Kibbles and Bits

Ooh Ooh---news gathering scoop of the year: Barbara Walters has talked with Paris Hilton in Jail. I hope she wasn’t on the clock for that colossal waste of time.

Sorry—I just don’t fathom what anything Paris Hilton could possibly say that would have any meaning or bearing whatsoever on the future path of mankind on this planet. All that mind-numbing media coverage last week was just a waste of electrons.

Interesting story from Hot Springs, Arkansas, where an amusement park ride stranded riders upside down during a power failure. Several amusing postings to the article… including the usual comments about Arkansas and the advent of electricity in that region…

For those of you who were watching in Arkansas last night when the power went out, we won’t spill the beans (Leotardo's out) on the finale of The Sopranos, but the ending left the door open for a great made-for-TV Movie.

Oh, wait—The Sopranos WAS made for TV…

Wyeth Laboratories has tasked more than 350 scientists exclusively to Alzheimer’s research, with 23 separate projects for medicines underway to possibly treat the disease. CEO Robert Essner thinks Alzheimer’s should receive the same attention that AIDS got during the 1980s and 1990s, when a concerted effort of government and private industry researchers tackled the disease.

I agree.

It's tragic when a mother can't recognize her own daughter who's providing care...when a son provides for a stranger living in the body of his father.

Indescribably tragic.

Meanwhile in Russia, researchers are looking at Dimebon, an antihistamine, which is showing promise as an Alzheimer’s treatment. I used to take Dimetane and Dimetapp in High School for my allergies. My friends thought I had Alzheimer's when I was on that stuff…

Google is getting poor marks for privacy practices considered to be the worst among the Internet's top destinations… Privacy International gave Google the lowest possible rating for practicing "comprehensive consumer surveillance and [having] entrenched hostility to privacy."
Wonder if Google saw that one coming?

Plastered Paris

I managed to get through the entire week without mentioning the biggest waste of time and electrons since Don Imus’ gaffe on MSNBC. Or was it the Republican Presidential Wannabe un-Debate?
Hard to tell...

Somewhere there’s got to be a metric of minutes devoted to a worthless topic, expressed as a ratio of value to time wasted on the topic.
Maybe we’d call it the Fluff Factor, a reverse indicator (economists love this stuff!) and the higher the number, the more viable the information could be assumed to be.

Fluff Factor Grid

Scales of relativity:

• X-axis = Importance to the daily welfare of the nation, 1-10, with ten (10) being vital for the survival of the human species on this planet, the center of the scale (zero) being benign in importance, and negative ten (-10) actually resulting in the destruction of brain cells, just for thinking about it.


• Y-Axis = time consumed by people on this topic. Interestingly, the less time people spend on something, the more value it might achieve, but if no one watches/listens/reads, or clicks-on, the value will always be a negative number.

If you take Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which lasted about 20-minutes, but has been hailed as one of the most sublime speeches in American History, and apply it to this grid, you get a value of 200. Last night's 6 O'clock news, watched by 2% of television viewers (maybe) yields a value of .01 in importance on the scale.

On the other hand, Roseanne Barr’s unfortunate rendering of The National Anthem and subsequent crotch-scratch, which probably resulted in millions of minutes of wasted time watching and re-watching the footage, would rank with a factor of -1,000,000. And it was embarassing.

Somewhere between the two extremes (but not far from Barr on the scale of relativity) lies the fiasco of Paris Hilton’s DWI arrest, conviction, sentencing, gyrations by attorneys, incarceration and subsequent early release for reasons charitably described as “creatively vague,” when in reality, she’s just scamming the system.

No surprise this travesty of the Justice System is occurring in The Land of Fruits and Nuts, where one Congressional Representative is seriously pursuing a bill to stock US Foreign Embassies with copies of Hollywood films, so that the rest of the world can see we’re really not all that evil (a la Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”)

Would somebody please tell the Congresswoman that the fare coming out of Hollywood is more than likely exactly what put America in the crosshairs of some extremist groups in the first place.