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Lobotulism Epidemic

For those of you who thought that wearing one of those Bluetooth cellphone earpieces was only good for making you look like a self-important prick, I have some very good news: it also makes you look like Lobot!

Yes, in addition to making people think you're a loon who's loudly talking to himself, you can also brighten the days of your contemporaries by reminding them of one of the most fondly overlooked characters in the Star Wars mythology.

To corroborate my theory, I'm including here a picture of a guy I saw at the airport and Mr.Lobot himself. I hope this gives Bluetooth headset users some much-needed perspective:

And, it probably doesn't even need to be said, but this warning goes double if you're a bald guy.

UPDATE: I just realized I should have used the word lobotomy more.

Maria Sharapova Said What?

I caught the very end of Maria Sharapova's U.S. Open women's singles triumph over Justine Henin-Hardenne on TV Saturday night. There was a mathematical error in her victory speech (referring to a total change in strategy as a 360 rather than a 180). The quote would be useful at my math-related day job, so I quickly turned to online news sources for the exact wording. Here's what I found.

Reuters:
"I figured I lost the last four times I played Justine so everything I did the last four times I had to flip 360 and do totally differently and that is what I did today."

Bloomberg:
"I lost the last four times I played against Justine so I figured everything I did, I had to flip it 360 and do the total opposite,'' Sharapova added.

dpa News (perhaps translated from German):
"I had lost four times to Justine, so I threw out everything I'd done and did a 360 (turn of strategy). I did the total opposite."

Eurosport:
"I figured I lost the last four times to Justine, so I figured I had to do the total opposite," she continued.

Sunday Times (U.K.):
"After four defeats in a row to Justine I knew that I had to change my game plan and I was able to do that."

Study: Verb campaign pleases media industry

File this one under News of the Weird:

Health Journal: Hip government exercise campaign looks for its next move

The story is about the apparent success of the Center for Disease Control's "verb" ad campaign -- designed to fight obesity among children and teens. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics found that kids who had seen the Verb campaign "reported one-third more physical activity during their free time than kids who hadn't."

Funny. When I showed a couple of Verb commercials (including this one) to high school students a few years ago, all of them recognized the spots -- but not a single one of them had any clue what they meant. The commercials were inscrutable. Of course they were. Verb is an anti-obesity campaign that conceals the primary causes of obesity practically by necessity. Why? Because Verb's partners are a veritable who's who of the "obesity lobby" -- AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Primedia, and the ad agency Frankel, which also does work for McDonald's.

But back to the article at hand. As part of the campaign, Verb people have been distributing yellow balls to kids and asking them to log into Verb's "tween" website to discuss what they did with it.

One of the bloggers is 9-year-old Drew from Monroe Township, N.J. "I shot the ball in the basket, got the rebound and threw it to my mom."

Ten-year-old Peyton from Poland Spring, Maine, got his yellow ball from a brother, who had received it from a friend. "I have had a lot of fun playing with it in my front yard," wrote Peyton. "One day I was practicing my soccer skills with it and the next day I had it in the pool with me. I am now going to pass my yellow ball on to my other brother. This has been fun."

Really? I can't imagine real kids saying the above unless they either suffered from Down's Syndrome, were in a hostage situation, or were required to write about Verb for school.

The proof, however, is in the pudding. Do we want kids out playing ball, shooting hoops, and running around -- or sitting at a computer discussing it?

New Lingo? How Book!

As we text-messagers know, there's a mode that anticipates the word you're typing (1 keystroke per letter), rather than pecking out up to 4 keystrokes for each letter. The cellphone guesses the most common combination of those keys. If it guesses wrong, you press the "Next" button until the correct word appears.

My favorite wrong guess: When I try to type "cool," my phone says "book."

This is where you come in, Stay Free blog-reading demographic: Help me make "book" the new "cool." If your phone says "book," don't hit Next. Just leave it, brother. Then, start working "book" into conversations. "That youtube link you sent me was totally book." Or "You're writing a book? Very book!" You get the idea. It'll be viral.

That's my two cents. Well, two cents to receive, ten cents to send.

Frappuccino and brimstone

A friend sent me this from Decatur, Georgia — where apparently
the Lord Himself gets second billing to Starbucks.