On Thursday, I went down to visit my cousins in Philly for some pre-New Year’s fun. Visiting Philly usually leads to bodily harm, but only as a result of copious amounts of food and alcohol. This time, I was in trouble before even arriving.

I was at a red light on a four lane road with a median. At the light, my car was in the right lane behind one other car. Two police cars were blocking the road in the other direction and some glass was on the ground. Looked like a basic accident. However, all of a sudden about 7 more cruisers came flying up, and the first one was an undercover. The cops all jumped out and surrounded the area.

About 30 seconds later, cops all around the car were shouting “Get out of the car! Get out here now!!” I wasn’t sure if they were talking to us (because of my troubled past) or telling the other cars to get out of the area so they could deal with whatever was going on. Before I could figure it out, I heard about three gunshots – with bullets hitting the car directly to my left.

Not wanting to stick around for the conclusion, I hopped into the shoulder, ran the red light and got out of there. Another 10-15 police cars came flying by in the other direction as we flew down Broad Street.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I did in fact consume copious amounts of food and alcohol at a new tapas place in Philly called Kokopelli. Our waitress (Krystal) was awesome and I recommend it to anyone who lives around there (try the Onyx drink, bison sliders and chorizo mac & cheese).

Here’s the news story about the gun battle. In the video below, you can see that this was all a simple misunderstanding about domestic violence and obstruction of justice. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Thursday. Happy new year!

Ingrid Zweifel, a student at Parsons The New School for Design, decided to do a thesis on this issue (or more broadly, on how technology has affected interpersonal communication). The conclusion was, unsurprisingly, that people are technology whores.

She ended up inventing a “Phonekerchief” that actually blocks cell signals, rendering a phone unreachable. For those that might use this as a pocket square, losing style points and wrapping your phone into an impenetrable gift bag would surely impress a date (although if you have an embroidered handkerchief, it would probably best be used to block the girl from texting anyone about how embarrassed she is).

Here’s Zweifel’s site – these are supposed to be available to order the day after Thanksgiving.

The list includes a variety of famous characters – Barbie, Wizard of Oz, and more. Here are some of the better ones:

Bizarre – Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch
Commercial – Mr. Clean’s first name is Veritably
Earth-shatteringly important – Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons is named Jeff Albertson

Weirdest. List. Ever.

The NYC Public Advocate put together a Google map mashup of the worst offending landlords in the five boroughs. Each has received different classes of violations. Here is a description of the worst type:

Class C: Immediately hazardous violations, such as inadequate fire exits, rodents, lead-based paint, lack of heat, hot water, electricity, or gas. An owner has 24 hours to correct a C violation and five days to certify the correction to remove the violation. If the owner fails to comply with emergency C violations such as lack of heat or hot water, HPD initiates corrective action through its Emergency Repair Program.

Some landlords have 160 violations of this type – and nearly 1,000 total. How are you even a landlord at that point?

Anyway, it’s worth looking around the map and seeing some of the trends/worst offenders. The actual map isn’t embeddable but a screenshot is below and here’s the real thing. What’s interesting is that most educated people have known for some time that Astoria is the greatest neighborhood outside of Manhattan. This map bears that out. Nothing but gold and sunshine in northwestern Queens.

Unfortunately, of course, this map really represents landlords taking advantage of tenants in lower income areas. One would think that some government official could take action against those with so many violations, but hopefully some public shame is a good start.

Note: Dramatic reenactment

Last Friday, some friends and I planned dinner at Sea, a great Thai place in the meatpacking district. It’s across the street  from the Standard Hotel, noted for its exhibitionism and exclusive club.

After dinner, we walked to my car, which was parked on the street nearby. Jared and Z-Man got in the back, and Richardo and I were up front. It is probably worth noting, at this point, that Richardo is black, while the rest of us are as Jewish as the day is long. Richardo was wearing a polo shirt and was earlier accused of being the preppiest person at the Standard Hotel (no small feat).

Anyway, we drove about three blocks, and were stopped at a red light (in front of Dos Caminos, which is irrelevant, yet a hilarious setting for what was about to occur).

All of a sudden, there was a siren and flashing lights behind us (from an unmarked police car), and extremely aggressive yelling on the loudspeaker to pull over. We had no idea what was going on, and the reaction seemed a bit strong for a tail light outage or missed stop sign.

The car was approached on either side by two undercover officers – one was white and looked twelve (on my side) and one was black and enormous (on the passenger side). They immediately started asking numerous questions for which the answers seemed to not matter:

Vanilla Ice: WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!?!?!?
Me: I’m leaving dinner.
Vanilla Ice: WHO IS THE GUY NEXT TO YOU?
Me: My college roommate and best friend.
Vanilla Ice: PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE WHEEL NOW
Me: Okay [does so]
Vanilla Ice: PUT THEM BEHIND YOUR HEAD!
Me: Okay [does so]
Vanilla Ice: DAMMIT YOU’RE NOT LISTENING – GET OUT OF THE CAR NOW!
Me (inaudibly): Are we playing the worst game of Simon says ever?

Once I was out of the car, I noticed that Slim Shady’s other hand was on his unholstered gun. At this point, we began to wonder….what in the hell was going on. His questions seemed to focus on who the hell my passenger was and if I was sure I was not a criminal. Finally, I asked the officer why we were stopped.

His demeanor immediately changed. He said that some guy was walking around Little West 12th Street “committing crimes.” They had been watching us, and when we got in the car they thought Richardo matched this guy’s description, but couldn’t see him so they had to pursue us. (Ed. note – How could he simultaneously match someone’s description, yet be unseen?)

The other cop asked Richardo what his name was, in full earshot of me. Then, Richie Cunningham also asked me Richardo’s name. When they “matched,” the cops simply walked away without so much as an apology.

While Z-Man tended to changing his pants, Richardo and I were completely shocked. First of all, if this search was even real (and worthy of involving guns), one thinks they would have actually done something crazy like…check our IDs? As opposed to taking our word for it? I don’t know how Richardo could have matched a suspect, yet they couldn’t see him.

I wasn’t able to get either badge number, and we were never actually detained, so I don’t know how much recourse we have. That said, if the NYPD’s thriving racial profiling business is here to stay, a word of advice – I don’t think many street hustlers drive around in expensive clothes with 3 Jewish kids in a convertible through the meatpacking district. But hey – if you see something, say something.

From the website: “Name of the Year was founded in 1983 on an Ivy League campus. Its mission has remained unchanged: to discover, verify, nominate, elect and disseminate great names. All names included here are, to the best of our knowledge, real. No malice is intended.”

In a nutshell, this esteemed website creates a bracket where people can vote on different names, ultimately ending up with a name of the year. In case this doesn’t sound hilarious yet, here are some of the names:

• Spartacus Bernstein
• Pamela Balls Organista
• Napoleon Einstein
• Hannukkah Wallace
• Lolita Respectnothing

Part of the wonder of this blog is the lengths they go to identify the names as being real through newspaper articles, magazines, etc. Knowing that Charity Beaver is actually out there somewhere makes the whole thing even better. Below is a link to the full bracket for the year. I highly recommend looking at past years as well because there are some real gems in there. When you’re done, go vote! (Thanks to Brett for the link)

Just came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail. My two favorite parts:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

…

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

If Newsweek is as good at maintaining the journalism industry as they are at fortune telling, they should be around for a long time.

The Internet? Bah!

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.

Women, however, are another story. Before using the bathroom, my girlfriend often turns on the sink and shower while blasting Pavarotti. The only way to block out more noise would be to form a black hole somewhere near the hand towels.

Leave it to Japan, then, to solve a problem that no man has. Enter the Pee Without Noise Stool!

This one-of-a-kind product eliminates the “sit or stand” debate by presenting an awkward middle option – the halfway kneel. I guess the theory is that by dropping “Godzilla” very close to the water line, there is less distance to travel and thus a quieter splash. Fascinating.

My favorite part of the website is where they actually show this in practice. As you can see, everyone’s urinary tract is a teapot. Standing up causes a big splash, and sitting causes you to aim right and pee on the seat while displaying oddly Hebrew-like characters. Only the Pee Without Stool enables the silent stream. Happy Friday!

The recent earthquake in Haiti has caused untold destruction, magnified by the poor conditions that surround much of Port-au-Prince. Casualty estimates have ranged from 40,000 to as high as 500,000.

The NY Times highlighted a huge surge in cell phone giving – $2 million has been raised via text message as of early this morning.

The easiest way is to text “HAITI” (presumably without quotes) to the number 90999. This will add $10 to your cell phone bill, which is aggregated and sent to the Red Cross. None of the money goes to the phone company, so you don’t have to worry about AT&T using an earthquake to build up their 3G networks.

More information can be found on the White House or Red Cross websites. If you’re reading this and you can spare $10 and a few seconds, it’s definitely worth a donation. Via Consumerist:

• Doctors Without Borders
• Red Cross – you can also text “haiti” to 90999 to automatically donate $10–the service is being offered without surcharges by mGive
• International Rescue Committee
• Yele Haiti (Wyclef Jean’s charity) – text 501501 to automatically donate $5 (the charge will appear on your phone bill)

And if you want something more specific, try looking through this list of relief organizations provided by InterAction.org.

The Associated Press notes that if you want to donate your technical expertise or job skills to the relief effort, visit the Center for International Disaster Information (www.cidi.org) for more information. (Warning: their site is being hammered right now.)

Here is a stirring report on the devastation and how the lack of infrastructure is hampering recovery.

On Twitter, you can follow developments by searching for #Haiti. While doing so, I saw the following:

Pope Benedict activates the Catholic Church’s extensive worldwide charity network to help the victims #Haiti quake – Reuters

This made me wonder…how do you “activate” a charity network? Is this an email, a phone tree, or what? In my mind, Benedict hit a giant red button on the Pope-desk, and missiles full of supplies came shooting out of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, although that may not be completely accurate.

In any event, donate if you can.

The study suggests that there is no genetic basis for the G-spot and that environmental or psychological factors may contribute to whether a woman believes that she has a G-spot. The new study is published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

This has been getting a lot of news play (no pun intended), even within traditional news sources like the Clitoral News Network. Since there are far more pressing things going on in the world, I thought this was best left to the always excellent web comic xkcd.