– If ever there was any doubt about the supremacy of the NFL in America’s hearts, look no further than last week’s Neilsen ratings, where a lowly pre-season game between two middling teams – the Tennessee Titans and the Buffalo Bills – trounced the competition from MLB, NASCAR and the PGA. The “Hall of Fame Game” (so-called because it takes place at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio) averaged 7.9 million viewers, compared to 6.3 million viewers for the final round of the Bridgestone Invitational, 4.7 million for the Yankees-Red Sox game, and 2.5 million for NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series. Let me emphasize – this was a pre-season game between two teams with small fan bases… and it beat out Tiger Woods, one of MLB’s classic rivalries, and a bunch of rednecks driving in circles! Read more here.
– Some nutty British scienticians have decided that Britain’s ideal pet would have the “ears of a rabbit, face of a cat, body of a golden retriever and tail of a horse”. Read more about it here.
– Like I lot of people, I occasionally walk past a dirty car and feel an overwhelming urge to write “Wash Me” on it. Texas artist Scott Wade is the same way, only he uses brushes and his fingers to create masterpieces on the windshields of cars:
Read about his work and see more pictures here.
– And lastly, a bit of free advice for Apple: stop censoring so many iPhone apps! As you probably know, Apple’s iconic iPhone has an online store (called, imaginatively enough, the App Store) where users can download programs for their iPhones. The only problem is that Apple has complete control over what apps make it to the App Store, and sometimes the company likes to use a heavy hand when dealing with developers.
Apple pulled a Bittorrent app from the App Store because “it could be used for piracy” (which is pretty rich from a company that made billions selling iPods!). Apple then banned a Bittorrent viewing program because again “it could be used for piracy” (it’s crucial to note that this program simply connected to a desktop computer and checked the status of the BT app running on that computer; the rejected iPhone app couldn’t download anything by itself). Apple has also taken a caviler attitude with apps that complete with the iPhone’s existing apps (the recent Google Voice drama) or the bread and butter of its main iPhone partner, AT&T (the SlingPlayer drama). But last week might have been the last straw: Apple banned a dictionary app from the App Store… because the program contained “offensive words” (the app was later approved when all the “offensive” words were removed and a “17+” label was added to the app. I just wanted to say this: “Hey, Apple: the Justice Department can investigate companies other than Microsoft and Intel, ya know?”