Over the Edge

It's not enough that Donald Trump owns buildings and casinos and a large chunk of the New York City skyline. This CNN story shows that he wants to own segments of my career.

Seems that there's a new federally required warning on condom wrappers.

From the AP:

Justin Kleinman hadn't noticed the condom packet wording until he squinted to read it recently.

"This is completely pointless," the 24-year-old Chicagoan said of the warning telling him that, while condoms can help prevent the spread of some sexually transmitted diseases, there are no guarantees.

I'm with this guy:

But scientists who study HPV worry that abstinence groups are dismissing important information to promote their own values.

"I want to be polite. But it appalls me when I see scientific and medical studies being manipulated for a different agenda," said Tom Broker. He's a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and president of the International Papillomavirus Society, a coalition of experts who study HPV.

The excellent Southern Living magazine has had to recall its April issue because following one of the recipies could apparently cause burns.

In a recipie for icebox rolls, readers were instructed to boil a cup and a half of shortening in water for five minutes. You may have heard that oil and water don't mix all that well; four readers were burned by spattering fat.

The publishers pulled the issue -- a difficult and expensive thing to do -- and mailed a postcard with a corrected recipie to all subscribers.

I would imagine that there's an opening for a test kitchen editor in Alabama right about now... (And as of this writing, there's sho'nuff just such a job posted.)

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Bob Woodward's new book about the invasion of Iraq quotes Colin Powell as telling George W. of the importance of a post-war political solution. This has apparently upset the good folks at Pottery Barn.

From the NYDailyNews:

"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all," Woodward quotes Powell as warning Bush about the consequences of invading Iraq. "Privately, Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it."

Yesterday, Pottery Barn's Oshirak complained bitterly: "This is certainly not our policy in any of our 174 Pottery Barn retail outlets in North America. In fact, there is no policy regarding this whatsoever."

And, instead of dealing with, like, important stuff, a State Department spokesman actually responded to this:

"I don't think anybody from the State Department would ever have intended to cast aspersions on Pottery Barn's commitment to customer service," [spokesman Adam] Ereli told me.

Oshirak shot back: "Well, it's out there."

Yes, this is surely the worst thing about the U.S. Iraq policy; that Pottery Barn is upset. Haliburton, however, seems fine with it.

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So the magician David Copperfield and his two lovely assistants were robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach. The local newspaper reports that while he has a gun on him, Copperfield

pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.

"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said.

He probably was going to make the two of clubs jump out of the guy's ear while he was at it.

The perps were caught about 10 minutes later.

Some poor production assistant at the BBC put the wrong guy on the air. Rather than Guy Kewney, tech pundit, they grabbed an IT interviewee who was waiting at the Reception desk and put him on a live program instead.

After something of a rocky start, he apparently did quite well -- which kind of underlines how low the bar is for punditry.

Kewney himself, waiting in the green room, had no idea this was going on until he looked at a monitor and saw someone who was not himself.

From the AP, via the NYTimes:

In fact the man was Guy Goma, a Congolese man applying for a technology-related job with the British Broadcasting Corp. Goma followed an employee to the studio after a mistake at a reception desk, the corporation said late Monday.

*snip*

Producers apparently realized by the end of the interview that something had gone wrong -- and, after they had gone off the air, asked their ''expert'' if there was a problem.

''He said: 'Well, it was OK, but I was a bit rushed,' Kewney wrote on his blog.

Goma told the BBC his interview was stressful, but added he was prepared to return to the airwaves. He said he was ''happy to speak about any situation,'' the BBC reported. Officials at BBC declined to comment on whether he would get the job he was applying for.

From today's NYPost:

Police arrested a Manhattan subway flasher after one of his grossed-out victims gave officers an Internet address that was emblazoned on the back of his jacket - and busted him when they found X-rated pictures of him on the site.

The paper tastefully doesn't give the URL. One wonders if it was on MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, as is the Post.

So it seems that a carry-on bag belonging to a writer for Saveur magazine caused authorities to shut down the Tallahassee airport.

The bag has audio and video equipment, honey, an oyster shell, and rub. Somehow, a screener mistook all this for something far more sinister.

As a freelance writer, I especially like this graf:

Coleman had come to Tallahassee to visit his parents, who live here, and do a story on the food of nearby Apalachicola, Florida's oyster capital.

From the AP, via WCBS Radio:

FORT WORTH, TX (AP) -- A 47-year-old insurance company worker accidentally fired his gun in his office cubicle, shooting himself in both legs, police said.

The man, who hasn't been identified, had put his .45-caliber gun into his jacket pocket and then draped the jacket over the back of his chair Tuesday morning, said Brett McGuire, Lake Worth police chief. The gun discharged as the man settled into his chair.

In a development sure to annoy natives citywide, New York State's highest court says it's OK for pedestrians to stand obliviously in the middle of busy intersections and force people to walk around them.

From the NYTimes:

This may be one for the etiquette mavens among us. Or maybe it's just a matter of common courtesy. Or cluefulness.

The other day, I was flying with my family -- myself, my wife, and two 7-year-old boys -- from JFK to SFO. I was sitting with one kid, my wife a few rows back with the other. The plane was a 767, in a 2-3-2 configuration. I was on the aisle, a kid in the middle, a stranger on the other side of him.

About an hour into the flight, said stranger pulls out a laptop and fires up a movie: "Slumdog Millionaire." My immediate thoughts, in rough order:

1. That's not on DVD yet; the SOB is watching an illegal download.
2. He's watching an R-rated movie -- one that features graphic scenes of little kids getting maimed -- in full view of a 7-year-old.

This is just so wrong....

And, not only is it kosher, it's either parve or dairy.

To cap it off, the first round of funding came from a second-place finish on America's Funniest Home Videos.

There's a remarkably clueless post on ZDNet today, wherein someone who should know better says that Google's index is 25 percent smaller than it used to be. His evidence: when he checks his own name, he found only 102,000 instances, down from 135,000 in March. (Bing.com, he says, has 157,000 results.)

The technological Onanism of this aside, it's just a dumb observation. The idea of a search engine isn't to provide the most results. It's to provide the most relevant results. Maybe those "missing" 33,000 results weren't especially interesting; it's hard to imagine that 100,000 results on anything, let alone a blogger, would be worth investigating. (And I mean, really -- who keeps track of the number of results for their own name?)

Does this have anything to do with Google's "Caffeine" update (about which I'll write more shortly)? Possibly, but unlikely; Caffeine seems to be about speed and resources, not index size.

In April 2007, I bought an upgrade to the formidable contact manager Now Up-to-Date and Contact. I'd used it off and on for some years and was looking for something a bit more powerful than Apple's Address Book and iCal. It had gotten old, and wasn't really happy with OS X. What Now was promising with "Nighthawk" sounded interesting enough for me to pony up $40 for an upgrade sight unseen. Besides, the software was supposed to ship that June. Two months wasn't so long to wait.

I'm certain that I forgot to ask "June of what year?"