GRAND ROUNDS

DON'T SHORT AMAZON SHORTS: Amazon.com is officially a publisher. The company finally unwrapped a program that showcases, and sells short magazine-like work from established authors. The program, called Amazon shorts and first revealed by PW Daily in early April, allows customers to buy the new work for 49 cents in digital form from a store at Amazon.com/shorts and elsewhere on the site, and then get the work in a number of digital forms (as well as print it out).

SCIENCE SHOWS MOST CHIMPS ARE LEFTIES: "When it comes to fishing tasty termites out of their mounds, wild chimpanzees don't have the right stuff. Most, in fact, are southpaws. A three-year study of 17 wild chimps in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, found that 12 of them used their left hands when using sticks to probe for termites."

A three day study of some of my comment threads could have told them the same thing.

POWER TO THE (NEW YORK TIMES) PEOPLE: "The NYC government took tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers and gave that money to the New York Times to
help the Times construct a building that will generate profits for the Times."-- 2blowhards.com: Eminent Domain and the New York Times

ONE'LL GET YOU FIVE: "What to do: active and relentless deterrence. Israel should announce that henceforth, any rocket launched from Palestinian territory will immediately trigger a mechanically automatic response in which five Israeli rockets will be fired back. In Gaza, deterrence is all there is. After but a few Israeli demonstrations of such retaliation, the Palestinians themselves will shut down their terrorist rocketeers."

YOU DON'T SAY: "City dwellers living in areas with little greenery and high levels of graffiti and litter are more likely to be obese than those living in pleasant areas with lots of greenery."

Seems the least they could do is slap in a few salad bars.

BLUETOOTH STAR TREK BARBIE has arrived... "You recharge me by plugging my USB connection into any computer." Cute shoes too.

MOMMIES DEAREST: "Media Moms come and go. There was Jon Benet Ramsey's Mom, Terri Schiavo's Mom, Laci Peterson's Mom, Elizabeth Smart's Mom and the Murdering Mom Susan Smith. Michael Jackson had a Mom, but she couldn't compete with her son for airtime; or maybe the lawyer told her there was no upside in sharing her torment with the country.

"Cable news has a lot of airtime to fill. The problem is, it pumps a lot of that air into its Media Moms, and the result is often slightly weird. Cable takes familiar tales of tragedy and pathos, death and desperation, finds a person to carry the narrative, often a Mom, and then every night fills the Mom with more air until, like a balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, she turns into something not quite real, drifting past us night after night." -- Daniel Henninger

UNIONS ARE SO 1999: "Of course, the truth is that Americans simply no longer give a flying fig about unions. They don't want to join them. They don't want to show solidarity with them. And they don't want to give their money to them when they're just trying to put dinner on the table."-- Always Low Tactics. Always.

OUT, OUT DAMNED SPOT! "According to a new study led by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, when women, not their surgeons, have control over the type of surgery they receive, they are more likely to choose a more aggressive surgery that removes the entire breast, even though survival rates are the same for surgery that removes only the tumor."

Posted by Vanderleun at August 19, 2004 8:46 AM