All about me

Check out "A Month of No Nagging," fascinatingly instructive for any men who have had to put up with female nagging (that would be all of us) and any women who have been frustrated to the point of hysteria by their need to nag men (that would be all of them). Call it sexist if you will, but that is the way it breaks down:

"The little things that count" department:

Scientists say giving a stranger a small smile or even just making eye contact as you pass can have a huge impact on their feelings. To find out how tiny gestures affected people, researchers at Purdue University conducted tests on hundreds of students and found even the smallest amount of eye contact made them feel connected to others.

WOWO News Director Dave Wheaton had his cell phone confiscated when he took it into Judge Fran Gull's Allen Superior Courtroom and now faces a contempt citation. News-Sentinel columnist Kevin Leininger thinks the solution is to grant a new-technology exemption for "legitimate" journalists -- a word that's used more than once -- that is not enjoyed by the general public:

So sad. The Times-Picaune is apparently disappearing as it currently exists, opting for mostly a Web presence and publishing a print edition just two or three times a week. Somebody who's been through that drill in Ann Arbor, Mich., offers advice on "What New Orleans Can Expect When Its Newspaper Goes Away":

Do not be looking for one of these on either of my cats:

Some of the stuff the Barack Obama campaign is selling to raise money for the re-election effort is pretty unusual.

They would like you to get your pets involved with the campaign by offering doggie sweaters and “I Meow for Michelle” cat collars.

If Warren Buffet is the smartest investor in America, why in the world is he buying up newspapers, which is supposed to be the dumbest investment in the world these days? The secret is that most of the 63 papers he now owns are in the 5,000-25,000 circulation range:

Holy cow, maybe this partisan divide thing has gone too far:

LOL, OMG, WTF -- or, in pre-digital terms, amazed, stunned, stupefied. Those are my reactions to really big numbers.  When I was in Michigan City, we had a computer that was in two big cases against the wall -- 40 megabytes of storage, and they ran the whole newspaper operation. I think my first home computer had something like 60 or 80 mb.

Is there a conspiracy out there to make me paranoid? First I see this tidbit about what might be going on in my co-workers' nasty little minds:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Your co-workers are judging you. Beneath a veneer of professional collegiality, they’re taking note of the mess on your desk, how loudly you chew, even your word choices.

This is a worse nanny state intrusion than the "Here, Kid, eat this and go tell your mother she doesn't care enough about you to give you healthy food" lunchroom incident:

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.