As the major labels and studios are learning, you can adapt, or you can become road chowder. Toronto-based Lion’s Gate film is positioning itself squarely in the former category — potentially as the first major production company to offer its feature film offerings online through iTunes.

The question, really, is what’s the downside? Why has it taken this long?

Answer: most of these execs are yesterday’s men.

Jon Feltheimer, Chief Financial Officer of Lionsgate Films has confirmed that the company has reached a deal with Apple to distribute full-length feature films via iTunes, most likely by the end of the year.

Read on

I found this again the other day. Possibly the stupidest and most homoerotically charged fight scene in cinematic history.

The venerable Cracked Magazine has put together a list of the Top 5 Most Obviously Drug-Fueled Celebrity Appearances on TV, including a YouTube clip of each. I had the pleasure of catching one of them live — Crispin Glover’s kung fu meltdown on Letterman.

I would have thought Anna Nicole Smith would have made the list, but she didn’t.

Watch

From NYU Journalism School’s Pressthink site comes a very interesting story from Jay Rosen. A non-partisan coalition of reporters is coming together to collectively investigate Congressional earmarks.

It’s a brilliant idea, because it’s what the web does well. Here’s the opening salvo:

Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.This is networked journalism (“professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story”) beginning to come of age, and it’s very much in the spirit in my initiative NewAssignment.Net.

Check out the site. It’s chock-a-block with links to all kinds of interesting stuff.

GO READ

For whatever reason, over the past week or so I’ve seemingly read nothing but stories about urinals. First, on Sunday, this little gem about a snappy bucket-shaped number called the Pale Ale Urinal.

As well, a Dutch McDonald’s restaurant found itself at the centre of a controversy after public outcry forced it to remove a set of mouth-shaped urinals.

From there, I started trawling the world of urinals with a greater sense of urgency. Urinal.net is a seemingly endless gallery of user-submitted urinal pics, including this top ten list.

Not on the list was this one, found in a Turkish tailor shop.

Please enjoy responsibly.

For all those folks who think that user-generated content is somehow the future of broadcasting, let me suggest that this video represents a rather chilling vision of things to come.

Just watch