According to a newly released account provided by a 19-year-old Austrian deserter, Adolf Hitler woke up about 10 a.m., enjoyed a nice breakfast of bread and marmalade, and was mild-mannered during personal conversations. The soldier also revealed that Stalin enjoyed long moon-lit walks on the beach, Mussolini liked receiving flowers and candy, and Idi Amin cried every time he watched Bambi.
A guy walks into Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s office and says, “I have no privacy when you do this.” Schmidt says, “Don’t do this.”
But seriously, folks. A while back, when asked how adults can clean up any Internet-based record of their youthful indiscretions, Schmidt semi-joked: “Change their names.” Then last week, in a CNN interview with Parker Spitzer, he said that people who don’t want their homes to appear on Google’s Street View should “move.” Interestingly, that exchange has disappeared from both the video posted on CNN’s site as well as the transcript. Yet amazingly your house is still on Street View. And those incriminating photos of you at that party are still on Google Images.
The moral? It’s easier to edit an interview than your online life.
Thank you! Drive safely. And don’t forget to tip your waitress…we’ll know it if you don’t.
A new survey finds that the average American teen sends 3,339 text messages a month. That’s 111 a day, eight an hour, or one every seven waking minutes. When confronted with this, most of the teens were shocked to learn that they had all that spare time in which to send more text messages.
Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Manchester have analyzed millions of Tweets and come up with an algorithm that figures out the mood of Twitter users. And along with it, predicts the ups and downs of the stock market with 87% accuracy. They’re working on refining the algorithm so it can also predict elections, select winning lottery numbers, and predict whether people who get fired as CEO for sexual harassment or as a news commentator for making racist remarks will not only land on their feet but make more money than ever. Okay, so we don’t need an algorithm to figure out the last one.
A couple of days ago the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, declared that, “Few people know it, and he does everything to hide it. But it’s true: Homer J. Simpson is Catholic.” Executive producer Al Jean begs to differ, saying that Homer and his family are “Presby-lutheran.” Meanwhile, Episco-Buddha-du minister I.M. Miksedup says, “Weird. We always thought Homer was Jew-slim.”
According to a new book, the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. This means the Mayan calendar may not, in fact, end on Dec 21, 2012 as expected, thus the much hyped apocalypse is being postponed. Unless, of course, the calculations were off in the other direction in which it’s already happened. Like say, when George Bush was elected. On the positive side, it gives John Cusak more work by making it possible to film a sequel to the movie “2012.”
In a sad, blatant cry to Saturday Night Live begging for them to feature her in a skit, Delaware’s Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell told a group of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School she wasn’t aware that the First Amendment to the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state. She was also shocked to find out that the Constitution guarantees the right to vote, a speedy trial, and free speech, which includes allowing former witches who can’t name a recent Supreme Court decision they disagree with to embarrass themselves over and over.
In a speech in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid compared President Barack Obama to a trapped Chilean miner, saying that when he replaced George Bush in the White House he found himself in a “hole so deep that he couldn’t see the outside world. It was like the Chilean miners, but he, being the man he is, rolled up his sleeves and said ‘I am going to get us out of this hole.'” Unlike the Chilean miners who needed all that help. Reid, on the other hand, isn’t anything like a Chilean miner since he’s shown he can get himself into a metaphor hole so deep there’s no way he could ever dig out.
It’s obvious which part of “Anger Management” Faribah Maradiaga doesn’t understand. When the 19-year-old walked into her anger management class at Bellevue College and started complaining about the video that was being shown, another woman told her to “give it a chance.” Maradiaga pulled a knife and stabbed the woman, then threatened to kill her family. Not only has she been charged with second-degree assault, it’s a safe bet she’ll have to take the class again.
For the next month, the Macy’s store on 34th Street in New York City will have a “magic mirror” in a women’s fitting room that lets you try on virtual clothes by selecting different outfits from a touchscreen and seeing them on you. Sort of. You can even post the image on Facebook, where friends can “Like” it, “Ignore” it, or suggest you switch the mirror to “Funhouse Mirror Slimmed” before you post another image.
According to MSNBC, Justin Bieber is teaming up with Nicole by OPI to put out a line of, uh, nail polish. He’s also coming out with a book later this week, Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story, and there will be a 3-D movie about his life supposedly out next year. All that’s missing is a perfume—Bieber!—that will smell like a desperate attempt to amass as much money as possible before his voice changes.
A survey by anti-virus maker AVG found that the average age in which children have an online presence is six months, mostly because of parents posting or sharing photos of their babies, though 23% of parents start the process pre-birth by uploading the kid-to-be’s sonogram. The survey also found that 7% of babies have an email address at birth. And of those, 98% have received ads for V!agra, 76% have been asked to confirm their bank login information, and 47% have gotten an email from a friend who’s stranded in London after having had his wallet stolen asking them to send money immediately.
When police in Bradenton, Florida, stopped 25-year-old Raymond Stanley Roberts for speeding and smelled marijuana, they searched him, finding a bag of pot between his buttocks. Looking into it deeper—or should we say, a further examination—revealed that someone took the name “crack cocaine” seriously. Yes, there was a bag of rock cocaine in there too. Roberts swears the pot was his but not the cocaine and says he has no idea how it got there. The police probably should search him again. Good chance this time they’ll find his head in the same place the pot and cocaine were.
MSNBC is launching a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to increase brand awareness (and ratings) based around its cryptic new tagline, “Lean Forward.” They’re hoping it will make viewers “Sit! and “Stay!” The network recently took the No. 2 news channel spot away from CNN, which may adopt the slogan “Roll Over. Play Dead.” Meanwhile, industry leader Fox News isn’t watching all this from the sidelines. It’s reportedly changing its slogan to: “Not just correct, but right.”
Forget barking, now your dog can Tweet, thanks to Puppy Tweets from Mattel. You simply attach a special tag to your dog’s collar, plug a receiver into a USB port on your computer, and when your dog moves or makes noise, it automatically sends Tweets to a Twitter page you set up for your dog. It’s programmed for 500 different Tweets including “Chasing everything that moves is definitely a full time job!”, “Your comforter does just what its name says it does,” and “Don’t you and your friends have anything better to do than read bogus Tweets supposedly from a dog?”
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing says the newly designed, high-tech, hard to counterfeit $100 bills that are supposed to be released on February 10 are being delayed indefinitely because they’re having trouble printing them. If you can’t wait, go downtown. There are probably plenty of nice, clean, freshly printed versions available on the street already.
