In the News

BIC sold its 100 billionth pen recently. I'm wondering how many of those I've bought over my lifetime, since I'm a BiC Round Stic fan. I read about this in the NY Daily News, but have found a nice online link for you. A bit of history about the company is included. I hadn't known that the design of BIC ballpoints was inspired by a wheelbarrow wheel. Oh well. 100,000,000,000 are a lot of pens.

This item tickled me for some reason: Bearproof food canisters tested by actual bears, which makes sense, of course, but the little article in the Daily News was nicely written. I liked the part about the grizzlies in the Bronx Zoo's Bear Den giving up trying to open some canisters after "a half hour of some intense clawing and biting," to the entertainment of lunchtime visitors to the zoo.

News items like that make it less stressful to read the paper that's otherwise filled with such tidbits as Time Magazine finding "discrepancies" in FEMA head Michael Brown's official biographies on the FEMA website and on FindLaw.com. Apparently, and no surprise given his amazing incompetence, he seems to have enhanced his resume, claiming to have served "as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," when, according to spokeswoman Claudia Deakins, he was an assistant to the actual manager in Edmund, OK, a job she said was "more like an intern. Department heads did not report to him." And a listing that he was a professor of political science at Central State University seems to have been very inflated. Carl Johnson , a spokesman for the University of Central Oklahoma, formerly Central State, said he was actually a student there. Wow, those sure are impeccable credentials for a man entrusted with overseeing emergency services for the entire US. I usually save the politics for Occasional Blog, but I figured a short bit here would be okay.

Feeling: