Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting things you probably already saw because, hey, it’s not like I’ve been updating here: I’d love to be the Dispatch/Argus reporter sent out to talk to this woman. How many times do you think he had to apologize? ****
According to a 73-year-old Geneseo woman, employees at the Geneseo Wal-Mart store apparently felt that 50 cents was too high a price to pay after she became stuck in a Dispatch/Argus vending machine Wednesday evening in front of their store.
Detectives had heard for several weeks that people in the rear apartment of the five-unit building were following the fast-food concept by opening a drug trade business through a back window at the apartment - complete with a buzzer - for people to order and pick up their hits of crack cocaine.
And people say kids today have no sense of customer service … I wonder if they were able to deal with the normal drive-through speaker problem: It’d really suck, I’d think, to place your order for a couple hits of crack and end up with, say, a bag of pot instead. “Dang it, I said ‘crack!’ Plus, they didn’t leave the mustard off my cheeseburger!”
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Tweaking The Journal was no easy task, of course. By Dow Jones chief executive Peter Kann’s own estimates, the company spent four years and $225 million to do it. Moreover, introducing a two-column breaking-news story posed its own problems on a page that’s been defined for so long by its “leder” stories in columns 1 and 6, and it’s “A-hed” feature in the center of the page.
“We didn’t know what to call it,” said Mike Miller, the paper’s page 1 editor, of the new addition. “For a while we were calling it ‘Bob,’ just because we couldn’t think of anything else. Finally [Money & Investing editor] Larry Ingrassia started calling it the ‘extra story.’ That seems to have stuck.”
I just love that they called it “Bob.” I’ve been doing that for years — you get really interesting looks someone asks you what you’re holding and you respond with, for example, “It’s a bottle of soda; it’s name is Bob” — and it warms my heart to know that the WSJ has the same sort of great minds at work.
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A monkey with a fingernail-size brain implant moved a cursor on a computer screen just by thinking.
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A Japanese electronics company has developed drinking glasses which signal when they are almost empty so that table staff know when to bring a refill.
I put these two stories together because of the awesome possibilites that could result from combining the technology. I can see a day when scientists combine self-aware glasses and monkeys with freaky mind powers, resulting in a monkey that will telekinetically bring me drinks whenever my glass has anything less than a full shot in it. Quite frankly, I can’t believe the world has lasted this long without mutant monkey waiters, and I say something must be done to rectify the situation.