Though it has quite a long way to go before rivaling Glastonbury and Coachella, this year's Media Battle of the Bands at New York City's B.B. King Blues Club delivered six nonstop hours of music.

As you may remember, Aesop's "the Ant and the Grasshopper" is a tale extolling the virtues of work and saving that showcased the wisdom of sacrificing the indiscriminate pleasures of the present for the security of the future. A good day tomorrow is worth two good days today. However, given today's economic realities, not everyone would agree.

I have a really nice blue pin-striped suit from barneys. It looks great and when I wear it I feel like a million bucks. Oddly, nobody ever compliments me on it. On the other hand, I have a cheap, very loud jacket that I bought on sale at Filene's Basement. Total strangers on the street tell me how much they like it. One just never knows what the public is going to like.

When someone's eyes move up and right, it's a signal they are accessing the creative part of the brain. Up and to the left implies they are accessing memory. If you are speaking with someone and they quickly look right, that implies they are lying and if they look left, they are likely telling the truth.

There's nothing playful about grand central station at rush hour.Usually you keep your head low and walk fast, dodging the tourists who gawk at the ceiling. But then one day, there's a troop of gorgeous living mannequins posing on the staircase, holding the smallest, shiniest laptops you've ever seen. Go ahead, stop and play. Lots of people did - and they'll remember Sony's Vaio P-series, a sleek 8-inch mini weighing in at 1.4 pounds. Grand Central does not welcome many advertisers. Maserati sometimes parks a car and raffles it off …

Views of TV content online is notoriously hard to compare to traditional Nielsen ratings. Unique viewers don't mean squat, according to Artie Bulgrin, senior vice president of research and analytics at ESPN. "It's a meaningless stat. All it tells me is a person came in for a minute at any time during the month."

have been a dedicated, passionate Facebook user since 2004, when I was a sophomore magazine journalism student at Syracuse University. In fact, one might call me an "early adopter" of "social networking" technology. I have witnessed the site blossom - nay, explode - in popularity, applications and innovations during the past five years. In fact, when I am an elderly, lonely man, I plan on sharing the thousands of wall posts with my suitemate at the retirement castle during one of his fits of dementia, to reflect on my long-lost youthful vigor.

On Bravo's FLIPPING OUT, OCD-suffering real-estate speculator Jeff Lewis has turned his focus to interior design, choosing to flip off his aggressive buy-sell impulses, at least until the real estate business perks up a bit. Likewise on The Learning Channel, Flip That House has given way to the more buyer-leveraged Deals on the Bus. "We've done a bit of a shift to reflect what's happening in the market," says Nancy Daniels, senior vice president of production and development for TLC.

It ain't exactly TicketMaster-Live Nation, but when country crooners Rascal Flatts American Living Unstoppable Tour kicks off this June, it will mark yet another example of corporate sponsorship's continuing domination of the music world. In conjunction with the launch of JCPenney's American Living collection, the two-year sponsorship deal will require Rascal Flatts members to do everything from compose and record a tribute song titled "American Living" to driving around in a fleet of tour trucks and buses wrapped in commercial signage. They'll even wear JCPenney clothing during all concerts and appearances.

Waterboarding might be too lenient (if satisfyingly appropriate) a punishment for Craig Zucker, the founder of Tap'dNY. Tap'd is a company that rented a Brooklyn warehouse, opened up a water main in it, and started bottling the stuff, which it now peddles under the tongue-in-cheek brand name.