April 12, 2002
Customer service

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting things you probably already saw because, hey, it's not like I've been updating here:



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.

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?

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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.


Posted by tgibbons at 01:29 PM
March 08, 2002
Slightly geeky

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting things you would have read if you hadn't been captivated by my love of vegetables:




European countries on Monday applauded a decision by Switzerland to join the United Nations after 57 years on the sidelines ... "This historic decision puts one of Europe's oldest democracies where she belongs — at the heart of global decision-making," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.

The U.N is at the heart of global decision making? Eh, sorry ... just having an Americo-centric moment ...



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Superman will be weakened and suffer irreparably if a hair company is allowed to keep marketing a green hair gel called Kryptonite, the superhero's creator claims.

First, that's an awesome lede. Second, does it matter that Krypton is a real element? Third, it'd be cool if they came out with red Kryptonite gel: "I used this new gel, and look -- now I have an ant head! and grew a third arm! Nifty!"



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A determined cow that hurdled a six-foot fence to escape from a Cincinnati slaughterhouse and eluded police for 11 days will be allowed to live out the rest of her natural life. The 1,200-pound Charolais was an hour from death when she bolted from a barn at Ken Meyer Meats, bowling over workers leaving for a break.

See, this is where kryptonite could come in handy. What, you're telling me that's a normal cow?



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Some people live in New York ... perhaps only for the mysteriously pleasurable sight of a stranger on the morning subway or the evening bus slithering into an empty seat or getting a good grip on a pole and then deeply resuming his or her paperback of "The Counterlife" or "Glitz" or "The Vampire Lestat" or "The Idiot" or "All the Pretty Horses" or "A Journal of the Plague Year," or, most likely of all, a book you've never heard of.

Oh, c'mon ... you're saying that the people on the subway are actually readingthose books? I've always figured that anybody with an on-so-serious tome on public transportation is just showing off. They really have have a comic book or something stashed inside.

Posted by tgibbons at 10:45 AM
March 01, 2002
In the trenches

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting interesting stories from the week:


Csikszentmihalyi is digressing from the topic at hand, which is his explanation of why he has built a satellite-linked, Net-operated robot that he intends to send into a combat zone ASAP. Since the invasion of Grenada, he notes, the U.S. Armed Forces have limited journalists' access to areas where fighting is taking place, and he finds this troubling, to say the least.

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The House's approval of campaign finance reform earlier this month has drawn vast coverage. But the broadcast networks somehow failed to mention that high-powered television lobbyists killed an amendment that would have provided cheaper rates for candidate advertising.

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David Frum, the former Canadian journalist and speechwriter for U.S. President George W. Bush, has left the White House — but not, he said Monday, because of an imbroglio surrounding his authorship of the phrase "axis of evil."

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Which brings us back to the lawsuit. Why did Netscape fail? Because it was managed with this kind of incompetence. The last major revision of Netscape Communicator, version 6.0, which was introduced in April 2000, was a disaster.

Posted by tgibbons at 01:51 PM
February 25, 2002
I can just shake my head

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting interesting stories from the week:


British troops temporarily invaded Spain when a landing exercise on Gibraltar went wrong.

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A male sexuality class at The University of California at Berkeley has been suspended after the campus newspaper published allegations that students watched their instructor have sex at a strip club and participated in an orgy at an extracurricular party.

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The Vatican said Tuesday it would neither confirm nor deny a report that Pope John Paul II has now carried out three exorcisms during his papacy, the latest in September. The Rev. Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist for the Rome diocese, told La Stampa newspaper, that the most recent exorcism involved a young woman who appeared to be possessed during the pope's general audience.

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A Filipino man was killed and his friend seriously wounded after they sarcastically applauded a student for singing Frank Sinatra's classic "My Way" off-key, according to a newspaper report.

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Their lawsuit in Johnson County District Court alleges that the previous homeowners and the real estate professionals had a duty to disclose that a "gruesome murder" had occurred in the house they were buying just north of 95th Street on High Drive.

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Posted by tgibbons at 04:52 PM
February 15, 2002
Breath deeply

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting interesting stories from the week:


Scientists don't know about Apollo, but evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic which, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.

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"I don't think Howell wants people bitching about how they can't spend time on the road," says one reporter. "He's looking for 30-year-olds with no spouse and no children, people who can file from four datelines in five days. It's the model of what a national correspondent was like when Howell was on the national staff.”

(Ehhh, I’m still under 30, but I got the rest of the qualifications ... call me)

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An airline passenger who allegedly got up to go the bathroom less than 30 minutes before landing became the first person arrested under a new federal flight regulation adopted for the Olympics.
Richard Bizarro, 59, could get up to 20 years in prison on charges of interfering with a flight crew.

(Bizarro?! That somehow makes the story even more ... well, bizarre ...)

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On the eve of the Toy Fair last week, Hasbro gave a party at the company's Chelsea showroom to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of its first toy, Mr. Potato Head.

(Happy Birthday, Mr. P!>

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Ten resolutely celibate sharks at the National Sea Life Center are getting a blast of Barry White in hopes they'll get in the mood for lurve.

("We'll know if they are likely to mate as the male chases the female and tries to bite her back and pectoral fins in the early stages of courtship ...” Ah, sweet, sweet love ...)

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''I wanthsssssFFFF!!'' he says, stuttering. My robber. Stutters. If someone is stuttering, you don't draw attention to it, right? You figure out what he wants. This is a very bad time for a communication problem, and it's probably all my fault.

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Chocolate fries with your burger? Beginning in May, H.J. Heinz Co. will ship a new line of Ore-Ida frozen potato products called Funky Fries featuring five new shapes, colors and flavors, all intended to give kids even more say over their parents' grocery store lists.

(Two great tastes that ...uh, suck? ... together ...)

Posted by tgibbons at 10:34 AM
February 08, 2002
All sorts of mistakes

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting some interesting stories from the week:

Meanwhile, when county cops cracked down on the local massage parlor trade last year, they did so in a decidedly Montgomery County kind of way: by paying someone else to do the deed. While detectives waited outside establishments in Bethesda and Wheaton, informers equipped with $100 of taxpayers' money had sex with suspected prostitutes. County Police Chief Charles A. Moose justified the unorthodox investigative practice at the time, saying, "We don't want our police officers to have these values and morals."

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"He's a real fun-loving guy who's also intellectually serious," says Larry Ingrassia, editor of the Journal's Money & Investing section. While they were posted together in the London bureau, where the ponytail-wearing (Daniel) Pearl kept a beach chair, Pearl invited some people he met on the subway to a staff Thanksgiving dinner. He also once wrote a story about sturgeon in verse; it never ran.

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Being in high-tech journalism these days means having a lot of unemployed friends. That ensures both a lot of freeloaders at table and a steady stream of media industry rumors. Among the most intriguing, especially to out-of-work associates, are whispers of new life springing from the ashes of the high-tech media apocalypse that claimed so many jobs and whole publications over the past 18 months.

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Because of knucklehead errors, a photograph caption in The Palm Beach Post Monday incorrectly identified one of the Three Stooges, as well as Abbott and Costello. The caption misidentified Curly Howard, at left, one of the Three Stooges, as Curly Joe Howard. Curly Howard, whose real name was Jerome Lester Horwitz, was the brother of Moe and Shemp Howard. Curly Joe DeRita was the sixth and last member to join the Stooges. The caption also incorrectly referred to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello when in fact the photo showed Costello and Abbott, at right. The errors appeared on Page 4E of the Accent section; the photos illustrated a story on the front page of Accent about movie shorts. We're pleased to note that we correctly identified Laurel and Hardy.

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A voter fraud conviction against a former city commissioner should be nullified because the defendant's lawyer was having an affair with his client's wife, a federal magistrate said.

Posted by tgibbons at 02:20 PM
September 28, 2000
Olympic weirdness

From Sydney...
* How long until this doctor is found floating face down in the Danube?

* "The way we slide through life, wasting time by the hour, we ordinary humans never notice it. Yet elite athletes, for whom a wasted hour is 360,000 opportunities to grab a hundredth of a second, seem to have some highly calibrated internal timepiece. The sprinter Ato Boldon, of Trinidad and Tobago, says he can feel the hundredth of a second."

Posted by tgibbons at 12:16 PM
September 21, 2000
Lo and behold?!

This had to be shared:

JARRATT, Va. (AP) — Three monkeys hurled bananas and crab apples at cars on Interstate 95, then fled into the woods, police said.
Police believe the monkeys escaped while being taken to the state fair in Richmond or a circus in North Carolina.
State Trooper Mike Scott was flagged down Sunday by a driver who had pulled over near Jarratt. "When I walked up to the car, it looked like a banana had been smeared on the side," Scott said.
The woman told him a monkey had thrown the fruit about a mile back.
"I started laughing," Scott said. But he drove to the scene of the attack and found a van and a station wagon on the side of the highway.
"A man said, `I know this sounds crazy, but a monkey threw an apple at our car,"' Scott said.
Just then, something hit the van.
"Lo and behold there were three brown monkeys in an oak tree throwing crab apples," Scott said.
The primates jumped down, ran across the highway and escaped into more trees.

Posted by tgibbons at 06:48 PM