The complexities of confetti

Yes, throwing confetti off a rooftop is an art form. So self-proclaimed "Confetti King" Treb Heining tells the Wall Street Journal. After all, he's the man who oversees the New Year's confetti drop in New York's Times Square:

"Confetti is an art," he says, "right down to how it's fluffed."

Dropping 3,000 pounds of confetti on cue isn't easy. Heat rising off the partying bodies below can create a strong upward draft. There's snow and rain to consider. The friends, and friends of friends, who fly in from around the country to help Mr. Heining, need special New York Police Department security credentials. ("We usually discourage people from lobbing items from rooftops," an NYPD spokesman says.) Even the preparation of the confetti is demanding. Mr. Heining, 50 years old, combines products from two different manufacturers and has to mix his recipe on site before the drop.

What brands does he use? "I'm sorry," the exceedingly polite confetti maven says, "but I don't like talking about that. It's kind of a trade secret."

Lest you think he's being paranoid, the Journal indicates that confetti dispersal (and affiliated balloon dropping) is actually a cut-throat business with deeply rooted philosophical disputes and sometimes unscrupulous competition.

Also, on a mildly related note, the New York Post lists 100 things you didn't know about the festivities in Times Square.

Seeking sentient service

Never mind SETI; plenty of people are focused on the search for sentient life right here on earth.

They're trying to contact real live humans in the customer service department.

The New York Times' Katie Hafner wrote a great piece on this unfortunate ritual of life in the Internet age. Amid the tales of woe, she also lists some helpful resources for tracking down e-tailers' customer-service numbers.

One of her sources shares this useful tip for circumventing labyrinthine voice-menu systems: if pressing "0" doesn't transfer you to a live operator, press it again ... and again ... and maybe again. Some systems ignore the first "0" but most will eventually let you through.

About the tsunami

A few questions keep popping up in the ongoing coverage about the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami. Here's an attempt to clear them up:

• How reliable are the death toll estimates? It depends. As the New York Times explains, accurate death tolls are impossible for many reasons: census counts in rural and slum areas are often unreliable, existing records may have been destroyed, and some devastated areas lack functioning governments. Also, counting the dead may not a priority for responders on the ground, such as rescuers and relief workers.

  Plus, procedures for tallying the dead vary considerably across the region, the Associated Press notes. Indian bureaucrats meticulously photograph and catalog each body while Indonesian officials make guesstimates based on how many corpses fit into the average mass grave. Which brings us to the next question ...

• Do all those dead bodies really pose a health risk? No, the experts say. Poynter Online's Al Tomkins wrote a great overview on the topic. Slate addressed the issue, with decidedly more gruesome detail, back in 1999.

• Were there no measures in place to mitigate the tidal waves? There's been a lot of press about the need for a high-tech tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean but, as AP notes, some areas were spared because of very low-tech defenses set up against ocean-borne disasters.

• Was the devastation as total as it sounds? Apparently not everywhere, as this jarring photo of a busy nightclub on Phuket suggests.