Words fail me

From the Jacksonville Times-Union: At first, it was just a guy, dressed like a doctor, driving an ambulance reported stolen ... but the dead deer with an IV made it weird.

What's in a nickname?

Bearing the nickname "Scuz" isn't likely to make your life easier, but it can really cause you problems if you're going on trial for murder, according to the Daily Local News of Exton, Pa.

(Via Romenesko's Obscure Store.)

The mysterious island

Joshua Trujillo / P-I

One of the most popular stories on SeattlePI.com this morning concerns the three bedraggled-looking men floating on a tiny island in Lake Washington north of the Evergreen Point Bridge.

They're not really castaways, of course: they're performance artists John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler, new winners of The Stranger's genius award for visual arts. The work in question, "The Island," celebrates the waning days of summer (which officially end Wednesday).

However, some passing motorists mistook their art for an overturned boat and called in police and firefighters, who were reportedly quite amused.

Update: Mother Nature bested the intrepid artists Monday night.

Cool toys in cool boxes

Anyone surprised that there are avid collectors of Apple's distinctive product packaging? Didn't think so.

Legalistic about Legos

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow points out a hilariously persnickety trademark warning regarding a well-known toy brand. See it for yourself at www.legos.com.

Safest cities

Forbes and Sperling's Best Places joined forces to compile a timely list of the 10 safest places to live in the United States in terms of risk from natural disasters. The fourth, fifth and sixth place spots are all in Washington state: Yakima, Spokane and ... the Tri-Cities, home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Again, that's risk from natural disasters.

Weaponizing teleportation

A San Francisco Chronicle story about the Air Force-funded study (1.6MB PDF) into the strategic potential of teleportation (previously noted on Buzzworthy) includes this wonderful expert assessment:

Michio Kaku, a noted physicist and author at City University of New York, said "the only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine."

Musical 'Nerds'

Todd Bishop tells the story behind a new satirical musical called "Nerds" that spoofs, among others, legendary rivals Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The creators' Web site features two sample songs in MP3 format, both poking fun at Gates. Check out Windows Rap, in which he boasts of being the "bitch pimp of the software biz."

Amazonian myth-chief

When Amazon.com started letting customers post their own photos of products in its catalog, you just knew people would start having fun with it.

Witness this mythological staging of Plamobil's Sea Serpent Nessie with Viking playset.

Evolution in action

Snopes.com fact-checks a list of purported 2005 Darwin Awards winners.

Blinding images

Another helpful public-service announcement from New Scientist:

Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along – erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners’ calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.

The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as “emotion-induced blindness”.

The social cost of extra chopsticks

How hard can it be to change the eating habits of millions of Chinese? Health officials in Hong Kong are finding out, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Chinese health officials are trying to change the way people eat, pushing a utensil they hope will stem disease outbreaks: an extra pair of chopsticks.

At restaurants and homes, Chinese meals are dished up family-style, with serving platters in the center of the table. Most diners pluck their dumplings and stir-fries out of the platters and onto individual plates or bowls of rice. They use the same chopsticks to put the morsels in their mouths, often going back to the serving platter for seconds and thirds.

Following an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, two years ago, officials worried the habit can transmit diseases. ...

Serving chopsticks aren't new to China. Usually, they look exactly like regular chopsticks, although they sometimes come in different colors. They have long been used for special occasions like business dinners or banquets, or by families who eat their meals more formally. But most Chinese eating at home or at restaurants shun them.

In China, sharing food is all about strengthening family and business bonds. Using a separate pair of serving chopsticks can be a bit of an affront -- a little like showing up at the family table with a surgical mask. A few diners stake out a middle ground and flip their chopsticks when they serve themselves or others at the table.

Reality bests game skills

From our sister paper, the Albany Times Union, comes empirical evidence that no, all those hours you spent playing "Grand Theft Auto" won't actually help you evade police during a high-speed car chase.

Pricing pratfalls

The most implausible-sounding stories can turn out to be quite real, once you factor in, well, human stupidity. Witness this account from Snopes.com about the veracity of tales about store clerks mistakenly scanning the wrong side of a CD whose cover art shows a bar code, ring up a lower price:

In 2005, Sony BMG released a 3-CD set entitled Electric 80s. The cover art for this compilation of "the greatest Eighties electric hits" featured a reproduction of a UPC bar code, with the title "ELECTRIC 80s" placed in the space at the bottom of the bar code where the human-readable numbers corresponding to that code would usually appear. (The real bar code — the one used for scanning the price of the item at checkout counters — was placed in a corner on the back of the packaging, as it is for nearly every similar item.)

Unfortunately for some retailers (such as Tesco supermarkets), the machine-readable version of the bar code used for the CD compilation's cover art was scannable by their systems, and sales clerks at those outlets who mistakenly passed the CD's cover (rather than its back) over point-of-purchase scanners ended up ringing up sales for £9.77, (US $17.46) considerably less than the set's listed price of £14.97 (US $26.76). Often the mis-scanning resulted in stores' mistakenly recording sales of singer Jack Johnson's new (and significantly less expensive) CD, In Between Dreams, instead. ...

Steal a Segway and ...

So, what exactly do you do with a stolen Segway? Not much, it seems:

The burglars who wheeled 10 Segways away from a Concord [N.H.] truck dealership in April apparently couldn't figure out what to do with them. Concord police officers found all the motorized scooters stowed in a garage in Manchester last week, collecting dust and in perfect condition.

"Right from the beginning, we questioned how they would move these things around," said Concord Detective Todd Flanagan. "It seemed like it would be difficult for them to get rid of them. And that seems to be what happened." ...

"I think the burglary was very well thought-out," Flanagan said. "I think what wasn't thought out was how they were going to profit from this. It's sort of comical, actually."

(Via Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room.)

Sword vs. Taser

Swords, chain mail and big wooden mallets are just no match for one of those newfangled Taser things.

Cinema by scientists

How about this as a way to get more kids interested in science: train real scientists to write screenplays for Hollywood movies?

That's the goal of $25,000 in Pentagon research grants, according to The New York Times. One person who's trying to make the career change, biophysicist Valerie Weiss, points out that scientists are actually well-suited for the movie biz:

"They're inherently creative, and willing to take more risks than other people," she said. "They're searching for the unknown, they're compensated very minimally, they're going on blind faith that what they're searching for is going to pay off. And filmmaking is exactly the same way."

What links Microsoft and eBay

What to Microsoft and eBay have in common? San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus' surprising answer:

Phone sex.

And pet psychics.

The two West Coast tech titans ... are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.

Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.

Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay ...

A ring that's really you

And in the Macabre-Yet-Fascinating Department:

Why go to Tiffany's for a wedding band when you have one grown from your own bones? That's what five British couples did this spring, starting with a trip to the hospital for a quick jaw biopsy to retrieve bone cells....

Not worth stealing

My favorite quote of the week (so far) comes from Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

The release of the Garbage Pail Kids movie on DVD marks an exciting new anti-piracy technique from our friends in Hollywood: releasing DVDs of unwatchably bad movies that you'd be hard pressed to find a reason to download.

It's funny, but also makes an interesting point about digital content piracy: some stuff is so bad that no one will want to go to the trouble of stealing it. On the other hand, the copyright owners are probably quite correct in thinking that they can find people to pay money for it.

Human nature is a curious thing.

Personal Pygmalions

You can add lifestyle designer to the list of new occupations for the 21st century, according to The Wall Street Journal:

In a world where people are finding no end to the pressure to be stylish, the booming market for upscale personal services has spawned a new, even more rarefied creature: the self-described lifestyle designer.

Not to be confused with butlers, personal concierges or even image consultants, these advisers consider themselves general contractors of good taste. For as much as $450 an hour, they will insert themselves into a client's life and begin parsing everything from wardrobe and home decor to party planning, gift-giving and picking out the perfect car. About the only thing they won't do is run errands.

Missing: John dough

Here's an idea: levy fines from patrons of prostitutes in order to fund treatment programs for prostitutes and others in the sex trade. The Seattle City Council approved it in 2002. Unfortunately, it turns out that the fines often weren't imposed and the money wasn't being collected.

When stars deliver

As part of its 10th anniversary festivities, Amazon.com has recruited big-name celebrities to deliver products in person to lucky customers across the United States.

All of these special deliveries will be webcast.

Not surprisingly, the company tapped the collective wisdom of its shoppers to pick the list of delivery people -- which includes Harrison Ford, Jeff Bridges and Moby -- choosing them based on "their popularity among Amazon customers over the past few years."

One industry observer tells reporter Malini Goyal that the result is a sterling roster of celebrity delivery-people: "upscale, not run-of-the-mill and not overexposed."

I never cease to be surprised by what Amazon can do with data mining.

McFashion Statement

McDonald's wants trendier, more fashionable uniforms for its employees, the Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Ramping up its bid for a hipper, more youthful image, McDonald's plans to hire top designers to remake its uniforms. The Oak Brook-based hamburger giant recently hired a marketing whiz with ties to the hip-hop community and is contemplating deals with fashion figures ranging from Sean "P. Diddy" Combs to Tommy Hilfiger.

"It would be pretty cool if our employees liked their uniforms so much that they would also want to wear them while they were not working," said McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman.

Am I the only one who thinks that idea is, well, a little weird?

An efficient energy hog

Seattle's new City Hall was designed to make the most of available energy-efficient technologies. Why, then, are its monthly power bills higher than those of the older building it replaced? There are lots of theories, but no one seems to know for sure.

Formula for terror

An eye-opening story from the Christian Science Monitor: Is black-market baby formula financing terror?

In the nearly four years since 9/11, police have uncovered and dismantled a growing number of regional and national theft rings specializing in shoplifted infant formula, over-the-counter medicines, and personal-care products. At least eight of the major baby-formula cases have involved "fences" who are of Middle Eastern descent or who have ties to that region, according to a Monitor review of congressional testimony, news accounts, and a study by the National Retail Federation released Tuesday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has traced money from these infant-formula traffickers back to nations where terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, are active, investigators say. Then, the trail usually goes cold. Once funds enter such countries, there's often no way to track them. ...

So far, most officials are unwilling to draw conclusive links between proceeds from shoplifted formula and terror financing, saying only that they're "likely" or "probable" in some cases.

Paying for free stuff

There's always a way to game the system, as Wired News indicates:

Lured by a slew of websites that promise free electronics and other goods to people who fill out advertisers' forms and refer others to fill them out, some die-hard freebie fans are finding the best way to get something for nothing is to simply pay for it.

In recent weeks, a growing number of freebie aficionados are offering to pay people to fill out tedious forms from online advertisers in order to qualify for valuable giveaways. The payment offers are cropping up on websites like RefStop.com and Anything4Free.com, where users of freebie sites swap referrals.

People are shelling out large sums in some cases to qualify for "free" goods from sites like FreeiPods.com, one of several freebie offers run by Gratis Internet. The sites require users to refer a certain number of people to sign up for online offers before they can get their coveted freebie.

Hm, I wonder if this sort of thing might have saved Mercata ...

Hurricane babies

Did you know that hurricane season begets baby boomlets? The St. Petersburg Times offers an interesting insight into life on the lower right corner of the country.

(Via Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room.)

Why married men make more

According to a new study from the U.K., married men earn more -- if their wives stay home to do the chores.

Well, I can't wait to see what people have to say about this one ...

Hidden in plain sight

Surprisingly, it is still possible to disappear in America today and start a new life elsewhere without changing your identity, the Associated Press reports.

Brandi Stahr, a student at Texas A&M University, disappeared in 1998. Authorities long suspected that she had been murdered. But she was found in Kentucky last month -- alive, well and still using her real name and Social Security number.

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that if Stahr's intention was not to be found, she did things right, including not obtaining a Kentucky driver's license and not having utility bills in her name. ...

Stahr did pay taxes, but because of federal privacy laws, law enforcement officials do not have access to tax records, IRS spokeswoman Pat Brummer said.

Frank Viera, a Social Security Administration spokesman, said the same laws apply to that agency's records, except in cases of violent crime or fraud involving a government program. And there was never any proof Stahr was a victim of violence.

Bridges for beasts

Here's an idea to combat the roadkill problem: build bridges for animals across the freeway.

It'd be safer for good Samaritans, too.

Slain over a sword

Well, it had to happen: a real-world murder was committed in a dispute involving a virtual sword that existed only in an online gaming world -- but which had been sold for non-virtual money.

Film first, then brain surgery

Can you imagine postponing surgery on a brain tumor in order to attend the Seattle International Film Festival? As you probably guessed, that's not a hypothetical example. Reporter Kristin Dizon looks at the lengths to which some film buffs will go to take in the full SIFF experience.

Er, um ...

I've tried but there's no way I can summarize this item and do it justice.

A hairy question

Do you still own your hair once it's been cut off?

That's the obvious question arising from the bizarre news that former astronaut Neil Armstrong is threatening to sue a barber for selling his shorn locks to a collector without his permission. Armstrong wants the barber to return his hair or donate the money to a charity of his choice.

The Danbury, Conn., News-Times indicates that the answer is somewhat more nuanced than you might think.

A grave mishap

So, ever wonder what would happen if someone were mistakenly buried in your grave?

Save us from the skies

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, is backing a proposal to create a government agency to protect the Earth from a catastrophic asteroid strike, Wired News reports.

This is either a forward-thinking vision that might someday save all of humanity or one of the most pointless boondoggles in history.

Anyone want to share their thoughts?

Crackdown on errant carts

Local cities are cracking down on runaway shopping carts that end up abandoned far from their stores, the P-I's John Iwasaki reports.

Turns out it's a bigger problem than you might have imagined:

The city estimates that 800 to 1,000 carts per year are pushed home full of groceries and merchandise, then abandoned, sometimes miles away at bus stops, outside apartments, on sidewalks and in ditches. Some end up in new roles, bearing the possessions of the homeless.

Shopping cart theft is a misdemeanor in Washington. But it's illegal only if the cart has a sign that identifies the retailer, warns that removal of the cart from the premises is unlawful and lists contact information to return the cart, among other provisions.

"At an average cost of $250, that's a quarter of a million dollars of shopping carts," said Ron Harris-White, special projects manager for Seattle Public Utilities, the agency responsible for removing hazards from city streets. Harris-White heads up the city's Shopping Cart Reclamation Action Project, or SCRAP. ("Shopping" was added to the original name to avoid an unpleasant acronym.)

And Seattle's figures might be low, if other cities' estimates are any gauge. Renton picked up more than 300 carts in a seven-week period last summer. A single apartment complex in Bellevue once held about 150 carts.

Don't try this at home

Two British "Star Wars" fans were critically injured after apparently trying to stage a mock lightsaber duel using fluorescent light tubes filled with burning gasoline.

Remote petting

I'm going to include a rather extensive excerpt from this Wired News story about a system that enables remote "tele-petting" of chickens because so much would be lost otherwise:

You walk into your office, where a hollow, chicken-shaped doll sits on a mechanical positioning table close to your computer.

The doll whirs to life as soon as you switch on the system, duplicating the motion of a real chicken in the backyard whose movements are being captured by a webcam.

Fondling the doll translates into touching the real fowl.

Touch sensors attached to the doll convey tactile information to a nearby PC through radio signals. The data is sent over the internet to a remote computer near the chicken; the remote computer triggers tiny vibration motors in a lightweight haptic jacket worn by the fowl.

The chicken feels your touch in the exact same place where the replica was stroked.

"This is the first human-poultry interaction system ever developed," said [National University of Singapore] professor Adrian David Cheok, the leader of the team, who has been developing the technology for nearly two years.

"We understand the perceived eccentricity of developing a system for humans to interact with poultry remotely, but this work has a much wider significance," he added.

Promoting the welfare of un-caressed chickens is not the only goal here.

Remote haptic interaction could allow people who are allergic to dogs and cats to caress their pets remotely. Used in zoos, it may allow visitors to pat a lion or scratch a bear. A security officer could remotely and silently signal a dog wearing a haptic suit, giving the animal instructions by simply touching it, which could be useful in rescue work or homeland security applications. ...

Don't worry, there's a lot more great stuff left if you click through to read the full story.

(Incidentally, if you're not familiar with the term, haptic means "relating to the sense of touch." Haptics is the science of applying touch-based interactions to computing.)

Beastly relations

Just as you probably suspected: wild animals are better at resolving conflicts than civilized humans.

Suspicious resemblance

Stop me if you've heard one like this before ...

A Texas woman helped her husband fake his death in a fiery car accident, even digging up a corpse from a local cemetery to be burned beyond recognition in the wreckage, the Associated Press reports.

Then, she reintroduced him to her kids weeks later as her new boyfriend ... who looked "a lot like" her late husband. He quickly moved into the family home. His disguise? A new hair color and a fake name (albeit one complete with forged identification).

Not surprisingly, they got busted. The woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to insurance fraud (her husband had a $110,000 life insurance policy) and hindering apprehension (he was about to go to jail when he "died").

According to the AP, her lawyer "said he couldn't explain why anyone who went to such great lengths to mislead investigators would stay in their home where they could be so easily discovered. But he said the fact that they didn't leave proves that their motive wasn't insurance fraud."

It's the Barbiedrive

Yes, you too can turn a decapitated Barbie doll into a USB drive.

(Via Gizmodo.)

Here's the beef

Denny's Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pa., the world record-holder for world's largest hamburger, is defending its title with a 15-pound cheesy version.

How does one even cook a 10 1/2-pound burger?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explains:

The burger starts out, as burgers typically do, as a large slab of raw ground meat -- 280 ounces of extra lean beef shipped up from Pittsburgh. That's enough beef to make 70 McDonald's quarter pounders.

Kitchen manager Matthew Williams mixes in eggs and bread crumbs and other ingredients he won't disclose to hold the beef together, and then puts it into an auto sham -- basically a big broiler -- for 2 1/2 hours while the grease sizzles and jumps in the pan.

After it is good and cooked, he lifts the Jabba the Hut-like lump of meat with a pizza shovel to the grill to charbroil it.

Our own food editor, Hsiao-Ching Chou, elaborates:

Since it's so large, you'd have to cook it slowly, so that the inside will come to the right temperature. When you've reached the proper temperature inside, you could char the outside. If you cooked it like normal burgers, then the inside would be completely raw.

Lunch, Lord Vader?

		AP

Well, here's something you don't see every day: four Imperial stormtroopers and an infamous Sith Lord milling about on the sidewalk, trying to decide whether to go eat.

The five sentients pictured in this Associated Press photo are, of course, actually "Star Wars" fans. According to the caption, they were in New York taking part in a Stand-A-Thon for "Revenge of the Sith" to raise money for charity. Here's the story behind the event.

Offensive snow art

First Amendment questions can pop up in the oddest situations. Take the case of the anatomically correct snow sculptures two Laramie, Wyo., men built last week.

When toads go pop

I think the headline on this AP story says it all: Exploding toads puzzle German scientists:

More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and German scientists have no explanation for what's causing the combustion. ...

Predicting the pope?

ElectAPope.com put out a press release today trumpeting the fact that participants in its online poll also picked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, as the new pontiff by a margin of "almost 800 votes out of 25,000 cast."

"Did Electapope.com have an inside track?" the press release asks. "With the announcement this afternoon of Germany's Cardinal Ratzinger as the 265th Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, it seems that Catholics worldwide were of the same mind as the Cardinal electors."

Perhaps ... but I have to admit that I'm skeptical: ElectAPope was still accepting new votes in its poll when the press release reached my inbox at 12:13 p.m. PDT -- about 2 1/2 hours after Ratzinger's election was announced.

The poll finally closed shortly afterward but I saw Ratzinger gain five more votes before that happened. Or, rather, the poll form disappeared from the site. I see that Ratzinger has somehow gained another four votes over Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger since I started typing this post. With a final (?) tally of 5,174 votes, he now leads second-place finisher Jean-Marie Lustiger by a healthy margin of 872 ... but the "total votes" counter is still going up every so often.

Update, April 20: It looks like ElectAPope.com is accepting votes again. The new pope's lead continues to widen.

When dogs network

Social networking is going to the dogs, Wired News reports:

The Social Networking in Fur, or SNIF, project is a wearable computer system for dogs that allows their owners to monitor the animals' behavior and capture their social networks.

The technology, designed by a group of researchers at MIT's Physical Language Workshop, also gives dog owners the chance to "petwork," or network through their pets.

The system consists of a technologically enhanced collar, leash and wall-mounted leash-docking station. In prototype now, the system will be linked to a web-based community containing information about pets in the program and their owners.

Bureaucracy in inaction

How Many Government Agencies Does It Take To Teach Soldiers Arabic? Slate asks.

The answer, as you might expect, would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing.

Britney ready for reality?

Some stories just invite commentary. Case in point: the news that premier pop tart Britney Spears will star in a reality show for UPN based on home videos she shot with hubby Kevin Federline during their courtship.

Here's a sampling of what they're saying:

• BayouBuzz: "is there anything about Spears that we do not already know?"
• Philadelphia Daily News: "We're calling it Must-Puke TV."
• AdRants: "The blissful innocuousness of MTV's The Newlyweds is about to get slapped upside the head by UPN ..."
• Noise Proves Nothing: "Dear Lord."
• Lost in Thought: "The horror, the horror..."
• The D-List: "think of it as Fat Actress, but instead called Fat Singer."
• hecklespray: "Wouldn’t it just be swell if we could all sell off our own fabricated holiday videos and then afterwards start calling yourself an executive producer?"
• Pink is The New Blog: "Woot!!! Words cannot even express what I'm feeling right now ... it's like a dream come true!"

Although the show is described as "a documentation of love," there are hints floating about that this is one "true" story that might not have a happy ending:

• New York Post: "Spears and husband Kevin Federline just might separate before their UPN reality show premiere next month, if their current behavior is any indication."
• Daily Mirror via Ireland Online: "Britney Spears drew up legal documents before her marriage last year to prevent husband Kevin Federline inheriting any of her fortune in case she dies before drawing up a will."

But, as E! Online points out, "one season may be plenty to satiate our curiosity."

Finally, it has had nothing (yet) to say about the show but The Official Britney Spears Pregnancy Watch is still good for a laugh.

The end of the world -- er, I mean, the show's debut is set for May. By the way, The Washington Post notes that not even the majority of TV viewers who ignore UPN will be spared: "One or more of the MTV cable networks will rerun each episode shortly after its UPN play and then rerun all of them again in a marathon."

Reports of his death ...

Pope John Paul II died late Saturday morning, Pacific time. But St. James Cathedral in Seattle prematurely announced that he had died shortly before 11 a.m. on Friday. The pastor blames the mistake on erroneous news reports that were quickly discredited.

Outsourced parenting

Yes, you can outsource parenting. In fact, it's a booming business, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The burgeoning industry of services aimed at harried parents, which began with the likes of birthday-party packages at gyms and pizza shops, has expanded to the point where you can now hire someone to assist with everything from potty-training your toddler to getting your teenage daughter to agree to a passably modest prom dress. ...

The phenomenon comes amid a growing and widely publicized body of literature -- essays, novels, Web blogs -- about the difficulties and dark side of parenthood, particularly motherhood. Many reflect the feelings of affluent, professional women who are accustomed to having control of their own success -- and find themselves uncharacteristically flummoxed by sleep deprivation, tantrums and other unscripted moments of parenting.

Parents like these, who come out of a workplace culture that brings in the "experts" to tackle any problem, are sometimes inclined to seek out similar expertise in their family life. It is the same mentality that leads parents to enroll 2-year-olds in art classes (a booming business these days), instead of scribbling with them at the kitchen table, or to hire a batting coach for their Little Leaguer instead of playing catch with him in the backyard.

'Darth Chocolate'

What could be cuter than Mr. Potato Head as Darth Tater?

How about an M&M as Darth Vader?

A larger-than-life-sized "M-Vader" spokescandy appeared in New York yesterday to help launch the popular candy line's new dark chocolate varieties. It's the first time dark chocolate M&Ms have ever been available.

Available for a limited time starting April 2, the special "Darth Mix" features candies in black, maroon, purple, dark blue and silver. There'll also be a "Jedi Mix" featuring milk chocolate M&Ms in more uplifting colors: beige, cream, pastel green, gold and "lightsaber blue."

StarWars.com offers the backstory on the "M-Pire" TV campaign.

Searching for search

The ways that people use the Internet never cease to amaze me. Today's jaw dropper: among the most common search terms entered at leading search engines are ... the names of other search engines.

Balls bash all 'bout bulls

There's still time to put in your bid at eBay to become the King and Queen of the Ball at this year's Cowboy Caviar Fete in the town of Conconully, Wash. As a story in today's P-I explains, the event "celebrates a delicacy of the prairie cowboy -- bull testicles."

What do they taste like, you ask? According to rancher Rod Haeberle, the testicle festival's reigning king:

"I think they really resemble really nicely prepared filet mignon," he said. "Some people say they're more like chicken. ... Kind of depends on how they prepare them."

Update, March 21: The item sold Sunday night for a winning bid of $1,225. The winner's a name that you might have encountered in stories about previous oddball auctions online: Golden Palace Casino.

Update, March 22: See the P-I's followup story.

Fun with cover art

Got a spare moment? Check out AmazType, a truly astonishing tool that lets you search for authors and titles in Amazon.com's catalog -- then spells out the search words using letters formed from miniaturized versions of the cover images for matching books.

You can, of course, just type in your own name and watch it AmazType spell it out, too.

Even the error message AmazType uses when it can't find any matches uses this eye-catching effect.

(From Boing Boing.)

IRS time machine

A Seattle woman who asked the Internal Revenue Service to send her some tax forms, including a Schedule B, got a surprise in her mail. The IRS sent her a Schedule B, all right -- from 1969!

Don't worry, the agency does have an explanation for the mix-up -- which affected "fewer than 500" taxpayers nationwide -- and for why it keeps 35-year-old tax forms lying around.

Human billboards

Selling ad space on your body is turning into a regular cottage industry, according to the Los Angeles Times.

You say 'tomato' ...

In the You Learn Something New Everyday Department: Turns out that, legally, tomatoes are vegetables, not fruits. So ruled the U.S. Supreme Court in 1893.

This factoid courtesy of a Newark Star-Ledger story on how the Jersey tomato is on its way to becoming the Garden State's official vegetable.

Fired for a phone

Well, here's one way that bringing a cameraphone to work can get you fired:

SAN ANTONIO -- A substitute teacher at a local high school was fired last month after students were shown photographs of the woman having sex, school district officials say. The photos were on the teacher's camera phone, which was passed around a health class at Judson High School.

Teddy sees, knows all

Clearly, I'm not the only person who finds the child-monitoring robot teddy bear demoed at Microsoft's TechFest somewhat absurd and rather creepy:

• Mitch Wagner: "Because your kids don't pick up enough viruses in daycare."
• Shiny Shiny: "How to give your child a lifelong uneasy feeling that it's being watched ..."
• Gizmodo: "While sure to be useful for making sure children are safe and not able to formulate their plans to supplant us, this is only slightly less creepy than dad's Pink Floyd tapes in Teddy Ruxpin."
• Bonnie @ Greengrl.org: "Did these people not see A.I.?"
• Fabulist: "I can almost imagine the Platonic or even Sartrean tale of a child raised entirely by a robot teddy bear who emoted based on facial recognition software (written by Microsoft) and who facilitated communication between parent and spawn through a speaker/microphone combo (made by Microsoft) in the teddy’s eyes. The Child would emerge eventually, nostalgic at each fast food drive-though, seeing humans as only shadows of themselves."
• Slashdot user Archangel Michael launched a lively thread debating the implications with the rhetorical question, "Now we are letting inanimate objects raise our kids! When will it end?" My favorite responses so far:
  
  
  
  • "You mean 'as opposed to the warm and healthy TV-education kids have been raised by in the past 15 years'? At least this robot might create the opportunity to go play outside." (link)
  
  
  • "And at 2am the child wakes up screaming, after someone hacked into the robot and played a recording of Chucky?" (link)
  
  
  • "Robot with Clippy's voice: 'Hi kid! It looks like you are peeing, do you want me to help?'" (link)
    

Darth Tater returns

The photo was taken in the lobby of the International Toy Center in Manhattan. Believe it or not, there was a Darth Vader there as well.

Since I used to be an analyst for the news media, would that now make me a "Common Tater?"

Impregnating pachyderms

You can learn the most interesting things by reading SeattlePI.com. Example: How to artificially inseminate an elephant.

Crime spree targets dumb laws

What are you planning to do during your summer vacation? British college students Luke Bateman and Richard Smith plan to travel around the United States, violating stupid laws in every state along the way, the Guardian reports:

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative - and landlocked - state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

"There are thousands of stupid laws in the United States, but we are limiting ourselves to breaking about 45 of them," said Richard Smith, from Portreath, Cornwall.

The journey, which appropriately enough begins in Alcatraz, will cover around 18,000 miles and take eight weeks - provided, of course, that Mr Smith and his accomplice, Luke Bateman, are not apprehended along the way.

Here's a sampling of other laws Messrs. Smith and Bateman plan to break, according to the Times of London:

• It is illegal to play cards against a Native American in Globe, Arizona
• It is illegal to drive around the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, more than 100 times on a single occasion
• It is illegal to say “oh boy” in Jonesborough, Georgia
• It is illegal to play golf in the streets of Albany, New York
• It is illegal to give lighted cigars to dogs, cats and other pets in Zion, Illinois
• It is illegal to take a lion to the cinema in Baltimore
• In Carmel, New York, a man cannot go outside while wearing a jacket and trousers that do not match
• In Miami, it is illegal for men to be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown

You can read about more of the nation's dumber laws at The Dumb Network.

Hazzard pay

Let the record show that you can earn $100,000 as the official blogger for a cable network's weeknight reruns of a cult TV series. That's the annual salary CMT will pay its resident fan-expert on "The Dukes of Hazzard," aka vice president of the CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute, a position it's currently trying to fill.

Blogging isn't the only job responsibility, of course. It's actually the fourth item on the list after watching the show every night, knowing the lyrics to the theme song and serving as a "media expert" who will do interviews "to share passion" for the network's reruns. (Curiously, "being passionate" about them is fifth on the list.) Still, barring a really intense schedule of public appearances and interviews in other media, I suspect writing the blog will become the biggest part of the job.

Applicants must be at least 18 years old, have a valid driver's license, be eligible to work legally in the United States, and available to travel occasionally. Go here if you're interested.

Lego Steve Jobs

Why covet your own bobblehead doll when you can be immortalized in Legos?

One way to sell out

Here's one way to try and contain bad publicity:

Jack William Pacheco has more copies of this week's edition of The Chowchilla [Calif.] News than he'll ever need.

The 35-year-old Chowchilla resident went around town Wednesday morning and purchased every copy he could in an attempt to suppress news of his arrest for alleged methamphetamine possession.

(From Romenesko.)

Herding cats

The End is Nigh Department: Herding cats is now officially a competitive sport.

(Im)perfect match

A man and woman in Jordan whose cyber-romance had blossomed into talk of marriage were stunned to discover upon meeting face to face that they were actually man and wife. They're divorced now, AFP reports.

The irony, of course, is that it sounds like they might have been right for each other after all.

The Bill & Tony Show

Today's Insider column leads off with an amusing anecdote about how the mind of Bill Gates was apparently mistaken for that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The governor and the pizza girl

If you missed P-I statehouse correspondent Chris McGann's interview with new Gov. Christine Gregoire, it led off with an entertaining anecdote:

Two days after her inauguration, Gov. Christine Gregoire came home from a long day at her new job and decided to relax and order a pizza. But when she picked up the phone and dialed, she found out that when you're the governor, the tough questions never end.

Before she ordered, the pizza girl wanted to know:

"What's your telephone number?"

"I don't know."

"What's your address?"

"I don't know that either."

"Pardon me? What's your name?"

"My name is Chris Gregoire -- that's C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-G-O-I-R-E."

"And you don't know your address?"

"It's the mansion."

"What?"

"You know, like the governor's mansion."

"Can you hang on a minute?"

Gregoire eventually managed to order the pie -- she said someone else at the pizza parlor helped clear things up -- but when she walked downstairs to the guard station to pick it up, she realized just how much her life had changed.

For shy dogs only

		Jim Bryant / P-I

Only in Seattle: Magnuson Park now has a special, protected off-leash area marked off for small and shy dogs:

The penned area, a pilot project that became permanent last month, caters to wallflowers, puppies, lapdogs and other canines intimidated by the roughhousing of normal dog parks. But small dogs seem to use the area most. ...

So what if they can't run with the big dogs? They can do something huskies can't: throw their entire bodies into clumps of grass and play peek-a-boo.

Costly cookie caper

		AP

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: Teenagers Taylor Ostergaard and Lindsey Zellitti decided to surprise a neighbor one night by dropping off a batch of fresh, home-baked cookies.

Alas, the unexpected visit triggered an anxiety attack that prompted her to flee her home and later sent her to the hospital. She sued the girls' families and a judge ordered them to pay her $900 in medical bills.

Death by enema

A Texas woman has been indicted for negligent homicide for giving him a sherry enema that caused fatal alcohol poisoning, the Houston Chronicle reports. His blood alcohol level soared to 0.47 percent.

Throat problems kept the husband, an alcoholic, from ingesting alcohol the conventional way, police said.

"A person drinking alcohol will usually pass out before getting a lethal dose," Lake Jackson, Texas, police detective Robert Turner told the Chronicle. "But if you're getting it through an enema, you can pass out and still be ingesting more alcohol."

Ads on abs

Rather than cover up her growing belly, Amber Rainey of Myrtle Beach, S.C., now seven months pregnant, auctioned off the advertising space on her abdomen on eBay for $4,050.

What really surprises me is that she got so much less than the guy who auctioned off the advertising rights to his forehead for $37,375.

Hendrix house update

Seattle has had a pretty rocky relationship with rock legend Jimi Hendrix's legacy in recent years, from the contentious origins of the Experience Music Project to lawsuits over his estate.

The latest development: the city wants the house where he lived during the mid-1950s removed from the vacant lot where it's rested since being moved from its original site three years ago. It's given the James Marshall Hendrix Foundation, which owns the house but not the land underneath, until Feb. 22 to find it a new home.

He's still first in line

Famously patient "Star Wars" fan Jeff Tweiten is no longer waiting for "Episode III" at the Cinerama downtown. He's moved to the Seattle Center in pursuit of a larger vision: seeing "Episode III" on an Imax screen. Details at his blog.

Dumb business moments

Business 2.0 has published its list of the