‘American Idol’ Season 10: Hollywood Week Continues With Group Night

The stress and scramble started well before the contestants hit the stage on Idol’s continued Hollywood Week. That’s because it was group night - singers had to form a team and perform together, even though the eliminations would be individual.

A surprise rule: Groups had to be made up of both day one and day two singers from the first part of the week, which made some of the pre-planning singers had attempted a waste of time. Contestants like Tiffany Rios, who had talked smack on stage during the elimination had a rough time teaming up. She got special permission to form a duet even though every other group had to have a minimum of three singers. Several others were picky about who’d they sing with, and instead of practicing with a group kept searching for the perfect fit.

AOL and HuffPo Tap Booz, Talk Integration

As AOL and the Huffington Post plan their marriage, they’ve tapped Booz & Co. for help, according to people familiar with the matter.

The consultants are sitting in on an array of planning meetings over how to unite the editorial, product and sales staffs of the two organizations.

A spokesman for the firm declined to comment.

Those integration meetings are ramping up this week, as Huffington Post executives regularly drop in on AOL’s headquarters.

On Tuesday, the sales teams met in a more social setting over pool and ping pong, one of these people said.

AOL, which announced its plans to acquire the news and opinion site for $315 million nine days ago, expects the deal to close in the next month or so.

Please read more at our sister blog Digits.

Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum: A Timeline of His Lost Years

In 1998, Jeff Mangum and his band Neutral Milk Hotel released “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” a haunting psychedelic folk record widely considered an indie rock masterpiece. Not long after the album’s release, Mangum virtually vanished from the public eye, and he’s basically been hiding out ever since — a sort of J.D. Salinger for the indie rock set.

Recently, however, Mangum has been showing up unannounced, usually wearing the same flannel shirt and wrinkled hat. His first live performance of Milk Hotel material in seven years came in October of 2008, when he performed at a few concerts celebrating his former Elephant Six labelmates. Two years later, he played a short set at an New York benefit for stroke victim and fellow-folkie Chris Knox. And this past December, he played a solo show in a Brooklyn loft, announced mere hours earlier.

Could this mean indie rock’s long lost anti-hero could be back for good? While fans contemplate the news, Speakeasy has compiled a timeline of Mangum’s lost decade.

Sen. Scott Brown Recalls Childhood Abuse on ‘60 Minutes’

On this week’s upcoming episode of “60 Minutes,” Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown tells Lesley Stahl that as a child, he was the victim of “physical, psychological and sexual abuse”. According to a statement from the show, Brown, 51, reveals that he was abused several times by a camp counselor. He was also physically abused by stepfathers — details that will surprise many who know him well and are also revealed in his upcoming book “Against All Odds.”

Watch a preview clip of the interview after the jump.

Hit Films Get App-ified

Want to download the films “Inception” or “The Dark Knight” for your iPhone or iPad? There’s an app for that.

Wednesday, Warner Bros. released “app editions” of director Christopher Nolan’s popular action-dramas, calling it the first time a major studio has made its films available to download within a freestanding application, rather than through a download service like Apple’s iTunes Store or Wal-Mart’s Vudu. (Independent filmmakers have previously explored the idea of releasing their undistributed films as apps.)

Dead Space iPhone App Aims to Put Horror in Your Pocket

The iPhone is an unlikely venue for Dead Space, Visceral Games’ survival horror videogame about fighting alien-infested corpses with futuristic mining tools and telekinetic powers. Yet this downloadable app is not only a dead ringer for its console brethren, but a self-contained adventure that successfully translates their fundamentals to the small screen. You play as Vandal, a member of the Church of Unitology—a cryptic organization whose purpose was unclear in the first game and remains so here. Like the new sequel Dead Space 2, the action occurs three years after those in the first game.

For ‘Tron’ Fans: Your Very Own Light Cycle

The film “Tron: Legacy” may have come and gone at your local movie house. And while it didn’t break any box-office records, the story made an impression. Well, OK, it was the vehicles in the story that we remember most, especially the Light Cycles. How cool were they?

If you picture yourself cruising the digital grid on a sleek, brightly illuminated bike, then the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog may have just the thing: a street-legal Light Cycle. The retailer is taking orders now (all light cycles are built to order) so you could be on the road long before the next “Tron” sequel.

More after the jump.

Stars Descend on Michael Kors New York Fashion Week Show

Organized chaos enveloped every facet of the Michael Kors show, from the personal runway escorts who brazenly broke through the thicket of photographers to seat the likes of Debra Messing, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas and Bette Midler, to the backstage photo booth assembled solely for the models to document their experience to the vice president of visual merchandising at Bergdorf Goodman Linda Fargo.

It is, after all, the 30th anniversary of Michael Kors.

Jeopardy Computer Watson Heads to Final Chapter

Last year, writer Stephen Baker approached Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with an idea for a book about an IBM computer  designed to compete against humans on Jeopardy! “I said, ‘There’s going to be a big match in January 2011 and we should really hurry and get a book out by September,” Baker recalled. “They said, ‘Forget it.’”

The publishing house the story would be old news by the time Baker’s book was published. Instead, HMH suggested Baker report and write everything but the final chapter by the time the match took place so the book could be in stores the next day. The result, “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything,” will go on sale in hardcover tomorrow.

Read Speakeasy’s interview with Baker and watch a clip after the jump.

Vashti Bunyan: A Cult 1960s Folkie Steps Back In the Studio

Vashti Bunyan is one of the more obscure figures from the late-60s British folk scene. She released a couple of singles and one little-known album, “Just Another Diamond Day,” before disappearing. In the decades since, Bunyan’s ethereal music has attracted a cult following. As a treat for fans, she appears on the soundtrack to the new autism documentary “Wretches & Jabberers,” which also includes singers like Stephen Stills, Norah Jones and Carly Simon.

Read more and hear Bunyan’s song after the jump.