What else is new?

1. You just got change, and you have a Canadian penny. What do you do?

a. Demand a real penny, damn it, not one of these cheap knock-offs

b. Check with those nearby to see if you really are in Canada, and if so, find out why

c. Swallow it, quick, before they find you

d. Unwrap it and eat the chocolate


2. You find an eclair in your sock drawer. You:

a. Put on a pair of socks

b. Put on the eclair

c. Look for the other eclair, cause there must be a pair

d. Pinch yourself cuz you must be dreaming


3. What can I say to God to get into heaven?

a. Do you have any idea who I am?

b. I just need to get in for a minute I want to see if my friends are there.

c. I can make your life very difficult

d. Come on god, be cool, man, be cool


4. If you were a tree, where would you go out to eat?

a. Miracle-Gro Casino Sunday Morning Champagne Brunch Buffet

b. Taco Bell because trees always seem to be broke

c. Tree food court at the tree mall

d. Red Lobster

e. Anything off the trunk of a $1000-a-night tree hooker


5. You catch your lover in bed with C-3P0. You:

a. Congratulate the better man.

b. Ask for a C-3some-0.

c. Get really C-3P.O.'ed.

d. Ask him to autograph the VCR.

e. May as well watch, because it's hard to picture how this goes down

I am so pissed off about the pharma companies. There is a Latisse spot may appear to be just another by-the-numbers pharma spot, but in fact it's the greatest bad pharma spot ever. Let's count the ways:

1) "The first and only approved FDA treatment for inadequate and not enough lashes," "also known as hypotrichosis."
Hypotrichosis has all the makings of a fake illness: enough of a medical basis to sound real (it's a condition of "no hair growth") and yet vague enough to invite creative interpretation. In December, the same month the FDA approved Latisse, someone at Allergan--the company that makes the drug--repeatedly tried to alter the Wikipedia entry of hypotrichosis to include eyelash hypotrichosis. Fortunately, Wikipedia moderators caught the changes and removed them (here and here).

2) Brooke Shields as spokesperson
In case it wasn't perfectly clear that eyelash hypotrichosis is a fiction, we're asked to believe that Brooke Shields--a woman with well over 30 years in modeling--isn't pretty enough without this new drug for her lashes.

3) "May cause eyelid skin darkening, which may be reversible, and there is potential for increased brown iris pigmentation, which is likely permanent."
Also "itchy eyes and eye redness" and, though the commercial never says it, the active ingredient in Latisse is also linked to optic nerve damage and blindness. Ok, so you get longer, dark lashes, but your eyes might turn brown, itchy, and useless.

4) "Full results in 12 to 16 weeks" and "If discontinued, lashes will gradually return to their previous appearance."
So you have to wait four months for this stuff to work and as soon as you stop, you're back to your old bald lids. It's worth noting that the message about discontinuing Latisse appears only as text on screen at the same time that the voice-over lists side effects. The makers of this commercial are hoping to cram the drawbacks in as little space as possible to free you, the consumer, from reflection.

5) "Find a doctor at Latisse.com."
Gee, I wonder what those doctors will think of Latisse.... Perhaps this serves a useful purpose, though: any dermatologist on here is probably one you'd want to avoid.

1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the football before helping around the house.

3. Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!

4. A Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer quickly to No 9 for the meaning of nothing.)

5. That's Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

6. Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you're welcome. (I want to add a clause here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot', which is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say 'you're welcome' - that will bring on No. 7).

7. Whatever: Is a woman's way of saying, "F-- YOU!"

8. Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to No. 4.

9. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in "Fine".

10. We: read as I. You are not included in plan making. We (I) made plans for something.

US firm apologizes over use of murdered couple’s photo

AN AMERICAN company has been forced to apologize after using a picture of murdered honeymooners Ben and Catherine Mullany in an online advertising campaign.

An image of the couple, who were shot dead in Antigua last summer, was used by the US firm MyDishBiz alongside in an area of its website featuring testimonials from satisfied customers.

The company last night apologized to the couple’s family, and said it had “not knowingly included the picture” on its site.

But its appearance has been criticized by Welsh Secretary Peter Hain as “diabolical”, while a friend of the family described it as “like some kind of terrible joke”.

Ben and Catherine, both 31 and from Rhos, near Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley, were shot dead in a bungled robbery at their holiday bungalow on the Caribbean island of Antigua on July 27 last year.

It was the last day of their honeymoon.

Catherine died instantly from head wounds while Ben died a week later having been transferred in a coma to Morriston Hospital in Swansea.

The picture used on the American website showed a smiling Ben and Catherine, and was accompanied by text suggesting the pair were “Frank and Mary from New York”, complete with a gushing testimonial purportedly from them about MyDishBiz.

The picture had in fact been taken in the run up to the couple’s wedding in the Swansea Valley a year ago this weekend.

The image of newly qualified GP Catherine and trainee physiotherapist Ben, an ex-soldier had apparently been downloaded from an internet tribute to them, and paired with the bogus testimonial.

The testimonial said: “We have made $1,000 alone with your MyDishBiz internet business opportunity.

“We are very happy with this program. This is the best opportunity we’ve ever seen online. Thanks again.”

The company has now issued a humble apology and has blamed either a disgruntled ex-employee or someone “with a warped sense of humor”.

Mr Hain, who is the MP of the murdered couple’s family, said: “This is diabolical.

“It may have been a mistake but it should never have happened.

“The couple’s memory should be cherished not abused.”

Ben and Catherine’s family in Pontardawe are said to be “upset” that the photograph is being used with a false identity.

And a friend of the Mullanys said yesterday: “It sounds like some kind of terrible joke or prank in which someone has gone to the trouble of downloading the photo from the internet and putting words alongside it.

“The company may not have known what was going on but surely there should have been more checks done on something like this before it went out?”

Internet company MyDishBiz based in Wintersville, Ohio, yesterday confirmed it has now removed the offending photograph and sent apologies to Ben and Catherine’s families.

A spokesman said: “We are trying to track down who sent the testimonial and picture for inclusion on our website.

“It may have been a disgruntled affiliate or someone who has a very warped sense of humor.”

“Deepest apologies are extended to the families of the victims.

“Our company did not knowingly include the picture of the deceased on our website.”

Two Antiguan men – Avie Howell, 18, and Kaniel Martin, 21 – are due to stand trial on the holiday island later this year charged with murdering the newlywed couple.

And a third defendant, Georgette Aaron, who has been charged with perverting the course of justice by trying to help Martin and Howell, will stand trial alongside them.

Aaron, 32, had also been charged with being an accessory to murder, robbery after the fact and conspiracy to make a false statement but those charges were withdrawn.

She is accused of receiving, harboring, maintaining and comforting Martin and Howell.

Tourism on Antigua has been badly hit since news of the Mullany murders swept around the world following their brutal killing.

The size of the police force on the island has been increased considerably since the Mullany murders and efforts are still being made to modernize detective and forensic work.

Sting nabs sticky-fingered JFK airport workers going through luggage

A sting captured by security cameras nabbed two sticky-fingered airport workers who swiped electronics planted by authorities, officials said.

Brian Burton, 27, and Antwon Simmons, 26, stole a laptop and cell phone from the decoy luggage as it moved through Kennedy Airport, Port Authority officials said.

"When air travelers check their luggage with an airline, there is an implicit trust that their bags and their contents will meet them at their destination," said Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. "The defendants are accused of betraying that trust."

Burton, an officer with the Transportation Security Administration, was videotaped July 7 pilfering through the Miami-bound suitcase in an airport screening room while Simmons, a baggage handler, looked on.

The thieves also switched the luggage tags, hoping to conceal their handiwork, officials said.

The suitcase was a trap set by the Transportation Security Administration and Delta Air Lines.

They stuffed the luggage with a lap top, an iPod and two cell phones, prosecutors said.

The pilfering pair - who had been on cops' radar, a source said - took the bait, failing the so-called integrity test.

Burton, of Queens, and Simmons, of Brooklyn, were awaiting arraignment last night on charges of grand larceny, possession of stolen property and falsifying business records.

They face up to four years in prison if convicted.

There are no words in the thesaurus of insult that quite do justice to the UK Border Agency and the minister for borders and immigration, Phil Woolas.

So let's just agree that new rules barring artists from visiting this country and so enriching our culture are some of the most contemptible ever devised, even by this narrow-minded apology for a government.

A few weeks ago I commented on the shameful treatment received at Gatwick airport by the Canadian singer Allison Crowe and two band members who were fingerprinted, held in cells then sent home under new laws that mean that artists have to submit to a set of expensive and time-consuming procedures to get their visa and further restrictions on their movements while they are here.

Now news comes from the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which is under way, that three poets who were due to appear have been barred from entering Britain. There could no more depressing example of the way in which this government's populist obsession with immigration damages artistic life.

Dorothea Rosa Herliany, according to the festival, is one of the most important poets writing in Indonesia today. She is a feminist, note the Muslim society in which she works, and has eight volumes of poetry to her name. Currently resident for a short time in Germany, she received this crushingly dim response to her application for a visa.

"You have provided an invitation to participate in the Ledbury Poetry Festival in the UK, however you have failed to provide any documents showing the funds available to you or demonstrating your current circumstances in Germany. I note that you only arrived in Germany in April 09, and have limited leave to remain until 30/07/09. I am therefore not satisfied on the balance of probabilities that you are a genuine visitor, that you intend to leave the UK at the end of your visit."

The festival only learned about the ban two weeks ago and did not have the time to make representations on her behalf. In the event she was given a visa for the day after she was due to appear. The only possible course for Woolas and the UK Borders Agency is to make an apology to Herliany and to the people who attend the festival, but we shouldn't hold our breath because there is clearly some kind of campaign against poets with strange sounding names and of Muslim origin who want to come to this country.

Also barred were Hassan Najmi and Ouidad (Widad) Benmoussa, two Moroccan poets who were due to appear today for an event entitled Moroccan Food and Poetry. The festival press officer, Simon Steven, outlines their credentials. "Hassan Najmi has published four collections of poems, one novel and two books of essays. He was president of the Moroccan Union of Writers from 1998 to 2005 and is presently director-general of the book and publications department of Morocco's Ministry of Culture. Ouidad Benmoussa has published two collections, including Between Two Clouds in 2006. Her first collection, The Imminent Root (2001), established her as a poet to watch."

Both were messed around by the agency that handles applications in a way that must shame anyone who cares about Britain's reputation abroad. It is a wretched irony that Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon (who were to host the Moroccan poets) have been invited to Morocco for a literary festival this summer and they won't need visas.

Steven said, "This is like holding a dinner party and finding you have a bouncer on the door who is barring guests." Joan Bakewell, who is chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, emailed me yesterday with this comment. "I am shocked by what has happened at Ledbury. The NCA has laboured long and hard with the Home Office explaining repeatedly and in the greatest detail how much the arts are international and depend on the exchange of artists to fuel the great appetite people now have for work that sustains the human spirits.

For such worthwhile and peaceful events to be snarled up by slow-moving and inappropriate bureaucracies is a failure of values and competence."

We need to hear from Woolas, or his boss, Alan Johnson. It's time these nasty and absurd restrictions were lifted.

Anyone who has ever had cats knows how difficult it can be to get them to do anything they don't already want to do. But it seems that the house cats themselves have had distinctly less trouble getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in the July 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

The rather crafty felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by sending something of a mixed signal: an urgent cry or meowing sound embedded within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result is a call that humans generally find annoyingly difficult to ignore.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom." She suggests that this form of cat communication sends a subliminal sort of message, tapping into an inherent sensitivity that humans and other mammals have to cues relevant in the context of nurturing their offspring.

McComb said that she was inspired by her own cat, who consistently wakes her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. She learned in talking with other cat owners that some of their cats too had mastered the same manipulative trick. As a scientist who already studied vocal communication in mammals, from elephants to lions, she decided to get to the bottom of it.

It turned out that wasn't so easy to do. The cats were perfectly willing to use their coercive cries in private, but when strangers came around they tended to clam right up. Her team therefore had to train cat owners to record their own cats' cries.

In a series of playback experiments with those calls, they found that humans judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts, even if they had never had a cat themselves.

"We found that the crucial factor determining the urgency and pleasantness ratings that purrs received was an unusual high-frequency element—reminiscent of a cry or meow—embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr," McComb said. "Human participants in our experiments judged purrs with high levels of this element to be particularly urgent and unpleasant." When the team re-synthesised the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly.

McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might get overlooked by poorly trained people.

In those instances, she said, cats seem to find it more effective to stick to the standard meow.

Lesson 1

Go to the grocery store.
Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
Go home.
Pick up the paper.
Read it for the last time.


Lesson 2

Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who already are parents and berate them about their:
Methods of discipline.
Lack of patience.
Appallingly low tolerance levels.
Allowing their children to run wild.
Suggest ways in which they might improve their child's breastfeeding, sleep habits, toilet training, table manners, and overall behavior.
Enjoy it, because it will be the last time in your life you will have all the answers.


Lesson 3

To discover how the nights will feel...
Walk around the living room from 5PM to 10PM carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 pounds, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly.
At 10PM, put the bag down, set the alarm for midnight, and go to sleep.
Get up at 12 and walk around the living room again, with the bag, until 1AM.
Set the alarm for 3AM.
As you can't get back to sleep, get up at 2AM and make a drink.
Go to bed at 2:45AM.
Get up at 3AM when the alarm goes off.
Sing songs in the dark until 4AM.
Get up. Make breakfast. Keep this up for 5 years.
Look cheerful.


Lesson 4

Can you stand the mess children make? To find out...
Smear peanut butter onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains.
Hide a piece of raw chicken behind the stereo and leave it there all summer.
Stick your fingers in the flower bed.
Then rub them on the clean walls.
Cover the stains with crayons. How does that look?


Lesson 5

Dressing small children is not as easy as it seems.
Buy an octopus and a small bag made out of loose mesh.
Attempt to put the octopus into the bag so that none of the arms hang out.
Time allowed for this - all morning.


Lesson 6

Take an egg carton. Using a pair of scissors and a jar of paint, turn it into an alligator.
Now take the tube from a roll of toilet paper. Using only Scotch tape and a piece of aluminum foil, turn it into an attractive Christmas candle.
Last, take a milk carton, a ping-pong ball, and an empty packet of Cocoa Puffs.
Make an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower.


Lesson 7

Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don't think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don't look like that.
Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment.
Leave it there.
Get a dime. Stick it in the cassette player.
Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat.
Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.
There. Perfect.


Lesson 8

Get ready to go out.
Wait outside the bathroom for half an hour.
Go out the front door.
Come in again. Go out.
Come back in.
Go out again.
Walk down the front path.
Walk back up it.
Walk down it again.
Walk very slowly down the road for five minutes.
Stop, inspect minutely, and ask at least 6 questions about every cigarette butt, piece of used chewing gum, dirty tissue, and dead insect along the way.
Retrace your steps.
Scream that you have had as much as you can stand until the neighbors come out and stare at you.
Give up and go back into the house.
You are now just about ready to try taking a small child for a walk.


Lesson 9

Repeat everything at least (if not more than) five times.


Lesson 10

Go to the local grocery store. Take with you the closest thing you can find to a pre-school child. (A full- grown goat is excellent).
If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat.
Buy your week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight.
Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.
Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.


Lesson 11

Hollow out a melon.
Make a small hole in the side.
Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side.
Now get a bowl of soggy Cheerios and attempt to spoon them into the
swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane.
Continue until half the Cheerios are gone.
Tip half into your lap. The other half, just throw up in the air.
You are now ready to feed a nine-month old baby.


Lesson 12

Learn the names of every character from Sesame Street, Barney, Disney, the Teletubbies, and Pokemon. Watch nothing else on TV for at least five years.


Lesson 13

Move to the tropics. Find or make a compost pile. Dig down about halfway and stick your nose in it. Do this 3-5 times a day for at least two years.


Lesson 14

Make a recording of Fran Drescher saying "mommy" repeatedly. (Important: no more than a four second delay between each "mommy"; occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet is required). Play this tape in your car everywhere you go for the next four years.
You are now ready to take a long trip with a toddler.


Lesson 15

Start talking to an adult of your choice. Have someone else continually tug on your skirt hem, shirt- sleeve, or elbow while playing the "mommy" tape made from Lesson 14 above. You are now ready to have a conversation with an adult while there is a child in the room.