I'm suspicious. This recent item from engadget is setting all kinds of tongues wagging. I on the other hand hear, 'Danger, Danger Will Robinson!'.

News organizations in other countries are starting to quote the story which engadget has sourced from only one spot; forums.somethingawful.com.

Couple the single, unreliable source with the fact that the EXIF tags for "Date Time Original" and "Date Time Digitized" are from January 7, 2004 and I think we have a problem here...

Where is Lenovo's press release? What about an LAX release? Why no local stories in TV or the newspapers?

UPDATE: Well duh... somethingawful.com specializes in hoaxes.

UPDATE 2 (Sept. 21): This is just getting weirder. Tom Krazit of cnet.com assures me that Lenovo has told him that "there was an fire incident at LAX and that their laptop was involved". Brian Humphrey (Firefighter/Specialist, Public Service Officer, Los Angeles Fire Department) at first reported no fire calls but subsequently discovered that(check out the comments):
"One media caller today provided more detail in the way of a date and approximate time, and I discovered our response on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 5:44 PM to Terminal 7 at LAX.
We responded to a 'fire out' in the terminal area involving a personal laptop computer. The apparent fire had been completely extinguished with a dry chemical extinguisher by bystanders prior to our arrival.
There were no injuries.
The LAFD notified custodial staff at LAX to handled the cleanup. Firefighters did not determine the make and model of the device or the cause of the fire."

The original source and the photo anomalies are still very problematic. On top of that, there are not yet any reported corroborating eye-witness accounts from people who are not using pseudonyms. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 3 (Sept. 29, 2006): Lenovo announces a re-call on some R, T and X series notebooks. There are still big questions to be answered about how this story originally broke and got reported but, sadly, I don't think we're going to get the answers. The truth is out there...

Trumped-up by the end-of-the-year list phenomenon and the constant need for filler in the news cycle, this year's "word of the year" has been chosen. The word is "podcast".

Last year it was "blog" (posited by Ethan and confirmed).

A sure fire way to become irrelevant is to have your activity named "word-of-the-year". Have you been talking about "metrosexuals", "soccer moms", or "Y2K" lately?

(This is part 112 in my on-going "Podcasting is Disco" series.)

A superb piece of flying and a good news story worth remembering but for a time yesterday TV relentlessly followed the progress of the jet. "See the impending fireball here live on WWWW!"

Jet Blue, like Westjet, has satellite TV on board. What must it have been like to watch your wounded jet fly around LA yesterday?

I've always liked being out of touch when flying. I can still do that of course -- I don't have to watch the TV -- but when your plane is the subject of the news then you would find out pretty quickly what is going on based on the buzz in the cabin. I flew on a flight into Vancouver in -- UPDATE: it was 1989 not 1986, duh -- that landed with only one engine. I was blissfully unaware of the situation until I saw all the fire trucks lined up along the runway as we landed. The crew calmly dealt with the situation and didn't see the point in panicking the passengers. Situations like these are also practiced in simulation on a regular basis -- and, believe me -- those simulators are incredibly good training environments. It is absolutely stunning to see a flight trainer and be part of a flight training experience.

Cheers to the pilot.

(UPPER UPDATE: Check out the radio traffic from the flight here. An interesting listen.

I Was cleaning out the truck last week and came across a lost CD; Joan Osborne's "Relish". That disc contains one of my favourite pop songs from the past 10 years, the plaintive "One of Us".

You don't have to be religious to get the point of the song.

Staring with abject disbelief at the images from New Orleans over the past week, the song has been playing over and over in my head. Out there are thousands of us.

Do what you can to help.

Will the New York Times soon be distributing broadsheets to Marxists in warehouse squats? Incredibly the Times comes out 4 square against wealth creation in the United States in the June 5th Sunday edition. (As a matter of "policy" I do not link to Times stories. I would like to do it of course, but as they say at car rental and air line counters, "I cannot do it sir because we have a policy against it...")

The stats: (from their own story)
Between 1983 and 2001 -
Percentage increase of all households in U.S. -- 27%
Percentage increase in number of households having inflation adjusted net worth of $1.5 million -- 123%
Percentage increase in number of households having inflation adjusted net worth of $5-10 million -- 304%
Percentage increase in number of households having inflation adjusted net worth of $>10 million -- 409%

The obvious conclusion should be that a greater proportion of U.S. tax payers were able to increase their collective wealth in an 18 year period. In other words: More Americans got "rich". Somehow the Times views this as bad news; their headline: "Richest are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind".

They even manage to pull ole' Dubya into this thing by whining about how tax cuts are going to give the rich even larger breaks in the future. What their tax charts show me is how the upper middle class tax payer is hammered by the system. Based on 2001 numbers; 70.5% of all taxes were paid by the top 20% of income earners. With tax cuts in full bloom by 2015 the top 20% of income earners will be paying -- drum roll please -- 71% of all income taxes paid. These numbers show that tax cuts are a boon to those who earn capital gains and dividends. Every Monopoly player realizes that not just the rich can earn money doing that.

After supplying a bunch of stats with the article and then sidestepping the positive aspects of them, the Times concludes with this absurd and completely unsubstantiated paragraph:
"But in fact, economic mobility -- moving from one income group to another over a lifetime -- has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation."

Funny that. More people have increased net worth and yet income mobility is static or declining. (BTW this is all based on 2001 numbers, before the real estate bubble.) Something does not compute or maybe those folks have been using dividend and capital gains increases wisely. Bad, bad rich people. Here is a listing of the advertisers from page 2 and 3 of the Sunday Times: Chanel, Movado, Dior, Tiffany & Co., Mikimoto, Jacob & Co., Fortunoff, Tourneau, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor's, Macy's, Barneys.

Make the rich pay! More.

Tina Brown writes in the Washington Post:
"We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with transcripts available. No matter who you are, someone is ready and willing to rat you out. Even the rats themselves have to look over their shoulders, because some smaller rat is always waiting in the wings. Bloggers are the new Stasi. All the timidity this engenders, all this watching your mouth has started to feel positively un-American."

My initial thought is this; if I wrote that someone in particular was like a member of the Stasi I could get sued by that person, but it's not actionable to tar a group of millions with a slur like that. Secondly how many bloggers are getting paid? Finally, who pays to read that kind of stuff in a major newspaper? I can think of at least a dozen bloggers who write better and boy is it going to be fun reading their responses to this... I thought the beauty of newspapers was that there was somebody on staff who acted as an editor.

Had enough of the "cliffhanger" metaphor? Even after all the polls had closed no major media outlets wanted to make the obvious calls on Florida and Ohio. It was a clear demonstration of insecure institutional group-think.

What about the popular vote? Wasn't that supposed to be the litmus test for indicating the true will of the people? Did we hear about that? Were the pundits not watching the results? All in all it was a night of shamelessly poor coverage, abysmal analysis, poor conversation and abject media insecurity. The local & regional feeds that I watched on the satellite were even worse. Mark November 2, 2004 on your calendar -- TV news pronounced clinically dead.

Dear Mr. Kerry: Treblinka was a Nazi death camp located in Poland, not the location of the KGB Headquarters. Doh!