The Tale of Target, Legos and the Stupid Smart Guy

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There’s a guy who was making a pile of money selling Legos online.  Pretty smart.  He got his merchandise by visiting Target stores, switching barcodes from cheap Lego sets to more expensive Lego sets and then buying the more expensive set at the cheaper price.  The tag switching thing is pretty smart, but doing it only at Target stores was pretty dumb because the folks at Target noticed a pattern and one of their own store security people caught the guy while he was trying to buy 10 sets of the Star Wars Millenium Falcon set.  They found a bunch more in his car along with a laptop that had Target stores plotted out on a mapping software.  That’s dumb.

You can read all about it at Loose Wire.

Matt McAlister – Smart Person for Any Publisher Type to Read

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I haven’t updated my "Smart People" section in a long time so here’s a good one to get it going again.  Matt McAlister writes some very interesting stuff about the evolving world of online content, and this latest piece is a fine example.

If you’re interested in publishing or the developing online world I strongly suggest that you subscribe to his feed.

Guess They Didn’t Give Them the Secret Handshake

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A couple of convicts from Louisiana escaped from prison, got themselves some fake student IDs from Tulane and after the Katrina disaster made their way to the University of Tennessee where they posed as brothers of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity from the Tulane chapter. The Lambda Chi Alpha brothers at Tennessee opened their hearts and their doors to the cons, as did some co-eds.  The men were recaptured after one of them was caught passing counterfeit $10 bills at a gas station. 

The full story is here along with a picture that ought to warm the hearts of real Katrina victims.

T-Ball Weenie

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TballweenieThe picture to the left is from Sports Illustrated’s site.  The guy pictured is the t-ball coach who offered $25 to one of his own players to bean another of his players, who was autistic, so that they autistic kid wouldn’t be able to play.  SI named him to their 2005 Turkey’s of the Year list.

Rarely does a picture capture the essence of a man so well.  Notice the collar on the shirt that makes it look like he’s wearing his daddy’s clothes, and the obviously-too-large suit that he is wearing to perhaps make himself at least feel like a man.

What a weenie.

Now THAT’S an Introduction

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I’ve always thought that the hardest thing to write is an introduction, or in my vernacular, a first paragraph.  I ought to take lessons from Chris Ayres of the London Times, who recently wrote an article that opened with this:

“WHEN A BULL whale comes at you with an erect
penis, it’s nine feet long,” said Gregory Colbert, aiming a fork at his
Caesar salad. “It’s like a torpedo. And you’d better get out of the
way, fast.”

Just grabs you doesn’t it?

Bushies Swing at ‘Curveball’ and Whiff

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The fact that one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction was code named ”Curveball’ was probably a good hint that his intelligence wasn’t so, well, intelligent.  In an article in the LA Times Curveball’s handlers, all senior officials from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), claim that "the Bush administration and the CIA  repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq."

In light of what we’ve been learning lately about some of the president’s folks, maybe they felt Curveball was a kindred spirit.  After all, his handlers "said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental
problems. ‘He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND
official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal
person,’ agreed a BND analyst."  Sounds like he’d fit right in working with Rove & Company.

You know, with news like this who needs fiction?

And I Thought Hooking My Tivo to Wi-Fi Was Cool

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A company based in Rhode Island called AmBio has come up with a cool use for 802.11b (i.e. WiFi) technology.  They’re hooking their Mosquito Magnets up to a network that will create a kind of invisible fence for mosquitos around things like golf courses.  From the story:

We got the idea from institutions that were jury-rigging our
technology to computer networks and mesh networks, with PC panels, to
see how many mosquitoes they’d caught or how much propane they had
left…It’s unbelievable the lengths people will go to, to get rid of
mosquitoes," said Hosea, a former National Science Foundation Fellow in
artificial intelligence.

"We’ve meshed a great mosquito-catching machine with a computer
technology on top of it, and wireless network technology on top of
that, and then turned it into a great defensive shield against
mosquitoes coming into your habitat," he said.

I sure hope they come up with a home version so we can enjoy our deck in months when the temperature actually gets above 80 degrees.

I’m Not Gonna Get Rich This Way

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I added the Google Adsense bar to the right side of this blog a week or two ago.  In that time they show me as generating 880+ page views with exactly zero click-throughs.  Yikes.

As a consequence I’ve deferred my retirement plans by another 20 years and am now re-evaluating my get-rich-by-blogging strategy. I’m considering the following:

  • Selling my blood via my blog.  I’m a universal donor and I no longer trust the Red Cross, so I’m thinking a direct-to-consumer approach might be worthwhile.  I’ll worry about little problems like blood sucking and delivery when I get my first order.
  • Selling my dog via my blog.  The challenge here is figuring out how to get rid of the dog without the family noticing it.  I could make a cardboard cutout of the dog with motion-activated slobbering, peeing and whining, but that’s a temporary solution.  Perhaps I could just tell them that they were playing in traffic, were killed instantly when they were hit by a passing pickup and I’ve disposed of the remains to spare them the agony of seeing the carnage.  Promising.
  • Selling my clothes via my blog.  I work from home so really I just need a couple of t-shirts, some sweats, a pair of jeans and one suit for special occasions.  The only problem is I’m not sure if there’s a market for paint-splattered sweats and t-shirts or suits that weren’t in vogue even when the president’s dad was in office.  Probably a non-starter.
  • Selling my 2001 Saturn that has a weird body-odor smell that just won’t go away.  You never know what kind of freakish stuff will sell online; this might just pull in some serious bucks from someone with a strange fetish or a fan of a certain Seinfeld episode.
  • Selling my opinion via my blog.  I think there’s an untapped market for commentary from a semi-literate, middle-aged, married-father-of-three whose idea of a good time is being able to watch a Tivo’d episode of CSI without being interrupted for 45 minutes straight.  You think O’Reilly or Dowd have something to say?  They represent about .001% of the population.  What the country needs is to hear from a representative of the largest class of Americans out there, the befuddled and exhausted guy who never thought he’d be caught dead saying things like, "That power-paint-roller is the greatest thing sinced sliced bread; I was able to cut my project time on painting the exterior by at least half."  I guaran-damn-tee you that Bill O’Reilly hasn’t painted anything other than his toe nails since 1975.  Of course Maureen Dowd does a lot of painting, but it’s all in front of a mirror.

I think that’s it.  I’ll use this blog to launch my career as a syndicated-everyman-columnist. Now you might be concerned that savvy editors could find this type of content by merely surfing the internet and finding blogs just like mine, but your concern would be misplaced.  With the rare exception of fine editors like our friend John Robinson at the Greensboro New & Record the editors at today’s newspapers don’t have a clue what’s out there.  It’ll be like selling candy to a baby.

Now if I could just find my first original thought.

Lawyers. Need I Say More?

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Most of us long ago learned to think of that strange breed of human known as the "lawyer" with a certain degree of disgust.  Following are eight stories that serve as further proof of the nefariousness of this breed, as if we need more proof.  All eight of these stories appeared this week.

  1. Users sue Match.com for date fraud
  2. Woman sues Dunkin Donuts for $15 million after spilling coffee in her own lap.
  3. Japanese hair salon successfully sued for bad hair cut — This one is offered to show some editorial balance.  In other words American lawyers aren’t the only morons in the world.
  4. Disney lawyers put a stop to Chinese company’s practice of making bad performers parade around in Mickey Mouse costumes.
  5. In settlement with Netflix, class-action lawyers get $2.5 million, customers get a coupon.
  6. Studios asked for smoking warnings on DVDs: "attorneys general from 32 states want Hollywood to slap anti-smoking admonitions on all new DVDs."
  7. Judge warned for jailing man who sighed in his courtroom.
  8. Real estate developer in Ontario slaps $8 million libel lawsuit on a woman for her blog about problems in her development. Since it’s Canadian dollars I guess it works out to about $126 US.