Category: News

In my book, payday lenders barely rank above child molesters and record company executives. I mean, I’m all for capitalism, and I think that people should have the right to get a payday loan, no matter how crappy the terms of the loan may be. But still, payday lenders are nothing but parasites. My heart leaps with joy at this news: apparently Cash America, one of the nation’s largest payday loan providers, ceased offering payday loans to U.S. military personnel on October 1, 2007. This is because of a new law called the Department of Defense Military Lending Act, which caps the interest charged to military personnel at 36%. Poor ol’ Cash America decided that 36% just wasn’t enough money, so they stopped offering loans to active duty personnel. Poor bastards!

Beijing, China’s first “smoke free” restaurant chain, Meizhou Dongpo, is apparently on the verge of going out of business. The Chinese are the world’s heaviest smokers, and banning smoking has not only kept smokers away, it’s kept non-smokers who hang out with smokers away, too. Business is down around 80% at the chain; at press time, it’s unsure whether the chain would simply go out of business or give up on the “smoke free” policy.

TV Squad columnist Jay Black has posted this interesting piece about “channel drift”. Channel drift is when a cable channel “drifts” from its original raison d’etre to other, non-related programming. The Learning Channel, for instance, used to run nothing but shows about history, science, and nature. Due to “channel drift” it now shows crap like Miami Ink (a reality show about a Miami tattoo studio), Flip This House (a reality show about buying homes, fixing them up and selling them for a profit) and John and Kate Plus Eight (a reality show about a married couple with eight children). There’s precious little “learning” to be found on The Learning Channel nowadays, and Jay’s post discusses why. It’s an interesting read.

Polymer Vision, a spin-off of Dutch electronics giant Philips, has released super-sexy photos of a new device. Originally conceived as an additional screen for mobile phones, the “Readius” is the first display that can be folded back in to the device when not in use. The display is around the size of two business cards when extended, but when you want to put it away, you just push it halfway into the phone and fold the other half over the back side of the phone (see the “full size” photo link in the linked article). That’s pretty hawt!

And lastly for today… check out this article from The Onion. Apparently Jessica Simpson is an evil genius along the lines of a James Bond villain. Her goal? To disrupt the Cowboy’s 2007 season!

This may be another Internet hoax, but this guy is claiming that Microsoft called him last week… for an issue he was having 10 years ago!

It seems that he was having an issue with “Windows” (Windows 98? Windows NT?) waaaaayy back on January 7th, 1998. Microsoft’s tech support people gave him several things to try, and promised that they’d call him back the next day to check on the issue. Apparently one of those fixes worked, since the guy never bothered to call Microsoft back. And he either forgot that Microsoft was supposed to call him back, or was so happy that his computer now worked that he overlooked the missed call. Imagine his surprise when his parents got a call on January 8th, 2008 from Microsoft support asking if the issue was fixed! It seems that the original tech support guy fat-fingered the date, and scheduled the follow up call for 01/08/08 instead of 01/08/98.

I guess it’s kind of reassuring that Microsoft’s tech support system is that robust though, huh?

Let’s see just how fast I can crank out the news today!

Have you seen those UPS “whiteboard” commercials? You know, the ones with the smug lookin’ guy drawing stuff on a whiteboard? (If not, click here) Anyway, am I the only one that’s amused by the background music… which was done by a band called (wait for it…) The Postal Service??

Speaking of music, the Coachella Festival is rumored to be adding a second event this year… on the east coast! The festival – full name: The Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival – has been a fixture on the Left Coast for some time now, and it’s about time that people on the Right Coast got in on the goodness! According to rumors, the Coachella Festival will take place in April, while the east coast version will take place in New York or New Jersey in August or September. Cool!

You know who took the stage at last year’s Coachella Festival? Scarlett Johansson. She went onstage with The Jesus And Mary Chain to sing “Just Like Honey” (you know…’cos of the film Lost In Translation). By all accounts, she did pretty well… well enough for someone to let her record an album of Tom Waits covers, which is due to be released on May 6, 2008.

Four major Hollywood studios canceled dozens of writer’s contracts today. This is a sign that 20th Century Fox Television, CBS Paramount Network Television, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. Television think that the current TV season is over, so the earliest we’ll see new (non-reality) TV is next September. This move is also a bad sign for next season, however: normally at this time, the TV studios are looking at pilots for shows they want to run in September. With the strike on, nothing’s been produced… so the strike is now starting to cut into next season. And, for what it’s worth, the entire city of Los Angeles is beginning to feel the pinch: not only are the people involved in TV directly starting to feel the pinch, but so are caterers, party planners, florists, and more. The cancellation of the Golden Globe Awards alone meant that dozens of parties were canceled, and some people in those industries are facing layoffs.

Anthony Bourdain has a new blog.

Brain scans have proven that people enjoy wine more if they think it’s expensive.

Renting a car? Watch out: Dollar is now charging a $2 “top-off fee”, even if you bring the car back with a full tank!

A man dressed as a Brinks employee walked in to a Wachovia bank in Washington, DC. He was handed $100,000 by bank employees, then left. The real Brinks employee came in an hour later and was told that Brinks had already shown up. Rather that report it to his home office, the employee just went about his business and didn’t bother telling anyone until he’d gotten back to the office. By the time anyone figured out what had happened, 11 hours had passed.

Lastly… what’s with Wegman’s? The upscale grocery chain recently decided to stop selling all tobacco-related products… and now they’ve put in a policy where children that want to order sandwiches from the deli must have an adult present! Wegman’s says the move is to prevent children with food allergies from ordering something that can hurt them. I think Wegman’s lawyers simply don’t have any balls.

OK, I’m having a bit of writer’s block… so let’s do some news!

New York City is going to clone 25 “historical trees”. Why? To save them, I guess. This article doesn’t mention anything about the trees being sick, or in danger of being cut down to build condos. The trees are historically significant, though: one of the trees is a 230 year-old St. Nicholas elm that George Washington is thought to have walked under, and “several” of the trees date back to the time of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer and architect of Central Park.

Congress is asking drug maker Pfizer why they think that Dr. Robert Jarvik is qualified to pimp Lipitor. They’re even questioning whether Jarvik’s ad breaks the law (since the ads run nationwide, is he legally giving medical advice in states where he doesn’t have a medical license?). The most interesting thing in this article about the issue is the biographical information about Jarvik: he attended Syracuse University as an undergrad, where his grades were so subpar that he wasn’t even interviewed to go to a medical school in the US. So he attended the University of Bologna in Italy, then transferred to the University of Utah, where he graduated. He did not do an internship, nor has he practiced medicine, however. Far from being the “super doctor” I always thought him to be, NBC’s science expert Robert Bazell last year wrote that while Jarvik is an M.D., “he doesn’t have the strongest credentials”.

If you’re in Maryland and a customer of Allegheny Power: check your bill! It seems that the company is sending their customers boxes that contain 2 compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs… and charging you 96¢ a month for it! The company sent the bulbs to almost 220,000 customers, and is threatening to cut off their power if they don’t pay for the bulbs, even if they return them to Allegheny Power or refuse to accept them from their letter carrier. I don’t know whose idea this was at Allegheny Power, but I can tell you what it is in two words: mail fraud! Read the whole vile story here.

And lastly, from the “What Are The Odds?” Department… a pair of British fraternal twins that were separated at birth met later on in life… felt an unbelievable attraction to one another… and ended up getting married! This became news this week because of changes that some lawmakers are pushing with regards to birth data in the UK. Currently, only the mother has to be named on a birth certificate in the UK, and birth certificates also are not required to identify “births that result from IVF or to identify the sperm donor”. British lawmakers want to tighten up the laws, so things like this don’t happen in the future. As for the twins feeling an “unbelievable attraction” towards each other… well, if I remember my anthropology correctly, then this is actually quite common. And not only is it just “attraction”, people that experience this sort of thing report an almost unstoppable sexual attraction to their birth mates. In fact, all kinds of bizarre behavior has been reported by twins who were separated at birth at meet up later in life!

Wow – I’ve got a lot of stuff for today… so let’s just get right on it!

The latest craze in Japan? “Dakigokochi”, or bags of rice shaped like babies. When a woman gives birth in Japan, it’s a big deal – much like it is here in the US. However, instead of just sending pictures of the newborn to family and friends that couldn’t be there for the birth, Japanese parents order a dakigokochi. It’s a bag filled with rice. The bag is carefully weighed to match the baby’s weight, and the newborn’s picture is printed on the front of the bag. Relatives can then “hold” the baby and love on “it” as if the baby were there with them. And when the relatives are done cuddling the baby, the bag is opened and the rice is eaten. That so typically Japanese: completely sensible on one hand, yet totally unsettling on the other.

Imagine how awkward it would be: your wife just isn’t “cutting it” anymore. You’re a man with needs. So you pay a little visit to the local brothel for a little “somethin’ somethin'”… and find your wife working there! It happened in Poland recently. The wife told the husband that she was working at a store in a nearby town for some spending money. He believed her… until he walked into the brothel and saw her there! The couple, which had been married for 14 years, is divorcing.

Former Talking Head David Byrne has written an excellent article at Wired.com about the future of the music industry. In short, Byrne envisions a world where record companies are far smaller, yet still exist. Because technology has reduced the cost of recording music to almost nothing, Byrne feels that musicians will have their choice between signing a “traditional” record contract and going it all alone – with several options in between. The article is all about finding a happy balance between “selling out” to the labels to take advantage of their mighty marketing machine or going it alone and having 7 people visit your website every month, only 1 of whom buys the CD (and that visitor is your Mom). It’s a really good read, especially considering that it’s written by a man that was in a band, owned his own record label, and looks forward to receiving publishing payments as a kind of “pension plan”. You should really read it!

The town of Peterborough, England offers trash bins to its citizens, much like many cities in the U.S. do. For some reason, however, people love stealing the ones from Peterborough. The city council recently announced that 2,351 of the bins have been stolen over the past couple of years at a cost of £70,000 ($137,585) to local taxpayers. From now on, residents will have to pay £30 ($60) for a new bin, or £20 for “a ‘pre-used’ bin that has been steam-cleaned”. Anyway, my point behind telling you all this is that this article about the bins notes that stolen bins have been spotted “as far afield as Bulgaria”. Who the hell steals a trash bin in the middle of England and ships it all the way to Bulgaria?

You’ve heard of the “No Fly List, right? It’s a giant database that contains the names of people that are suspected of various crimes, mostly terrorist activities. You’ve probably also heard stories about people that have the same name as someone on the list and all the hassles they have to go through to get this names off the list. But check this out: 5 year-old Matthew Gardner and his mother were flying out of SeaTac airport. Poor Matthew has the same name as someone wanted by ICE, so the family was stopped by TSA. The TSA agents, instead of realizing that this was just a silly coincidence, subjected the two to an extensive search. And during the brouhaha, Matthew started to cry, so his Mom went to pick him up… only to stopped by the TSA agent and told that doing so would be a “national security risk”. After putting him down, she was even searched again, to make sure that Matthew hadn’t “passed materials” to his Mom. This is why I don’t fly any more, people. Watch the local news clip about it here.

And lastly for today, you geeks out there might want to check out this article over at Engadget, which has the first pictures (that I’ve ever seen) of a USB 3.0 device. USB 3.0 is significantly faster than USB 2.0 (4.8 Gbit/s, as opposed to 480 Mbit/s for USB 2.0). USB 3.0 will also include intelligent power design that shuts off power to unused devices (which is neat) and will also sport plugs that have a slight depression on the top (so you’ll be able to tell which side is “up” by feel only – something looooonnng overdue in my book!). Sadly, we’ll have to wait until 2010 for this technology to be unleashed.

I hate British TV personality Jeremy Clarkson. He’s just so damn… smug. He’s a jerk in the same way that Simon Cowell is, only he’s somewhat quieter and he lacks Cowell’s wit. He’s an America-basher that finds fault with anything my country does, yet he (apparently) feels that Britain is heaven on earth. He comes across as one of those Britons that still longs for the British Empire, and deep down he probably thinks the Union Jack is still flying over Bombay.

Anyway, as you might of heard, there have been several incidents lately where the British government has lost sensitive data. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 160,000 children. The week before that, the British government admitted that a government contractor had lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 3 million people with learner’s permits. And shortly before that incident, the government admitted that it had lost a packet of CDs that contained the names and banking information of over 25 million people – almost half the population of the UK!

As you might imagine, privacy activists in the UK were (and are still) livid over all this. In response to the activists, Clarkson recently published a newspaper article about how the activists’ fears are overblown. He called their cries “a bunch of palaver” (idle talk) and called the whole thing “a storm in a teacup”. And to prove that all this privacy paranoia was a bunch of nonsense, Clarkson put his real, actual bank account number in the article.

Almost as soon as the article hit the newsstands, someone hacked into Clarkson’s account and transferred £500 to the British Diabetic Association. This article from The Guardian notes that Clarkson, “in a rare moment of humility”, admitted that the stunt had backfired:

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again. I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake.”

He also added: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer jerk!

I meant to type up something much longer, but time doesn’t permit so…. LET’S DO SOME NEWS:

Steve Flaig is from Michigan. He knew he was adopted. His adoptive parents even helped him search for his birth mother. Little did anyone know that he worked with his birth mother at a Lowe’s home improvement store in Michigan! It seems that Christine Tallady started working at the store a few months after Steve began his search. The adoption agency somehow spelled Tallady’s name wrong, but Steve had a sudden flash of inspiration and used the spelling of the woman at his store and… bingo! Read all about it here.

You knew it was coming… a company called Renova is marketing “designer toilet paper”! It comes in a variety of colors – black, red, orange and green – and the company says that the paper has a “voluptuous texture. Colors for an outstanding style. A warm mystery in every single olfactive moment. Soft and glamorous…A paper full of pleasure.”

And lastly, a clueless grocery store thinks their boneless, sliced ham is “delicious for Chanukah”!

Israel’s Ministry of the Interior recently released a bunch of passports with “Ministry of the Intrerior” stamped on the front of them. The ministry wanted to alert Israelis of the error, so it placed an ad in the Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper. The ad read (in part):

“Due to a technical error in some of the Ministry’s stampsthe document you received may have been stampedwith an flawed stamp.”

Awesome!

What’s with all the news stories about people changing colors lately? First, there was this story about Lee Thomas, an entertainment reporter for Detroit’s Fox affiliate. He was born a black man, but due to a disease called vitiligo – the same disease that Michael Jackson reportedly has – he’s slowly turning white:

Lee’s story is “newsworthy” because he recently decided to stop applying a thick layer of makeup every day and go au naturale on TV. Which makes sense, when you see how much makeup they have to use on the poor guy. Be sure to check out the slide show at the link above to see Lee’s transition from “black guy” to “half and half”.

Then there’s this story about a man named Paul Karason. Apparently Paul either read something in a nutty “holistic medicine” magazine or saw an infomercial or something, but the fact is, he’s been drinking colloidal silver – silver dissolved in water via an electrical current – for the past 14 years. And it’s turned him blue:

Apparently, some think that colloidal silver will cure anything that ails you. But apparently it turns you blue. Let the Papa Smurf jokes begin!