My career as a personal-lubricant pitchman started with a favorited tweet on Stellar that linked to Amazon where, for just $1,495, anyone could purchase a 55-gallon drum of Passion Natural water-based lubricant (and save 46 percent off list!).

Notorious class sleeper, D student, failed Oscar host, art enthusiast, multiple PhD candidate, and sometimes actor James Franco is going to ruin literature once again. He sold a novel! To Amazon! About actors! My eyes are getting a workout from all this rolling.

The economy is crappier than a Porta-Potty at an outdoor electronic dance music festival. We've all got to pinch pennies, and the holidays are no exception. So, we present our top five gifts under five cents.

Workers in an Amazon.com warehouse were routinely sent to the emergency room because of sweltering, suffocating heat that sometimes exceeded 110 degrees — and because Amazon refused to open warehouse doors, fearing theft, according to a devastating exposé in the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call. After workers, an E.R. doctor and a security guard complained, federal regulators investigated the warehouse and recommended changes. Amazon responded with popsicles, bandanas and finger pointing.

Dudes, the publishing industry is sucking harder than a middle-aged hedge fund manager summiting K2. What it needs is a jolt of hot, unadulterated innovation. Get ready, 'cause Amazon's entering the publishing biz with the world's foremost synergetically awesome innovabro.

Earlier this year, aerial photos of a newly discovered tribe living in Brazil's Amazon rainforest electrified the internet. Now that entire tribe, numbering around 200, has gone missing—and a panicking Brazilian government fears that cocaine smugglers are to blame.

That cute one you've had your eye on in the subway? She/he totally might have chatted you up, if you'd been reading a real book instead of a goddamned Kindle.

Last week, Brazilian authorities confirmed the existence of an uncontacted tribe of about 200 in the Western Amazon. They may be the last people on Earth unaware of the whole Charlie Sheen thing. (His existence, that is.)

Selling Lady Gaga's new album Born This Way for 99 cents not only crashed Amazon's servers, but also cost them about $3 million. Was it worth it?

Behold, the power of Lady Gaga. The pop superstar's new album, "Born This Way," managed to crash Amazon.com's servers soon after the retailer offered it on sale for only 99 cents. Consumers, initially wowed by the discount, quickly became peeved by the dragging download speeds, and took to the album review section to complain not of Gaga's music but of their ridiculous experience using Amazon—one fan I know said it took upwards of six hours to download the CD.

In your absurd Wednesday media column: a lawsuit against HuffPo proceeds, Amazon dives into book publishing, Bloomberg View is totally out there, the New York Times has a drug pusher's business strategy, and e-commerce is your future.

One need only look to the iPad 2 feeding frenzies currently gripping China for evidence that Apple is the hottest brand on the planet. And now it's official: Research company Millward Brown puts Apple at the top of their annual 100 global brand power list, knocking Google off the throne its held for four years running. The iPad has helped Apple grow 84%, to an estimated worth of $153 billion.

Textbooks cost way too much money, as any college student knows. Take Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly, which for a moment last week would have run you a cool $23,698,655.93 on Amazon.

Laser-eyed managementspeak cult guru Seth Godin has done it again: he's Unleashed the Idea Virus of Purple Cow Meatball Sundaes. No, wait; we mean he's now working without a traditional publisher. Will the unbearable book business ever be the same?

Need some steroids? Sure you do. Try Amazon.com, which offers a veritable ocean of steroid-containing "supplements," ready for shipping right to your doorstep.

Phillip Greaves, who infamously sold The Pedophile's Guide To Love and Pleasure through Amazon's e-book store, has been arrested on obscenity charges. He probably shouldn't have sent an autographed copy of his creepy "child lover's" guide to a Florida sheriff.

The Anonymous online movement that has risen up to defend Wikileaks is so outraged about censorship that they hacked into ABC News's web site and spiked a story about Sarah Palin. Makes sense, no? Or not.

Correction: The page we thought was an Anonymous hack replacing Jake Tapper's story, from which this screengrab is taken, was actually a page created by ABC News to show the hack that had been perpetrated on Palin's web site. Our mistake. Here is the Tapper story, safe and sound.

Under pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman, Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks.org off its servers. But why stop there? There's all kinds of controversial customers the cowardly but remarkably convenient e-tailer can flee from.

Amazon is launching Amazon Studios, a website that they are hoping will turn into a viable production label for producing feature films. Whose movies are they going to make? Yours! Well, maybe.

The Internet was afire today with the news that Amazon.com is selling a guide for pedophiles. Tonight, Anderson Cooper let his disgust be known when he opened AC360 with a related segment and called out Amazon's hypocrisy in the process.