? Well, you don?t have to any more. With new technology being developed at MIT, you can straightaway sort your voicemail under ?happy?, ?sad?, ?urgent? and other such categories. All the user has to do is check out an on-screen ?emotica? that will indicate what type of mail is waiting in the inbox. So, if you choose to, you can just read the happy ones and keep the rest on hold. And how lucky you?ll be if the emotica is a red valentine!

AWARD OF THE WEEK

To the doctors of All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, part of the tele-conferencing facility at the hospital, who are to help tsunami victims all over the country cope with mental trauma.