Category: news

Dow Doing Well — 10,450

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

It looks like the economy may be picking up and the major stock indices are posting encouraging gains. Just yesterday, the Dow closed up 125 points (1.2%) and all 30 blue chips advanced (yeah, every Dow company had a boost).

More than that, the Nasdaq closed above 2,000 for the first time in about two years (which was just before the second dip of our recession). Even the S&P 500 gained 1.2% yesterday. Though I’m hoping in the back of my mind that this isn’t just a case of holiday-time exuberance, the experts tend to agree that things are looking up:

“By and large, the news is positive, and the economy is perking along so unless we have some sort of terrorist activity or some other negative event, I would expect the positive momentum to continue through the week,” said Andy Brooks, head of equity trading at T. Rowe Price.

Pretend Narcotics Checkpoints Legal

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

It's against the law for police to set up a narcotics checkpoint — but a pretend checkpoint is fine, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled.

They were driving to a music festival in far southwestern Colorado when they saw the big signs posted along the road.

“Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead.”

“Narcotics canine ahead.”

The passenger tossed something out the window, and they just kept going. That was only the petty offense of littering — a little crime — but it was the start of something big.

It’s against the law for police to set up narcotics checkpoints to check whether any randomly passing motorists happen to have illegal drugs.

But it’s not illegal for the police to pretend that’s what they’re doing, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday. […]

I’m not sure what the laws are in Texas, but I’d presume that they’re similar. As a non-drug-user, I suppose it doesn’t apply to me anyway, but it’s interesting from a civil liberties perspective.

Man’s Signature Offends Delaware

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Charles Weinstein has an otherwise-normal signature that he’s been using for more than eight years — except that it’s upside-down. He's used it on checks, credit cards and other official documents, but the Delaware DMV isn’t accepting it:

He said he trained himself to write his name in this unusual way, working right-side up, as a way to make his mark unique. He said he has been signing his name this way for more than eight years on all official papers, checks, credit cards — even his old driver’s license. It was never a major problem until this week, he said, when he went to the DMV office on Airport Road to change his address.

Weinstein said a window clerk told him to “stop fooling around and sign it right.” When he insisted that what he wrote was his valid, legal signature, Weinstein said the clerk accused him of being a troublemaker and threw him out. […]

Writing one’s signature upside-down is an interesting trick, though I can’t imagine how long it took him to learn that technique or what methods he used to wrap his head around it.

Using an acting analogy, I’m curious whether he used “method writing” (where he actually learned to write the characters in his name upside-down and then wrote those in sequence to form his signature) or whether he merely learned how to mimic the look of his upside-down signature.

(Via the Crypto-Gram newsletter.)

Google News Alerts

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:

People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.

The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]

I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

I enjoyed this News In Brief from the latest issue of The Onion:

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks
SANDPOINT, ID—Seated on the edge of his bed, Carl Thompson, 38, paused for 20 minutes with one sock on his foot and the other in his hand Tuesday. “Ugh, tired,” said Thompson, who was otherwise silent from 6:30 to 6:50 a.m. During that period, Thompson stared at the wall and teetered perilously close to a reclining position six times.

I can relate to that feeling from when I used to work for Steamatic. Their office is in Fort Worth (about 45 miles from here), and I had to leave at 7:30am each morning just to get there on time. That made for some tired mornings.