Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein, the Jewish Puerto Rican wheeler-dealer whose full name was Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein, on Welcome Back Kotter died yesterday. The death certificate was signed by “Epstein’s Mother.” 

The Canyons School District in Utah has decided against using “Cougars” as a mascot for a new high school partly because they say it has a negative connotation. The school’s Single Mom’s PTA Group has decided to adopt it. Meanwhile the school mascot will be the “Chargers,” in spite of the fact that the local chapter of Shoppers Anonymous already uses that mascot.

Ever feel weird buying virtual tools to tend your virtual garden in Farmville? Well, a man in China has you beat—he recently paid $16,000 for a virtual sword to be used in “Age of Wulin,” a multi-player online role-playing game that hasn’t even been released yet. He probably bought it to impress his virtual girlfriend.

A survey by Poll Position found that of those people who knew about Tim Tebow, 43% believe divine intervention is at least partly responsible for his success. Forty-two percent of those polled disagreed, while 14% said they needed to pray for guidance in making up their mind.

At the American Dialect Society’s annual conference Friday, members voted for the Word of the Year. The winner? “Occupy.” Meanwhile, just a few days before, Lake Superior State University’s 37th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness included “ginormous,” “man cave,” and yes, “occupy.” You know, as in, “Can’t you find a better way to occupy your time?”

A bluefin tuna was auctioned off at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market yesterday for a record price of 56.49 million yen, which is about $736,000. And you think you get sticker shock at Safeway. The $1,238 per pound tuna will be cut into 10,000 pieces and sold by the Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain for $5.45 per nigiri or $27.25 for a lovely tuna sandwich, mayonnaise and lettuce included.

Barbie, the doll who turns 52 years old this year, has held 125 careers over her lifetime, including architect, dentist, and Army officer. When I do that I’m called an underachiever with no career path, for Barbie it means over 1 billion people have bought her.

An online gambling site has bought some of Michael Jackson’s hair for $10,871 and plans to have it made into a roulette ball manufactured “to the highest professional standards, ensuring it will be eligible for use at any licensed casino’s roulette table.” Apparently more appropriate body parts were unavailable.

According to the National Retail Federation (motto: “United we spend, divided we fail to make our projections”), U.S. consumers will spend $6 billion on Christmas decorations this year, the most in at least seven years. That could buy 600 million strings of tree lights, 7,228,915,662 packages of silver tinsel, or pay off .04% of the national debt and have enough left over for an “Occupy the chimney” ornament for the top of your tree.

Ray Bradbury’s classic book Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953 and named after the temperature at which paper burns, is finally available as an e-book.  You can get it for $9.99 from all major e-book retailers though it has been renamed Fahrenheit 302, which is the melting point of an e-book reader’s plastic casing.

Elvis Costello doesn’t want you to buy his record company’s upcoming release, The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, which includes a CD, DVD, 10-inch vinyl record, and 40-page tribute book autographed by him because it’s too expensive. He calls the $202.66 price “either a misprint or a satire.” Instead he recommends you buy Ambassador Of Jazz, a collection of 10 remastered Louis Armstrong albums he says is “vastly superior” and costs less than $150. If that’s still too rich for your blood, there’s always a Billie Joe Armstrong CD, like Green Day’s American Idiot for $10.76 on Amazon.com.

He’s still dead and still weird.

Connecticut State Representative Tim Larson is proposing that the state declare the last Saturday in October as Halloween since it would make life easier for parents and safer for trick-or-treaters to always have it on the weekend. What a dumb idea! Anyone with a lick of sense knows it should be moved to the last Monday of October so we can have another three-day weekend.

It was the last round draw at the World Scrabble Championships in Warsaw, Poland, and the two finalists noticed something odd–there should have been another “G” but it was missin_. The referee looked on the table, under the table, and finally asked both players to turn their pockets inside out to make sure the missin_ tile wasn’t there. Not findin_ it anywhere, and Vanna White not being handy so they could buy a “G”, the referee found another and put it in the ba_. OM_!

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population will hit 7 billion people on October 31, and by August 2013 each of them will have their own reality TV show.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley says too many Britains are overweight and knows how they should take care of it. He says they should eat less and be “more honest” about what they eat and drink. He also suggested that fewer people would drown if they’d quit going swimming, people wouldn’t fall down the stairs if they moved into one-story houses, and scabs heal faster if you don’t pick them.

Like many people this time of the year, a family went on an outing to the corn maze at Connors Farm in Danvers, Massachusetts. Like a lot of families, they got lost in the 7-acre maze. Unlike the rest of those families, they panicked when it started getting dark and called 911. An officer and K-9 unit went out to the farm, found the family, and hopefully escorted them home. While singing A-maze-ing Grace I suspect.