A blog that seems to appear & disappear unexpectedly
Posted by James Poniewozik, TIME Magazine blog
No, Courteney Cox hasn’t gone into a new line of work. This sign—snapped a block and a half from my house—is part of a stealth campaign for Cox’s upcoming ABC sitcom Cougar Town. Cox’s character, besides being an older gal with an eye for the younger fellas, is also a real-estate agent, which career must have seemed pretty hot and au courant… oh, back around the time when “cougars” were still a novel concept.
Users of Amazon.com’s e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including “1984” and “Animal Farm,” had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded.
Lawsuit: Amazon Ate My Homework
An Orwellian gaffe involving the Kindle e-book reader just won’t go down the memory hole for Amazon.com.
On Thursday, a Chicago-based law firm filed a suit in federal court in Seattle against Amazon on behalf of Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old Michigan high school senior. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims that when the company wirelessly deleted a copy of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from Gawronski’s Kindle earlier this month, it also deleted the notes he had taken on the device for his homework.
The suit, which cites another plaintiff who also lost his copy of the Orwell classic, seeks to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles. It also seeks monetary relief for people like Gawronski who lost work from the incident.
Amazon declined comment on the suit. The company, which refunded the purchase price of Orwell books to people whose copies it deleted, has already said it would not do it again. Last week, the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the incident, calling it “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”
Gawronski, a member of his high school’s debate team, says he got a Kindle earlier this summer because he knew he’d be reading a lot of books for his Advanced Placement English class. “If there’s something that catches my eye as I am reading, I just place a note there” using the Kindle’s keyboard, he said. Those notes are useful, he said, because “every 100 pages we have to write a 1-page summary and reflection of everything that we read,” he said.
But on July 20, when Gawronski turned on his Kindle, he watched his copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” disappear right before his eyes. “It was a bit ironic,” he said.
Walmart’s Project Impact: A Move to Crush Competition
Walmart loves to shock and awe. City-size stores, absurdly low prices ($8 jeans!) and everything from milk to Matchbox toys on its shelves. And with the recession forcing legions of stores into bankruptcy, the world’s largest retailer now apparently wants to take out the remaining survivors.
Thus, the company is in the beginning stages of a massive store and strategy remodeling effort, which it has dubbed Project Impact.
One goal of Project Impact is… home in on categories where the competition can be killed. “They’ve got Kmart ready to take a standing eight-count next year,” says retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director for Strategic Resources Group and a veteran Walmart watcher. “Same with Rite Aid. They’ve knocked out four of the top five toy retailers, and are now going after the last one standing, Toys “R” Us. Project Impact will be the catalyst to wipe out a second round of national and regional retailers.”
While most retailers are shutting down stores, Walmart has opened 52 Supercenters since Feb. 1.
MORE at 
Who are the wealth creators?
The right says the answer is rich people, not workers — who are wealth destroyers
By Michael Lind
Sept. 7, 2009
Today is Labor Day, when we celebrate the wealth destroyers – at least if the libertarian right is to be believed.
According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the “wealth creators.”
The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative “trickle-down” economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.
If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.
MORE at
Mountain lion reported on south Palo Alto roof
Full-grown lion sighted at 8:30 p.m. Thursday in 800 block of Rorke Way, east of Middlefield Road
by Jay Thorwaldson
Palo Alto Online Staff
A full-grown mountain lion was sighted Thursday evening on a rooftop in south Palo Alto, in the 800 block of Rorke Way, police reported today (Friday).
Sgt. Dan Ryan said a 45-year-old man heard footsteps on the roof of a neighbor’s house and saw the large cat, which jumped off the roof into the back yard.
see mountain lion sighted
Leo Alley, 22, spins Lyn Berry-Shiva, 58, across the dance floor at the National Single Cougars Conference at the Dinah’s Garden Hotel in Palo Alto Friday. The event brought Cougars (women 40 and older) and cubs (younger men) together for a night of socializing and for some a chance to find a partner.
Cubs crash cougar convention
August 31, 2009, 10:27 PM By Christopher Leydig
“Oh my God! We’re leaving,” shrieked a befuddled Cheryl to her Russian compatriot. “Ira, you know where we are? Do you know what kind of party this is? I thought this was a regular convention, I had no idea!”
Apparently Cheryl, a native Russian and San Ramon resident — clad in a black spaghetti-string top, playfully striped skirt and pointy three-inch pumps — did not get the memo. She was attending America’s premiere National Single Cougars Convention, a ball where older eligible women were supposed to be seeking the company of men; men much younger than traditional family mores might deem acceptable.
see Cougar Convention …
The man told police he had just visited a museum where he had seen a stuffed cat, with a long, distinctive tail, and was positive of his sighting.
Police searched the area but could find no trace of the cat, Ryan said. There were no tracks evident in the hard ground, unlike an earlier sighting of a lion on a rooftop by a teenage girl when the lion jumped into a damp flowerbed and left deep tracks, he said.
An officer stayed in the area for about an hour. But no one else has reported seeing the cougar, Ryan said. Without a second sighting the telephone-alert system was not activated, he added.
Rorke Way is three houses away from Barron Creek, which Ryan called “a mountain-lion highway. They use it as a natural trail.”
On May 17, 2004, a young mountain lion was spotted by a newspaper deliveryman around the Newell Road area and was finally cornered in a tree on Walnut Drive and shot dead by police.
Cougar Convention
So, perhaps it was the stalwart promotional work of teacher turned politician turned singles party guru Rich Gosse, the usage of the word “cougar” in the event title, or maybe even the number of people being turned away at the doors, but if anything particular stood out about Friday night’s National Single Cougars Convention it was the contrasting mix of the people, their expectations and environment.
“I was told that a cougar is an older woman who enjoys the company of younger men,” recalled a statuesque Sandy Samuel, 41, from Bognor Regis, England, in a tight one-piece black slip. On a flight to Las Vegas some men sitting near her and her friend had used the term in reference to them, which up to that point, they had never heard before.
“Guys my age just want to get their pipe and slippers and go sit at home and watch TV for the rest of the evening. I’m not a professional cougar or anything; I just go with a click. It’s personality and chemistry and that’s what it comes down to in the end.”
Meeting Gosse in person at the door of Palo Alto’s Dinah’s Garden Hotel, the host for the convention, was akin to getting acquainted with a contemporary Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrel’s adaptation of a 70s news anchorman from “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”
more on this media fabricated event HERE
In this July 1, 2003 file photo, Callie Rogers from Cockermouth [sic] in Cumbria is seen after she won £1.9 million in the U.K.’s National Lottery. Callie Rogers, now 22, told the News of the World that she has just £20,000 left of the jackpot she won six years ago. Most of the £250,000 she had wasted on cocaine – ‘a nasty evil drug’ – had been for an ex who was addicted to it, she said.
That’s about $31,000 more than I have in my account
Callie Rogers was just 16 when she won a whopping $3 million in the lottery. Six years later, she reports that she blew untold sums on drugs, partying, exotic cars, and breast implants. A staggering $730,000 went to designer clothes alone, Ms. Rogers explains in an article from AOL. Says Rogers: “I honestly wish I’d never won the lottery money — and knowing what I know now I should have just given it all back to them.” She’s currently left with around $32,000.
