Diet UngsungBlog

(All the taste of the regular UngsungBlog, but with zero sports! Yes, I'm going to attempt a second sports-free blog! This could get ugly...)

- I don't think I got more than an hour of sleep, as I was suffering from a bad sore throat, pains in the stomach, and a bad cramp in my right leg. Worse, it was horribly windy last night--and it still is--with gusts of wind hitting my window all night. It was a rough night, to say the least, and it's all my fault. This is what happens when one insults the Costco gods!!! I shall now say three "Hail Costco"s, and offer a cheese danish, a glass of Dole juice, and some Craisins to them.

(oooh...the winds seem to have died down, my leg no longer hurts, and my throat isn't as irritated as it was a minute ago. I think the offering is working!)

- Oh no! Warren Buffett is now only the third-richest man in the world, after getting passed by Mexican "telecom titan" Carlos Slim Helú, $53.1 billion to $52.4 billion. Still #1 is Bill Gates, at $56.0 billion, but the article suggests that Mr. Helú could eventually pass him. Regarding Mr. Buffett: poor poor guy. What is he going to do, now that he is only the third richest guy in the world?

Speaking of which, my sister joked that Mr. Helú probably was really worth 53.1 billion pesos. Using XE.com's currency converter, that comes out to about $4.8 billion USD; not a bad chunk of change still, wouldn't you agree?

- Newsweek reported that a CBS producer was fired after an article appearing in Katie Couric's "Notebook" was plagiarized from the Wall Street Journal. Couric will not be reprimanded in any way, due to the fact that she does not actually write these pieces herself. Disregarding the plagiarism for now, isn't affixing your name to a piece that you have no real input in providing, at best, journalistic dishonesty? Nice job by CBS to call the plagiarism an "omission," by the way, suggesting that they forgot to mention that the article was blatantly ripped. Whoops!

I wish I could ask the now unemployed producer if he really expected to get away with this. Let's see, you read an article from the Wall Street Journal--a newspaper with slightly more readers than one of those cheesy magazines you can find at the supermarket for free--and you decided to rip the article nearly word-for-word for use on a video segment associated with the CBS Evening News--a news show that has slightly more viewers than a City Council meeting on the Public Access channel? Talk about committing career suicide.

(By the way, did you know that Amazon.com keeps a complete order history of every order you've placed at Amazon.com? My oldest account has order details from orders placed in 2000!)

- Finally, even though more women use the internet than men, men are more likely to watch internet videos than women. I can't say that I'm surprised by either figure, especially the latter. My favorite quote from the article:

"Men are more visual than women, who tend to communicate in writing and or in words," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst with eMarketer and the author of the report.

Right...men watch more videos online than women do, because women prefer writing. I'm sure the availability of online porn, webcam girls on Youtube, and the like, have absolutely no correlation to the figures cited in the article. Never mind sports sites, like ESPN, that offer sports clips for those who don't get enough sports highlights from hours of SportsCenter and ESPNews.

(Crap...does the sentence above count as talking about sports? Did I fail to avoid talking about sports for a second consecutive blog entry? I'd argue that I wasn't talking about a specific sports topic, so that should count!)

That's all for now! Happy blogging!