With war drums beating louder than ever, the economy in a shambles, smoking about to be banned through all of the city, this item actually made the NYTimes today:

Two 17-year-old boys, apparently following instructions penned by Abbie Hoffman, caused a flash fire in a Brooklyn apartment yesterday afternoon while trying to make a smoke bomb on the stove, the police said. One of the teenagers received second-degree burns to the upper torso.

Very little property damage. No other injury. One of the kids goes to LaGuardia High, a good school. The other — the one who was burned — goes to Bronx Science, a very good school. The apartment is on a good block in a good neighborhood, Park Slope. The street was crowded because of a St. Patrick’s Day parade, but there was no apparent connection.

Without the oh-so-tenuous Abbie Hoffman link, seems to me that this doesn’t even make the local giveaway weeklies. At least the kids didn’t get the recipie off the internet….

The chairman of Motorola stood up in front of the cell phone industry today and said that what people want is better voice service. The chairmen of LG and Nokia said what people want is more bells and whistles.

From CNet:

But not being able to rely on a cell phone because a network is shoddy will turn back the expected tide of new users, Galvin said.

Absolutely right. If you can’t rely on a tech gadget to work, people won’t use it. And games and whizbang stuff aside, the main purpose of a phone is to make phone calls. But maybe I’m just an old fart.

How could LG and Nokia disagree that service needs to get better? Probably because better phone service is mostly an infrastructure issue, and Motorola is a much bigger infrastructure player than LG or Nokia, which rely more heavily on handset sales.

If cell networks aren’t built out, people won’t rely on cell phones. And that’s bad for the whole industry.

From Reuters, via CNN:

Most newlyweds experience a brief emotional bounce after their wedding, but they eventually return to the same outlook they had on life before they tied the knot, according to a study released Sunday.

“We found that people were no more satisfied after marriage than they were prior to marriage,” the researchers said.

From the AP via CNN:

JOHNSTON, Iowa (AP) — The president of a community college was arrested Wednesday on charges of raising marijuana for sale.

In India, a proposal to raise the price of fertilizer was shouted down. Literally. From the AP via the NYTimes:

Upset by a budget proposal to raise the price of fertilizer, lawmakers in India’s lower house of parliament shouted their opposition for four hours on Tuesday. The tactic was so effective the finance minister withdrew the plan.

Here in the U.S., our legislators would never do that. That’s what Talk Radio is for.

AP story today via the NYPost about using the net to troll — and track — for neologisms both historical and current. Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell, has tricked up software that searches the net for abrupt shifts in lingo tied to a certain era.

The program is intended to look at data about which the searcher has no clue – say a mountain of unread e-mail or documents – and divulge a list of what topics were hot and when they started to heat up.

(A quick look at Kleinberg’s publications list looks really interesting, if you care at about how people spread news/gossip. I do.)

Seems that the hosting company Verity is aiming Klenberg’s software at weblogs. Why? Because it

…could ultimately help advertisers target their sales pitches.

Figures.

Another collector of neologisms is Paul McFredries, an author who’s written a bunch of “Complete Idiot’s Guides” and maintains the web site wordspy.

Some of the words spotted by McFedries are tech-related, e.g., “ham,” which means legitimate e-mail that gets lost in spam filters because it contains some spam-like phrases. Others are free-floating jargon, such as “induhvidual,” meaning one who acts foolishly.

I first saw “induhvidual” in Dilbert. This usage of “ham” is new to me; I think it’s a keeper.

Tom Glazer, who in 1963 wrote the song parody, “On Top of Spaghetti,” died recently at age 88. (He did not roll off the table and out the door.)

Of course, Glazer did plenty of other things. He was an important member of the Folk Revival movement of the 1950s and ’60s. But there are worse things than to be remembered with a song that kids will be singing for approximately forever.

For the ignorant or forgetful, here are the lyrics. A-one, a-two, a-three, and-a-four…

From Reuters via CNN:

Shame television is off the air in Oklahoma after the channel aimed at humiliating men who frequented prostitutes ended up providing free advertising for city street walkers but gaining few viewers….

The scrolling and repeating mug shots of disheveled streetwalkers helped would-be customers identify prostitutes, the spokeswoman said. “It was almost a promotional thing for them. It wasn’t a deterrent at all.”

 

Speaking of Tony Perkins (see below), he’s got an excellent, rare and candid interview with the CEO of Sony, Nobuyuki Idei, at his own web site.

Sony is pretty much at the center of every piece of technological change going on in the world today — with the probable (and significant) exception of biotech. The fact that Idei seems able to keep ahead of all the relevant trends in all the relevant technologies is a marvel of personal focus. For that alone, the interview’s worth reading.

Some of his opinions:

• Sure, we’d buy PalmSource if they were selling.


• Ericsson teamed with us because they wanted an easy way out of the cellphone busines, and we wanted their patents.


• Nokia cares more about volume than anything else.


• His music division is operating from a position of panic, not thought.


• Microsoft doesn’t have a clue, but IBM might make an interesting partner.

Excellent interview between a smart questioner and a smart answerer. Worth reading.

The Red Herring, the last of the Venture Capital Porn magazines, has finally given it up, just short of its 10th birthday.

There was a time when the Herring, Upside, and the Industry Standard were riding high wide and handsome. More ads than they could take, more editorial pages than they could fill. They were The Elect, in their wierd technoCalvinist way, and they were more than willing to tell you so. Wearing my Publishing Wise Man hat, I was once interviewed by a gentleman from The Economist, who was wondering what was supporting these magazines, and if the success of these magazines meant that the economy beneath them had fundamentally changed.

Of course it hadn’t. Kurt Andersen once said that raising money in 1998 was as easy as getting laid in 1968. He may well have been right, and possibly in a more profound way than he meant. Most of the sex in ’68 probably lead to as many strong relationships as most of the funding in ’98 led to strong companies. In both cases, not nearly enough of them. In both cases, we’re probably paying the price today.

Then, Poof! The Standard, newest and flashiest, went first. Then Upside, the senior title of the bunch and the one with actual Adult Supervision. And now Red Herring.

Why? Because their readership sucked. The vast majority of the people reading those titles had as much involvement with the real venture market as the people reading Playboy have a real involvement with the models. Fantasy, at best. Obsession, at worst. The people who were really involved had better sources than a monthly magazine that needed a four-month lead time. The ads were bragging, the editorial was hagiographic. Though the magazines may once have had a purpose, by their end they were sponges soaking up the excess cash sloshing around the tech industry.

And Tony Perkins, the founding father, comes on and sings the same song: hey, it’s only a respite. We’re just one more round of funding away from being right back on our feet.

Just one more hit of crack and everything’ll be fine fine fine fine fine fine fine fine fine…….