The headline: Americans ‘too fat for x-rays’

The image:

(The link: Right here.)

So much class it’s hard to measure.

Anyone remember PeaPod? It was one of the first online grocery stores — well, sort of. The idea was that you could order online and a local PeaPod guy would do your shopping for you and deliver it to your door. It was an interesting concept, but it never caught on in a big way.

I say that because today I received proof of the demise of PeaPod. When it’s asking me to be an affiliate, something’s terribly wrong.

Hi there

I found your site while looking for marketing partners for PeaPod.
As your site focuses on our target market - we invite you to experience the most supportive and profitable affiliate program in the industry.

We will help you generate income and maximize revenues from your Web site with minimal effort.

Our commission program will pay you $10 for each person that you send to www.peapod.com that places their FIRST order. Action referral period is 45 days

If you require any more information please contact us at affiliates@peapod.com and please state your preference of communication (email/phone/fax)

Regards,

Ryno Saayman

Peapod, LLC

9933 Woods Drive

Skokie, IL 60077

In my column this week for USA Today, I explain why the current form of RSS is behind the times, and why it will soon be obsolete. (I also offer a suggestion for how a successor will work.)

By it’s very nature, RSS gives control of the content you read to the content creators, even though you’re the best judge of what you like. In an age of greater personalization, that idea likely has a limited shelf life.

RSS is a great aggregation tool, but its weakness is that it aggregates en masse. It lets you add sites to your reading list, when what you really want are articles. RSS is designed to show you what’s new based on the source, not the content.

My reader (I use the Sage Firefox extension) will show me all the new posts on, say, Gizmodo, simply because they’re on Gizmodo. Unfortunately, a lot of what’s there is stuff I’m not interested in. So I browse the list and read the handful that do interest me.

It’s still Gizmodo’s “package.” Using RSS to read it adds a certain amount of granularity, but not much. By being site-based, RSS is designed to work with the macro in an increasingly micro world.

We need a successor.

According to a New York Times story, TiVo will begin selling data about its users.

The service is based on an analysis of the second-by-second viewing patterns of a nightly sample of 20,000 TiVo users, whose recorders report back to TiVo on what was watched and when.

That’s certainly interesting, but there’s one tidbit in there that struck me as surprising. It has to do with the fact that viewers of TiVoed shows skip about 70 percent of the commercials. (As a TiVo user, I can say that I skip a lot more than that.)

But TiVo’s new research service is aimed at helping advertisers convince people not to skip their commercials. But here’s the odd tidbit:

…one study for a consumer packaged goods company, which [Todd] Juenger [TiVo's vice president for audience research] declined to identify, found that commercials featuring animal characters, when shown on animal-related programs, were skipped less often than usual.

Ah, the article implies, if a commercial is directly related to a show, people might be willing to watch it.

Mais non. The reason, I think, is more obvious. When you’re fast-forwarding through a commercial during an animal show, if the commercial has animals you might think, “Oops, the show’s on” and hit Play.

To find out if that’s the case, TiVo should see when those commercials fall during the break. My bet: They’re toward the end, when a user is expecting the show to start again (because he’s just zipped past three ads). I bet animal commercials that appear at the beginning of the break are just skipped right over.

So I get this odd voice mail on my cell phone the other day:

Hey Tim, it’s T-Mac. It’s 9:49 Eastern. Hot dog’s in the bun. Clear as crystal. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

I checked my incoming call log, but it was listed as “Restricted.” But my phone has a neat feature: I can reply to a message even if I don’t know the incoming number. So I hit 8 to do just that. The computer said, “At the tone, record your reply to mailbox…” and then the message-sender’s voice jumped in: “Tara McCarthy.”

So I said something like, “T-mac. Got your message. The church bells ring at three. Again, the church bells ring at three. As always, we’re code blue.”

I have no idea who Tara McCarthy — T-Mac — is, or who she thought she was calling. But now I suspect she’s just as confused.

There oughta be a law. Makers of power supplies — the ubiquitous transformers that charge cell phones, cameras, electric screwdrivers, toothbrushes, or what have you — should be required to either A) clearly label the device they belong to, B) make them a light enough color that black ink is visible, or C) include a white tab of some sort that can be written on.

I am sick and tired of trying to match voltages and jack sizes to figure out which power pack goes with which item. ARGH!

Timmy’s fallen into the well! (No, really.)

I had once heard that any cell phone, even if it’s no longer connected with any active account, can still call 911 (assuming it can get a signal).

I thought this might be an urban legend, of course, until I got to talk to the Verizon Wireless PR guy about it. Yep, he told me, it’s true. As long as the phone’s technology is still in use in the area, a 911 call will go through.

Of course, if you have an old-style analog model (known in the industry as and AMPS phone), good luck — wireless companies are phasing out their AMPS service.

But last year’s (or 2003’s) Verizon or Cingular or T-Mobile phone? If you still have a car charger for it, it might be worth tucking the thing in the glove compartment just in case.

In his first veto as President, George Bush refused to allow a bill to become law that would loosen restrictions on stem-cell research.

“This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others,” he said. “It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect.”

The bill was not a blanket endorsement of wanton stem-cell research. All it would have done is permitted couples to donate the embryos they have had for fertility treatments to researchers rather than let them be destroyed.

Once again: These embryos will be destroyed. These are not children waiting to be born. They are going to be destroyed.

President Bush, 37 senators, and 193 congressmen and -woman said they would rather have these embryos thrown in the trash than allow them to be used to advance medical science.

Just so we’re clear.

So President Bush will be vetoing a bill that would remove some restrictions on stem-cell research in the U.S. The bill does not have enough supporter to override said veto — in other words, there are a good number of Congressmen and -women opposed to stem-cell research.

OK, that’s fine. I don’t agree with them, but they claim to have an ethical objection.

But here’s a question we should be asking them: Are you willing to sign a pledge that you will never take advantage of any treatment that comes from stem-cell research?

See, the research is going to continue, just not in the U.S. And you can bet that treatments will arise because of it, and those treatments will eventually get to the States. But if these folks find the research leading to those treatments so abhorrent, they should have no problem promising never to use any of them.

Think there would be any takers?

There may be only so many hours in the day, but — at least for Taco Bell — there’s always room for another meal. Healthcare providers, rejoice! (Photo credit to Jeff Sturgeon.)

This is the best headline they could come up with?

Hooters chairman found dead in home

I cannot believe the play that this is getting. President Bush, while talking to British PM Tony Blair, cursed. He said “shit,” as in, ”They need to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.”

And that made headlines. [sound of head whacking table]

Have we really reached the point when the President using a word that, oh, 90 percent of the population probably uses, makes the news? I mean, if this was the State of the Union, I guess. If it was a long tirade of cursing, maybe. But it was a private conversation that happened to be recorded, and he used it in such a mundane way.

Who cares? (Answer: Too damned many people.)

‘Cause even in the middle of a major fire, people still like to pull this kinda stuff (in this case, on KTVU in the San Francisco Bay area):

If you feel like seeing the whole thing, Mr. “Litoris” appears several minutes into the story.

Hat tip to Dave Barry.

Incredible. Lebanese, er, Hezbollah terrorists cross into Israel and kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers. Israel responds as any nation would: by demanding the return of their kidnapped citizens. Hezbollah refuses, and continues random attacks on civilians, launching rockets into Israeli towns, pell-mell.

So Israel attacks, sick and tired of the terrorism, the rockets, the random violence, the kidnappings — stuff carried out by what stands for a government in Lebanon, with support from Syria and Iran.

And the United Nations, that august body, tries to condemn Israel, barely paying lip service to scolding the kidnappers and terrorists.

Screw you, UN.

Let’s keep in mind that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the only country there that treats women as equal, that has reasonable courts of law, that actually respects human rights. And the UN has the nerve to condemn it? Bull.

And don’t get me started on the Palestinians. They whine about living in “occupied” lands, which is nonsense — they count on people forgetting history, which apparently a lot of people have.

In a nutshell: When Israel was formed in 1948, its six Arab neighbors — Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Transjordan (now Jordan) — vowed to destroy it. Israel said to the Arabs living there, “Stay here with us.”

The Arab countries said, “Leave Israel, fight with us, and when we kill them all you can live in their houses.” And a lot of Arabs left.

Well, Israel won that war. And, not surprisingly, wasn’t interested in welcoming back the people who just fought against it. But, lo and behold, the Arab nations, licking their wounds, didn’t want those people either.

So they became the Palestinians, demanding to return to their “homeland” — the homeland they abandoned in order to attack Israel.

Sorry, those animals and terrorists — which no nation wants — have no claim to that land. If the Arab nations want them to have a homeland, let them donate the space rather than demand they be housed in the smallest country in the area.

If the Arab nations want peace, maybe, just maybe, they need to start acting reasonably. Maybe paying people to murder civilians in Israel, the US, and Europe isn’t the way to do it. But if they insist on acting like reckless, dangerous, terrorists, they really give up the right to complain when Israel fights back — and fights back hard.

“Nielsen: Podcasts More Popular than Blogging” reads the headline at Podcasting News.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s odd.” Then I re-read the hed. Podcasts are more popular than blogging. That is, more people listen to podcasts than create blogs.

Sounds like comparing apples to oranges to me, and the article bears that out.

Nielsen//NetRatings announced today that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have recently downloaded an audio podcast.

[snip]

These figures put the podcasting population on a par with those who publish blogs, 4.8 percent.

So 6.6 percent listen to podcasts, but 4.8 percent create blogs. [shrug]

What’s next, “Radio (listeners) more common than TV (creators)”?

Update: Oh, good. I’m not the only one who thought so. Not by a long shot.

Update again: The terrific Leesa Barnes (a fellow Galactica fan), has other problems with Nielsen’s conclusions.

It doesn’t make for much of a cover shot, but if one of us ever does manage to change the world, it’ll start with a puzzled glance at a computer screen, or a raised eyebrow while looking at a piece of paper. Instead of getting noisier, everything will get a lot quieter.

That’s from a post by Derek Lowe, an organic chemist, in a plea to PR departments not to use wild colored lights to depict their research labs.

…our instruments do not, regrettably, emit orange glows that light our faces up from beneath, not for the most part, and if they start doing that we generally don’t bend closer…

It’s hard to beat people in the Middle East when it comes to threats.

Referring to the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Lebanon Tuesday, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said, “If the soldiers are not returned we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”