Murdoch to eat up Twitter? The interwebs are afire with rumours Rupert is trying to buy Twitter. His biographer Michael Wolff thinks it’s a good idea too. The AFR weighed in today with this story in their Street Talk section:

While it’s an interesting story in itself, the best part is the graphic of a mobile phone and its caption “Tweets are text messages of up to 140 characters”. Crikey wonders if this may confuse or mislead technologically challenged AFR readers.

Print media isn’t going down without a fight. It seems print media dies a little more each day, yielding to the inevitable onrush of digital formats. Not so for the swingin’ Swedes at Tare Lugnt magazine, who “published” the third instalment of their body-art journal on a guy’s leg. Ouch! Hope it wasn’t a double issue.

Crikey‘s emo-Swedish contact, graphic designer Mathias Rapp, told us the tattoo says something like:

Take it Easy

(number 3. 2009)

Creativity = S-X

Scientists reckon/think that the big leap forward in human intelligence was actually based on s-x. Many women liked men that were creative and built sh-t. Therefore the creative gene became stronger and eventually developed a new creative brain.

A recent (not long ago) study proves that we today make more artwork (books and paintings) than before. The genes for intelligence exist primarily in the X chromosome of which men have one and women two.

Therefore there are always more intelligent women, but there are more manly geniuses and more manly idiots.

The experiment/research/study doesn’t mention the fact that women are always brought up to take responsibility. Men have, instead of taking care of house and kids, the ability to play the role of a “hurt/depressed artist” as much as they want.

Kind of cool — in a weird story on your leg for the rest of your life kind of way. Via Two Thousand and AdFreak. Check out the video of said dude getting his leg inked at Tare Lugnt here.

AP board touts new effort to fight online news piracy. The Associated Press and the newspaper industry plan an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators on the internet and try to divert traffic from websites that don’t properly licence news content, the AP board announced Monday. The not-for-profit news cooperative also said it will cut fees by $US35 million for US newspapers in 2010 — on top of a $US30 million reduction that took effect this year — and loosen its long-standing requirement for two years’ notice to cancel AP service. — Associated Press

We always knew it was dangerous to be a paparazzo. Two freelance photographers who snapped pics of Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s weekend wedding in Costa Rica say they were shot at by the supermodel’s security personnel. INF, the photo agency that hired Rolando Aviles and Uri Cortez, said yesterday the two men “narrowly escaped death” when bullets shattered the back windshield of the duo’s Suzuki jeep then hit the vehicle’s front window. Yikes! — The names blog

Cover girl Michelle Obama doesn’t always deliver. Vogue‘s March cover story on Michelle Obama called her “The First Lady the World’s Been Waiting For.” No doubt she’s been embraced by the media world, appearing on cover after cover, from Us Weekly to Newsweek. But when it comes to sales, Ms. Obama may not yet be general-interest magazines’ new Princess Diana, who regularly helped the industry sell more copies at newsstands. A Michelle Obama cover doesn’t hurt a general-interest magazine, the numbers suggest, but it doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift either. — Advertising Age

Playboy site to attract ads with tasteful redesign? With advertising at its print flagship declining, Playboy Enterprises is looking to the web for revenue growth. On April 6, Playboy will unveil an advertiser-friendly redesign of its eb site that it hopes will open the door to marketers who might otherwise shy away from racier content. “We’re no longer peppering the site with girls,” said John Lumpkin, divisional vp, associate publisher of Playboy Digital. “Our goal is to create a site that’s comfortable to more conservative advertisers.” — Media Week

Life after newspapers. Arianna Huffington may wake up some morning to find The Washington Post gone forever and the nakedness of her ripoff exposed to the world. Or she may be producing all her own news long before then. Who knows? But there is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper. — The Washington Post