Friday, January 23, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday, January 23, 2009)
(1)-GERMAN DOMESTIC HELP -- Almost one-fifth of the 40 million German households pays domestic help under the table at least once, according to a study published by opinion research center TNS Emnid. Despite Germany’s reputation for orderly conduct, 18 percent of the 2,091 people surveyed admitted they had paid a babysitter or housekeeper off the books.

(2)- THE HAT -- Aretha Franklin’s now-famous bow-tied, gift-wrapped, jewel-studded, $179 inaugural hat was designed, produced and sold to the Queen of Soul by Mr. Song Millinery, a family-owned business on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. Starting minutes after Franklin finished her distinctive rendition of “My County ‘Tis of Thee” Tuesday, the store’s phones started ringing.

(3)- TELLTALE SIGNS -- The length of a man's ring finger may predict his success as a financial trader. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England report that men with longer ring fingers, compared to their index fingers, tended to be more successful in the frantic high-frequency trading in the London financial district.

(4)- WHEN TO QUIT? -- Segway scooter inventor Dean Kamen freely admits it: He often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that's not panning out. "You end up lying there saying, 'I'm not stopping. It would be an act of shallow cowardice. Or you decide to quit and you say, 'This is one of those ideas that just isn't going to work,' " says Kamen.

(5)- IT ALL ADDS UP -- Several Internet complaint boards are filled with hundreds of thousands of comments from credit card customers noting a mysterious charge for about 25 cents on their statements. The charge is from "Adele Services" in Melville, N.Y. There is no business by that name listed to any business anywhere in New York. It's a theft.

(6)- HE WANTS IT BACK -- Divorce settlements have always cost an arm and a leg, but as the shocking Batista case demonstrates, vital organs are now fair game. Can altruism ever be regulated? She stole his heart so he gave her his kidney. And now he wants it back. So goes the story of 49-year-old Long Island physician Richard Batista.

(7)- AN EXPLANATION -- If every moral judgment is metaphysically uncertain, unsupported by any philosophical lender of last resort, it appears to some people that the only answer to the question of how people ought to behave is a complete relativism, possibly backed up by some version of John Stuart Mill’s principle that everything is permissible that does not harm another person.

(8)- MOVIE MARKETING -- Lionsgate, smaller, scrappier, and stingier than the six major studios, has released such distinguished films as “Crash,” “Monster’s Ball,” and “Away from Her,” but it has made its reputation with edgy, low-budget action and horror movies, particularly the five “Saw” films. The studio has now declared itself ready to take on the big studios.

(9)- FOREIGN NEWS -- As part of an effort to establish a network of English Web sites from Europe's leading high-quality journalism brands, SPIEGEL ONLINE has launched a partnership with Politiken in Denmark. SPIEGEL ONLINE has announced the Web site of the respected Danish daily Politiken would become the third partner in the European journalism network it launched in September 2008 together with NRC Handelsblad of the Netherlands.

CARTOON COMMENTARY

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