A 37-year-old man from Shanghai, China asked the Guinness Book of World Records to name him the world’s youngest smoker. While there are plenty of people younger than him who smoke, he says he first started puffing on a pipe when he was three years old, a pipe which was given to him by his grandparents. The editors rejected his request, though they suggested he reapply in the categories “Stupidest Attempt to Shorten A Child’s Life”, “Most Continuous Hacking Coughs”, and “Dumbest Idea Hoping to Get in the Guinness Book of World Records.”

A Hudsonville, Michigan, man was arrested on charges of “operating his vehicle while intoxicated.” The vehicle in question was a forklift and he was driving it in the Spartan Stores’ frozen food warehouse. He’s just lucky he wasn’t charged with driving with a loaded pallet.

…have too many blades on your razor. It started with one blade, then two became the norm. Then Gillette upped the ante with the Mach3 so of course Schick came out with the 4-blade Quattro. Not to be out-machoed, Gillette is putting out a five-bladed razor named Fusion early next year. So there! It will come with a beard and moustache trimmer on the back of the cartridge and be available in manual and battery-powered versions. Personally, I think I’ll wait until the Wi-Fi enabled version with USB port, iPod dock and ice cube maker is released. Still, they’re getting close to the perfect razor. At this rate they’re only a couple of years away from having enough blades so I can shave in one stroke.

A recent Harris poll showed that two out of three Americans don’t know the words to the national anthem. Just for the record, it’s called the “Star Spangled Banner.” Interestingly, they can all sing the lyrics to “Joy to the World,” know “Bohemian Rhapsody” by heart, sing along with “Rapper’s Delight” each time they watch “The Wedding Singer,” and know every word of every song Nirvana recorded, though they couldn’t tell you what any of it means.

At the end of his weekly general audience today, Pope Benedict gave a shout-out to Italian exorcists who are in town for their national convention. This caught people off guard since very few knew it was going on. Or where. After all, there was no meeting room posted on the bulletin board of the Vatican Hyatt. In related news, last week the Regina Apostolorum, an honest to, uh, god university in Rome, announced that for the second year in a row it will hold a course on exorcism and Satanism for Roman Catholic priests. Classes begin next month and can be attended in person in Rome or via videoconference from other Italian cities. The online course, “e-Exorcisms For Fun and Profit”, will be available next semester at the Learning Annex.

Years ago Simon Bond wrote a book, 101 Uses For a Dead Cat. Now we have another use. A German inventor says he’s figured out how to make gas from tires, weeds, and yes, dead cats. For about three cents per gallon if my math conversion is correct. He says one cat can produce 2.5 liters of diesel fuel, which is 20 cats per tank. The EPA is expected to decide soon whether getting 16 mpc (miles per cat) falls within the guidelines of the new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have modified an Aibo robotic dog from Sony so it monitors your daily food intake and exercise levels and nags you to stop pigging out and get off your butt to exercise. It’s connected by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to your bathroom scales, a pedometer, and a PDA in which you list everything you eat. When you ask “How am I?” it reacts. If you’ve been watching your diet it jumps up and down, wags its tail, plays exciting music, and flashes LEDs. If not, it makes you Sweat to the Oldies and poops on the floor. Just kidding. Actually it moves lethargically and plays low-energy music. It’s like living with Richard Simmons without the whining and high maintenance.

You don’t have to go to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, you can check out a smaller version in Prague or Las Vegas. Heck, Vegas even has a reproduction of the Great Pyramid, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Doge’s Palace in Venice. But that’s nothing. Soon you’ll be able to see life-size replicas of seven (count ’em, 7!) wonders of the world in the dessert of Dubai. The Falcon City of Wonders, which is expected to cost $1.5 billion, will have reproductions of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Great Wall of China. All filled with apartments, offices, hotels, and shopping malls. You’ll be able to go around the world in a cab — in 80 minutes! No more messy currency exchanges! No more wondering what country you’re in! See the world in one city and be able to shop until you drop! Maybe they should change the name of the city to Paradise.

Until recently, scientists believed human evolution stopped 50,000 years ago, long before the debate over Evolution vs. Some Wacky Idea That Has No Basis In Science flared up. Now a new discovery may turn this thinking upside down. A study reported in Science suggests that the brain may still be undergoing rapid intelligent design. I mean, evolution. Critics aren’t so sure of these findings, pointing to Jesse Helms, buyers of William Hung’s new CD, and the remake of the Dukes of Hazzard as proof.

Authorities in northeast China raided a restaurant that was rumored to be serving stir-fried Siberian tiger at 800 yuans ($99) a plate. The owner confessed that what was supposed to be endangered tiger meat was actually donkey meat that had been dressed with tiger urine to give the dish a “special flavor.” Oh, that’s different.

If President Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, TX is 1,600 acres, and each displaced family from New Orleans were given a spacious 1/2-acre plot there, how many families would have a place to live?

ANSWER:
[ ] 800
[ ] 3,200
[ ] C
[ ] None. But at least Halliburton Co. would be awarded the contract to develop the project.

President Bush said today he’ll oversee an investigation into the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, trying to determine what went wrong and why. The investigation will start, oh, sometime in the future, probably after a vacation in Crawford, two speeches equating the war in Iraq with the Revolutionary War, and allowing John Roberts to chair his own Senate confirmation hearing. Former president Bill Clinton is reportedly kicking himself for not having thought to head up the Whitewater/Monica investigation.

Britney Spears says she wants to name her soon-to-arrive baby London. London Preston Spears. It’s not that Apple, Phinnaeus, Rumer, Coco, and Moon Unit were taken — which they were — but rather that London is where she first hooked up with dancer Kevin Federline. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen in Tallahassee.

What do you do when you’re a King, need a wife, and there’s no match.com, CraigsList, or Blind Date around? If you’re the King of Swaziland you hold a Reed Dance, where more than 50,000 bare-breasted virgins wearing beaded mini-skirts dance around the royal stadium while carrying machetes and singing tributes to the groom-to-be in the hope that he’ll pick them to join his 12 other wives in multi-matrimonial bliss. And to think, the guys on ElimiDate only get to choose from four.

A company in Japan is about to start selling a child-shaped robot as a housesitter, a clever way to skirt child labor laws since, as far as my 20-second Google search can ascertain, humanoids aren’t covered, though this could turn out to be a litmus test for John Roberts’ Supreme Court nomination if word gets out. Manufactured by Mitsubishi-Heavy Industries Ltd. (motto: “Lightweights need not apply”), the robot is 3-feet tall, weighs 66 pounds, can recognize 10,000 words, and is named Wakamaru. Oh yeah, and it will sell for about 1.58 million yen (US$14,300). Here are ten reasons why a robot is better than a child.

Does shopping wear you out? Has the Ferris wheel, shark tank, and dinosaur museum in the mall sapped your strength so you’re just too tired to look for new shoes? If you’re at The Mall of America in Bloomington, MN, you’re in luck. Just stop at MinneNAPolis, the new store where for 70 cents a minute you can take a snooze in one of three themed rooms: the lovely Asian Mist room, Tropical Isle, or Deep Space. Sure that comes to $42 an hour, about the cost of a night at the Motel 6 down the block, but if it means you’ll feel refreshed and ready to hit the rest of the four miles of storefronts at the mall then it’s worth it. Remember, a rested shopper is a happy shopper.

Sure you know you can buy cheap toilet paper, chicken breasts, and caskets at Costco, but did you know you can buy an original crayon drawing by Pablo Picasso for only $129,999.99? You can also get art from Chagall, Miro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, and Peter Max. Or the handy Kirkland Art Sampler 6-pack. They’re only available online, but a note says, “Costco.com products can be returned to any of our more than 400 Costco warehouses worldwide.”

“Uh, I bought this drawing online but it doesn’t go with my couch. Can I exchange it for 260,434 rolls of Kirkland toilet paper?”

Remember when the town of Halfway, OR changed its name to Half.com in return for 20 computers? How about when every town that was approached about changing its name to Got Milk? turned down the honor? No? Well, that shows what good promotions they were. Not to let those lessons cramp their style, EchoStar Communications Corp., better known as the Dish Network has upped the ante. They say they’ll give 10 years’ worth of free satellite TV service to every household in a U.S. town that legally changes its name to Dish. This means the company would shell out about $4 million for 1,000 households. Or, if New York City were to take them up on it, $12 billion. C’mon, Bloomberg, think of the political capital you’d get out of that one.

In an effort to entice Americans to cross the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a city in the midst of a drug war that has resulted in 115 people being gunned down and 40 U.S. citizens being kidnapped so far this year, the town’s tourist board has started offering free bus tours. With an armed police escort. If the plan is successful, expect to see the program expanded to Detroit, Baghdad, Camden, NJ, and the opening of the next Ikea store.

While past research has shown that tall adults earn more money than shorter ones, a new survey by economists at the University of Michigan shows that what matters more is how tall a person is when they’re 16. Yes, they checked at ages 7, 11 and 33 — they don’t affect future wages. Much of the raw data came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, so maybe the moral is that longitude matters.