Blather

{Crickets}

Hello. If you've stumbled into this, my long-dormant blog, via a search engine hit or possibly just a blow on the head, please be aware that I am now blogging at Tumblr and at Twitter. See me there... don't you?

I don't understand. What business are you in again?

"Los Angeles Based Licensing Agency, The Licensing Group Ltd, Returns for Its 13th Licensing Show with New Properties in Its Licensing Portfolio"

Blog Fatigue Gets Big Ink

So I've had some nice emails today about Katie Hafner's NYT piece on compulsive blogging, which mentions this weblog in passing. Some of you have also been kind enough to write over the last few weeks, wondering what's become of the daily snarkiness that marked this site until pretty recently. For what it's worth: Blather's been on a little hiatus, and should be back shortly. Check in every once in a while, if that seems like a good use of your time. Or set your newsreader to scour the site for updates. Shiny, futuristic RSS feed lives here. Mmmm... Shiny!

Blog Fatigue

Fatigued. So very fatigued... And so very, very cold... More later. Maybe.

On The Road. (Again?)

Blather's traveling for most of this month. Back in early May.

(I Can't Get No) Shameless Self-Promotion

Three wheels to glory, in this month's Fortune Small Business.

Screw the verdict, where's my check?

Slobodan Milosevic and other war-crimes suspects will be paid for the time they spend cooling their heels in The Hague, under legislation just adopted by the Serbian parliament ("Paying Ruthless Genocidal War Criminals' FedEx Bills Since 2004"). According to Reuters, "The new law provides all Serbian war crimes indictees at the U.N. tribunal with compensation for lost salaries, plus help to spouses, siblings, parents and children for flight and hotel costs, telephone and mail bills, visa fees and legal charges." The mental picture this spawns, of the extended Milosevic family giddily ordering up Spectravision and gobbling seven-dollar Toblerones in a suite at the Amsterdam Hilton, is almost enough to restore your faith in international justice.

I'm on TV! I'm on TV! I'm... Wait. I'm Not on TV.

Ashleigh Banfield, who I used to take a childish delight in poking with a stick back when we were all hot and bothered about Afghanistan, is apparently washed up at NBC, where she has been toiling invisibly for some time. Her representatives are said to be exploring exciting possibilities in syndication. Circle gets the square!

And SLAP! And two. And three. And four.

This is so wonderful I hardly know where to begin: Richard Simmons (yes, that Richard Simmons) overhears a guy make a comment while waiting in line for a flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The comment, if accurately reported, is so mouth-breathingly dopey that it barely even registers as a quip: "Hey, everybody, it's Richard Simmons. Let's drop our bags and rock to the '50s." Simmons, however, goes nuts when he hears it, tells observers he's going to "bitch slap" the guy, and proceeds to do so. The guy -- a 6'1", 255-lb. Harley salesman and cage fighter named Chris Farney -- is apparently so "stunned," in the words of a police spokesman, that he walks away, then thinks better of it and contacts authorities. Farney tells the cops he wants to press charges. Simmons is later allowed to board a flight to Los Angeles.

My New Favorite TV Show

As Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show, people with jobs really missed out on something yesterday, unless their jobs permitted them, as mine did, to sit and stare at the TV coverage of the 9/11 hearings. The opening statement by witness and BushCo whipping boy Richard Clarke was so simple and eloquent, and offered such a stark contrast to the "What, us? Noooo, them" of other witnesses, that it seemed to knock even the panel's most aggressive Clarke-hunters off their game. (Former Navy Secretary John Lehman took a good nasty swing but missed by a mile, and Clarke never rattled.) Streaming video: The Washington Post excerpts Clarke's opening statement; C-Span has Clarke's complete testimony, plus the subsequent appearance by deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who really should think about playing silent-movie villains in his next career. The Post also has David Montgomery's take on panel member Bob Kerrey's open disgust over witnesses' buck-passing. Slate's Fred Kaplan weighs in here on Clarke's day before the cameras.

Wind! Smells! Something Shiny!

Poynter's Al Tompkins rounds up recent legislative activity on dogs in trucks. Common sense would seem to dictate that while a dog riding in the back of a pickup is cute as all hell, it isn't necessarily a good idea, as some dogs (and I say this as a dog owner) tend to let their natural joie de vivre overrule more basic instincts, like self-preservation. (Irish setters, I am looking in your direction.) Of course, some dog people disagree. "If you say the words 'ride in the truck,' they are going nuts," Amy Beasley of Columbia, TN tells The Tennessean.

And Mr. Gibson Thanks You For Your Seventeen Dollars

A Georgia couple really got into it, theologically speaking, after viewing "The Passion of the Christ": Sean and Melissa Davidson ended up debating the film so forcefully that Melissa walked away with injuries to her arm and face and Sean incurred a stigmata-like wound to his hand, although it was inflicted not with a spike but a scissors. Everybody involved seems vaguely embarrassed by the incident. "It was the dumbest thing we've ever done," Melissa says. Adds a Statesboro sheriff's deputy: "Really, it was kind of a pitiful thing.... I think they missed the point." The Smoking Gun has the incident report. (Also via reader Gary I. Selinger of New York.)

Plus, You Gotta Tip Like 16%

Thanks to Jane Farries of Not My Dog for this: The British Home Secretary wants the right to charge wrongly-convicted prisoners £3000 for every year of room and board they received while incarcerated. The Home Sec, David Blunkett, who could not have been more delightfully named if he'd been an actual Dickens character, argues that the prisoners would have spent that much for food and lodging if they'd been free, instead of, you know, wrongfully imprisoned. Understandably, ex-guests of the state see it differently. Robert Brown served 25 years for a murder conviction that was overturned in 2002; now he owes the Crown £80,000, his girlfriend has left him and he's facing eviction from his home -- all in all, the very stuff of bad country songs. "I never contemplated suicide once while I was in prison," he says, "but it's different on the outside."

Philadelphia to "The Real World": That's How We Do It in the PA, Beeyatch

"The Real World" is pulling out of my hometown after slamming up against one intractable reality: "This is a union town," according to Tony Frasco, vice president of Teamsters Local 107. RW producers figured to come into Philadelphia and set up non-union, as they've done in jerkwater burgs like New York, Chicago and Boston. They apparently didn't reckon on the creative levels of intransigence to which a real Philadelphia Teamster can rise when provoked. Too bad: Now we'll never know what a bunch of high-strung, narcissistic twentysomethings do when the Tastykakes run out.

Yard Fest!

Mark your calendar: It's Yard Fest 2004, Saturday May 1, from 10 am to 7 pm at Steve White's Folk Farm in Albuquerque, NM. Food, music and more outsider artists than you can shake a stick at. Generally speaking you don't want to go around shaking sticks at outsider artists, but I've been to Yard Fest and they're a really nice bunch of people. If you're anywhere in the Southwest, stop by and say hi.

Rummy Ruffled

"You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't...It's become kind of folklore that that's what happened."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Face The Nation (CBS), 3/14/04

"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02, quoted back to Rumsfeld by NYT reporter Thomas Friedman

"It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know."

-- CBS transcript of Rumsfeld's response

(Via The Progress Report. Squirmy, uncomfortable video clip here. I guess one could make a word-parsing argument that "more immediate threat" is not the same as "immediate threat." It'd be hard to make the same distinction about White House spokesman Scott McClellan's remark from February of last year: "This is about imminent threat." I mean, it--I--we--heh! Phew! Hey, look over there!)

Mmm... Low-Sugar

As part of its continuing effort to establish the health benefits of pastries and coffee, Blather reported recently on the campaign to roll out a healthy doughnut. Now AP reports that industry behemoth Krispy Kreme is getting into the game. The Motley Fool casts a jaundiced eye on the idea.

Wrap Up Those Fosters, Mate, I've Got a Vote

The New South Wales parliament has its own in-house liquor store. According to one backbencher, it's in no danger of going out of business anytime soon.

No, Please, You Go Straight To Hell First, My Friend

The New York Times pulls off a neat trick with this dispatch on a Finn who's offering fellow Finns lessons on how to get mad. (Anger is apparently highly un-Finnish.) The guy's had almost no takers, which in the normal course of things would suggest a non-story. The NYT imaginatively claims that the lack of response is actually proof of how anger-averse Finns are, and makes it one of the hooks on which its piece hangs. I'm woozy with admiration for this technique, which somebody (okay, it's me) has dubbed the "circular self-confirming non-confirmation." Requires NYT login and password, which would undoubtedly make my blood boil if I weren't part-Finnish.

Best Obit Ever

"There's no glamour anymore. Today's generation are arrogant and indiscreet. They want to show off their material wealth. I was never interested in that; I never liked to be ostentatious. I didn't spend my money on Rolls-Royces or helicopters, and I never bought expensive horses to play polo. We just wanted to have fun and sleep with beautiful women."

Jorge Guinle, old-school Brazilian playboy, who died last week at 88

(LA Times login and password req.)

Church Chat

I guess I'm kind of relieved, in a way. And say, that's a heck of a deal for a fish fry!

(Via the best stupid web trick ever, Ryland Sanders' Church Sign Generator.)

When Trends Marry

What do you get when when two trends you're already pretty sick of, weblogging and Atkins-mania, run headlong into one another? The geekiest blog of the century. (And hey, kids: It's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Yow!)

We shall fight in the bird cage, we shall fight in the -- Well, that's about it, I suppose. We shall fight in the bird cage. At least until Mrs. Grimsby puts the sheet over the top.

Here's Sarah Lyall on the parrot that may or may not have belonged to Winston Churchill. Lyall is unable to confirm the story's wackiest assertion: That the bird occasionally lets loose with an anti-Nazi broadside in something like the late PM's own voice. (She does track the rumor back to the reporter who first put it into print, but he doesn't exactly claim it's rock-solid -- he says he thinks he remembers reading it on the Internet.) NY Times login and password req.

It's The Most Deadliest Time of the Year, or: Have Yourself a Deadly Little Christmas, or:Really, Really Silent Night

Researchers at Duke (led by a cardiologist actually named Dr. Trip Meine, according to Reuters) say you're more likely to die if admitted to a hospital during the winter holidays than at any other time of the year. According to Dr. Trip, " ...heart attack patients admitted during this holiday period were less likely to receive angioplasty to open clogged arteries (12.5 percent versus 15.3 percent for those admitted the rest of the year), and had an increased mortality rate (22.5 percent versus 20.5 percent)." The implication seems to be that medical personnel are somewhat less attentive during the holidays, a hypothesis already proven conclusively in the hospital scenes of both "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Pt. II." Two questions that the study apparently fails to answer: What did Dr. Meine do as a pre-med to earn the nickname "Trip," and is this really the best possible background for a guy who's going to crack your chest open?

Free Skate!

UPN has ordered the producers of a new animated series to cut a brief flash of a female character's buttocks. An animated female character. Like, a cartoon. I was gonna fish around for something snarky to say about this, but then I got so depressed and tired over this climate of galloping post-Janet-Jackson yahooism we seem to be living in now that I just figured what the hell, you guys write your own jokes while I go check on exactly what's involved in moving to Vancouver.

Still Standing

The Gate's Mark Morford, whose capacity for colorful outrage continues to be a beautiful thing, wonders: Where is the retribution that San Francisco has coming if gay marriage is such an affront to the cosmos? (He also adds an interesting dimension to the debate over Biblical infallibility: Oh, and while we're at it, God also really hates shrimp. Maybe you didn't know. Shrimp are evil, as are all shrimp eaters. Clams, too. Hey, it's in the Bible. You can look it up. Why the Right is attacking homosexuals in love and not, say, Red Lobster, remains a mystery.)

You Can Have My Shameless Self-Promotion When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands

This month in Fortune Small Business: A look at the Cassity brothers, the world's liveliest undertakers.

From The Copy Desk

Print journalism has a long, inglorious history of tin-eared changes rendered by copy desks, resulting in embarrassed writers left to protest (usually to little effect) that what got printed really, really, really isn't what they meant. (If Blather had a copy desk, by the way, those three reallys would have become one, which would be technically correct but less zippy. This is one of the reasons why Blather doesn't have a copy desk.) My favorite of these stories -- maybe apocryphal, but hey, who cares -- involves the Newsweek writer who described an upscale women's school as "tony Bennett College," and sent the story off, proud of his little pun. The copy desk upper-cased the "t," which resulted in a reference to "Tony Bennett College." Here's the latest example, from L.A. Observed: The LA Times' Mark Swed calls the Richard Straus opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" an "incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean," meaning that it's a work which comes down exuberantly on the side of life in the great cosmic debate. The phrase ends up in the paper as -- wait for it -- "an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean." Swed is understandably steamed, and demands a correction. He gets two. Footnote: As of this writing, the original (i.e., bad and erroneous) version remains on the LAT website, right next to an explanatory note.

Yeah? "Walk" This, Pal. I Gotcher "Walk" Right Here.

If you've ever stood on a New York City street corner, jabbing away at the button that's supposed to make the light turn, watching as it doesn't and feeling increasingly powerless and frustrated, turns out there's a good reason why: The city disconnected the vast majority of the buttons years ago. The timing of traffic lights and cross signals in New York has since the 1970s been controlled by a vast network of super-intelligent cyborgs (or something, I'm a little shaky on the details), rendering more than 2500 of the city's 3250 "Walk" buttons inoperable. The city has chosen to keep this information to itself as part of a continuing initiative to "narcotize the populace into believing they have some small measure of autonomy." (This may not be the city's official position. I'm a little shaky on the details.)

Honestly, I'm Not Buying It

"What happens when two successful black rappers move into a predominantly white gated suburban community in New Jersey?" the Hollywood Reporter asks. Phew, for a minute there I thought they were describing a new pilot for Fox.

Oh. Wait. They were.

Man, that's depressing. So is the tepid endorsement given the premise by one of its creators, rapper/actor Method Man, who "...figured that his idea for a TV series couldn't be any worse than a lot of the stuff he has seen in primetime in recent years." Yow. Could he back off the thing any quicker? Oh. Wait. He can: According to the Reporter, Method Man describes his qualifications this way: "Honestly, I'm not a TV dude." Oh, I don't know.

Live Death

LAPD officers shot and killed a robbery suspect on live local TV yesterday, after a 90-minute chase that was itself broadcast live. The deck of this LA Times piece notes wanly that the incident "revives debate over broadcast of police pursuits." But the tut-tutting doesn't really wash, for at least three reasons. One: I live about half a mile from where the shooting took place, and the amount of increased debate it's fueled has been -- Oh, wait: None. (Note to the LAT: Writing a deck that refers to "debate" does not itself constitute debate.) Two: The broadcast was actually, on its own disturbing terms, a home run for local stations, because it gave viewers exactly what the stations yearn for every time they air live coverage of police chases -- actual death, live on TV. (Come on, if that isn't what they're hoping for, please tell me what is. Either some poor pedestrian gets mashed into guacamole or the malefactor himself crashes, or better yet, goes out in a hail of bullets.) Three: The LAT acts in effect as an adjunct, even an amplifier to the local stations, offering a sidebar link to KTLA footage of the shooting. The KTLA stream, by the way, makes you sit through a commercial before you get to the footage. This goes beyond disingenuousness into some realm of quasi-journalistic shame that's so creepy I hardly know where to begin disapproving of it.

News Roundup

Let's see, what's in the news today? Lena Horne is scandalized by Janet Jackson. Justin Timberlake has bowed out as host of the upcoming "Motown 45" TV special, citing a "scheduling conflict" (i.e., "If that scrawny poseur actually hosts the Motown special, it'll be time to write some angry letters to ABC"). Michael Eisner continues to profess strong support for Disney chairman Michael Eisner. Pretty light news day, actually. Oh, by the way: We're all gonna die.

U-2: The Consumer Model

Gosh, how many times have you said to yourself: "If only technology had advanced to the point where I could buy my own $600 spy plane over the Internet!"

Governor Schwarzenegger, Why Is Pete Wilson Hiding Behind That Potted Palm?

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has directed the state's attorney general to take immediate steps to stop the gay marriages being performed in San Francisco. Schwarzenegger says the city's actions "present an imminent risk to civil order." Sure, as you can tell by the sickening, omnipresent news footage of newly-married gay couples rampaging through the Civic Center, drunk on love and a fabulously flinty Veuve Clicquot, smashing store windows and overturning cars and killing with impunity. Not to be a big ol' wet blanket or anything, but a spokesperson for Attorney General Tom Lockyer points out a teensy niggling little detail: In California, the AG is independently elected and the governor has no statutory authority over him. "The governor cannot direct the attorney general," said spokeswoman Hallye Jordan. "He can direct the Highway Patrol. He can direct 'Terminator 4.' But he can't tell the attorney general what to do."

Switching Off The Lights

After a rather spectacular night of comment spam, I've switched off comments on archived posts at Blather v.1. (Comments still enabled here, but man I sure hope Ben and Mena come up with some effective way to spank those jerks in a future release.) I can't imagine why anybody should care about this, unless they had a burning need to post comments to an obsolete edition of an obscure weblog, in which case they're probably comment spammers and I have for them THIS and also THIS and THIS {series of violent arm gestures}. Thank you.

This Message From The National Council to Promote Literacy Among 15-Year-Old White Boys

"Hey y'all, I'm Britney Spears. I'm just an average kid like you, and I'm here to tell you that if you're lookin' for something fun to do on those average nights, like when your limo driver has to drive around the block while your ex-Mossad security guys brutally clear a path into a Grammy after-party, or like say when you've had a couple too many Crantinis and you went and did something really stupid and you have to sit in the county clerk's office while they annul it, then you know what you should do? Read one of these. It's a book! I swear to God! And this one's one of my favorimites! It's called... oh shoot, I don't know what it's called but it's right down here. No, down here. Down here. Hel-LO, eyes down here please, Mr. Perv. Hello? Shoot, don't read it then. See if I care. I'm richer'n all of y'all and I don't need anybody. Hell, I got 'Oops I Did It Again' money. So y'all can just read one of whatever-all these are or don't. I don't care. For reals, y'all. I don't."

No, RoboDebbie, NO!

The news that Carnegie Mellon University now has a robotic receptionist is less impressive than the sad, dull pain behind the eyes one gets when considering the dreary inevitability of its name: "Roboceptionist." There's also some fairly horrifying information in the wire story about the backstory given the creature by four writers (and man, look how well that worked on "Viva Rock Vegas"): "Valerie... a drum-shaped contraption with a digitally animated face that appears on a computer display," wastes your time nattering on about "her boss, her psychiatrist and her dream of being a lounge star." The air of humanoid authenticity the designers were presumably going for actually breaks down right about there, because when was the last time you met a receptionist who was interested enough in you to do anything but stare vacantly at a point just off your left shoulder? I have met a few who are drum-shaped, but that's another story. Valerie seems to be intended for permanent installation at the university's computer science hall, but given the unpredictable nature of office staffing, I'd look for her to be replaced by an even more disengaged robotemp sometime this fall.

Okay, Let's Move Right On to Gest v. Minnelli

The good news for sane jurisprudence, common sense and the idea of generally proportionate responses to things that upset you: Knoxville banker Terri Carlin is withdrawing her lawsuit against Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, MTV, CBS, Viacom and "I swear, everydamnbody who ever disagreed with me." The bad news: Carlin seems confident the FCC will pick up the slack.

In Fairness, These Are The Same Pollsters Who Said Howard Dean Was Unbeatable

64% of adults contacted at random for an ABC News poll believe the Biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea is literally true, word for word. If this sounds startlingly high, keep in mind that the results are subject to a sampling error of three points.

Polaroid to America: Skank You Very Much

Polaroid urges users not to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," advising instead that:

The best way to ensure a perfectly developed image is to simply lay the picture on a flat surface immediately after it exits the camera.

I can't decide if this is bland corporate humorlessness or a bland corporate attempt to have some kicky fun with the audience of Outkast's "Hey Ya." Either way, it falls as flat as a Polaroid picture which has been properly placed on a surface immediately after it exits the camera. (Alright, alright, alright, alright!!!) Wait, hang on, this just in: What Polaroid actually meant to say is, and I quote: "Thank you. Thank you. We're dyin' here. We were so cool once and now look at us. Holy God, what happened?"

Mmm... Myocardial Infarction

The Wall St. Journal, in a piece about why a truly low-fat doughnut is "the Holy Grail of the food industry," also offers up a little primer on why doughnuts are so tasty and delicious and really, really bad for you: They're basically the best system ever devised for the efficient delivery of fat. (Original WSJ piece subscribers-only; excerpted here via the Seattle PI's Buzzworthy.)

You Can Have My Transfatty Acids When You Pry Th-- Oh, Never Mind

Pepperidge Farm is set to announce that it's removing transfatty acids from its Goldfish crackers. The company will, however, retain the product's terrifying TV jingle, in which a chirpy-voiced singer urges consumers to "bite their heads off," a message comparable in its cheerful creepiness to the twins in "The Shining" urging Danny to "Come play with us... forever and ever and ever... "

Back to You, Becky!

The Christian Science Monitor blows the lid off the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, writing in its ultra-hep Living section that the dogs in the show are "pampered." This is an angle which is so minty fresh that no one has used it for an entire year, since the last Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. For bonus points, the Monitor slugs its piece -- wait for it... yes! -- "This Place Has Really Gone to the Dogs." Yowtch.

Jennifer Garner to Present Tech Oscars...

...Roomful of nerds to brush their hair and sit up really, really straight.

The New Statistical Abstract of the United States Is Here! The New Statistical Abstract of the United States Is Here!

Say, do you enjoy the statistical arcana? Sure you do! Who doesn't? So you're going to love the hell out of the 2003 Statistical Abstract of the United States, which among many other things (many, many, many other things) tells us that:

-- Retail sales of berry-growing supplies had an inexplicable spike to $227 million in 2001, then settled back to a more reasonable $171 million in 2002

-- Aluminum recovered from scrap was a muscular 6.27 billion pounds in 2002 (which is all the more impressive when you think about how light aluminum is)

-- Sales of archery equipment stayed flat in 2002, but sales of skiing equipment ticked up sharply

-- Tourist travel to the US more than doubled among Pakistanis in the '90s, but dropped among Finns

-- People who went to the movies in 2002 tended to be better educated than people who went to amusement parks (although you couldn't prove it by the chart-bendingly high cohort of mouth-breathing, joke-explaining, loud-talking dimwits who sat behind me in movies in 2002, and the statistically insignificant numbers of people I had to ask to stop talking while riding "Space Mountain")

All this and so much more -- so very, very, VERY much more -- is here, at the US Census Bureau. And tell 'em Blather sent you! (Via Poynter's Al Tompkins.)

...Then they came for my breasts and there was no one left to speak out for my breasts

Jeff Jarvis rounds up the latest news in the Janet Jackson breast flap, which is a really unappetizing combination of words that just looks worse and worse the longer I stare at it. (By the way, isn't it about time somebody started a Janet Jackson Breast Flap weblog?) Charles Taylor at Salon singles out Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico for special mention in the competitive "Helen Lovejoy 'Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children'" category, where she's been doing some very nice work, and points out an inherent flaw in the morality crusaders' argument. The scariest news of the day, though, comes not from Salon or even the Hindustan Times, where they're just flummoxed by this whole attraction/repulsion thing we Americans have going on with breasts, but from the tiny Delaware County Times: A local art dealer has a nude in her window. Area bluenoses complain. Cops come calling. Art dealer removes painting from window.

Uh oh.

You Can Have Friday Night on Cinemax When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands

The skin police at the FCC now want to extend their wrath from the broadcast networks to cable and satellite operators. The pretext, of course, is Justin 'n' Janet's shameful display of a quarter-inch of nudity a half a mile away in the Super Bowl halftime show, which this AP story notes also "featured provocative dancing and lyrics laced with sexual innuendo." Mercy! House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, not to be shoved out of the way when there's a camera around and a disapproving populace to demagogue, wants somebody to do something about all those awful commercials, too, which he described as "lewd and crude," apparently deciding that "rude and nude" would just have been gilding.

Your Call Is Impor--AAAAUUUGGGHHHH!^&(*^&**$@%&%%@!, ya BASTARD!!!!!!!Transferring You Now.

Wired News offers, at least indirectly, a new strategy for dealing with voicemail hell: As soon as the system takes your call, scream a hysterical string of profanities into the phone as loud as you can.

Mmm.... Clot-Free

It's vivid but not entirely accurate of New Scientist to refer to a potentially life-saving medical device -- a kind of stent that's placed in the carotid arteries to block the passage of blood clots to the brain -- as a "tea strainer." At least, cripes, I hope it's inaccurate. I'd hate to think my prospects for a stroke-free future rest on something you can get at Bed Bath & Beyond. Besides, what happens if I get some British intern who's so lonesome for a taste of home that he filters a quick cup of Earl Gray through the thing in the five minutes before my emergency surgery?

Surgeon: How do you feel, Mr. Barol?
Me: Better, doctor, thanks. What's more, I have a refreshing hint of bergamot in my brain.

(Thanks, I'll be here all week.)