Last year on April 1, I was driving home listening to a great story on NPR, about how cheap foreign imports of Maple Syrup (from boiling discarded maple furniture) were harming the Maple Syrup industry in the Northeast.  Untapped maple trees would then explode, often harming and killing the maple farmers.  You can listen to the story on NPR’s page.

It might be worth following up on these other stories from a year ago:

• Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
• UN Votes to Shut Down Internet
• Google Releases DNA-Scanning Drink
• Bush Twins Enlist in Air Force, Deploy to Iraq

Enjoy!

Yesterday, our fearless leader Alex appeared on “Inside the Net,” a podcast by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur.  In it, they talked about closed captioning and how even those were riddled with errors.  (Check out Inside the Net 16, which features PodZinger, here.)

It reminded me of the classic closed-captioning error on ABC’s 4/23/2003 World News Tonight, which reported in its closed caption feed of Peter Jennings, that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was “in the hospital for the removal of an enlarged prostitute.”  ABC later issued a formal apology to Greenspan.

When Greenspan’s wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, was asked about her husband’s enlarged prostitute, she said:

 He should be so lucky.

I have a PodZinger RSS alert feed for the term “xbox” so that I can keep up on xbox news.  As I was checking my items this morning, I noticed an interesting video podcast from Attack of the Show from last Friday.  They had Dean Takahashi on, and he was talking about why he believes Microsoft is working on a handheld, an “iPod killer,” that will have video, music and games. 

Dean has been working on validating this rumor since last December, when there was an Xbox reorganization.  You can read Dean’s full story in the San Jose Mercury News blog.

A co-worker of mine told me a quote about how Bush compared picking a new medicare plan to buying a car.  Huh?  Is that supposed to mean that it is easy or hard?  What an ambiguous analogy.  I decided to try to see if I could find an audio clip on PodZinger where Bush actually says it, just to be sure what he’s making the analogy to.  I didn’t actually find him saying it, but I did find a clip from PBS where Bush is talking, and then the pundits talk about the car analogy.

So, I tried to think of a few ambiguous analogies.  Here we go:

• It’s as easy as setting the clock on your VCR
• It’s as easy as putting together that toy you bought your kids
• It’s as easy as filing an insurance claim 
• It’s as easy as finding the WMD’s
• Mission Accomplished!

On my way into work today, I heard a news story about the lost productivity that will be experienced by companies with distracted employees talking about March Madness and figuring out their betting pools.  After reading Barbara’s blog entry today, I decided to try to find that news clip in PodZinger because I couldn’t remember the exact number.  So I typed “march madness lost productivity” and lo and behold, it came up with the dollar figure in the snippet in the first and third entries, both from CNN.  The figure that CNN is using is 3.8 billion dollars of lost productivity!  So I guess everyone will be standing around the water cooler or blogging .

It takes over our lives every year, those office pools attempting to predict who will make it to the Final Four. I’ve changed my approach after years of seeing the winner be the person that took the “dartboard” approach to picking teams! Even a article claims that “most knowledgeable sports fans” pick the winning teams only about 30% of the time. The same article points out that it is illegal, but let’s ignore that for now.

We’re having some fun at PodZinger predicting the outcome. It can’t be any worse than your average Joe. We’re tracking the buzz on which teams are being talked about the most. Take a look . Who do you think it will be?

Microsoft put together a humorous video poking fun of themselves about how they might re-design the iPod packaging. It is posted on Google video.

I just heard this news - PodZinger got named as Forbes Favorite Video & Audio Search Engine.  Check out our review by the Forbes editors in the “Look It Up” department, the “Look It Up” favorites, or look at the whole list of Video and Audio Search contenders. 

In their review, they even mentioned the same ”Ooops!” that I listed in my post on the Dubai ports deal - I wonder if they’re reading our blog??

Cool!

The Chronical of Higher Education had an article about the ouster of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.  As a sidebar, there was a short list speculating who might be offered the job, among which was the President of Tufts University, Larry Bacow, who also received his undergraduate degree in economics from MIT.  I heard that when Larry was asked about this article, he responded by saying:

 Do you think they would hire another economist from MIT named Larry?

Last week, we had a listing in Boing Boing, the “Directory of Wonderful Things,” that called us a “killer free service.”  That’s not what this post is about, though.  Apparently, the SmartFilter product by Secure Computing has now deemed Boing Boing a “nudity” site because of a post or two (out of thousands).  As a result, companies that use SmartFilter like Halliburton, American Express and Fidelity now block Boing Boing. 

 I’ve never been a big fan of content filters, even though I have kids that are beginning to surf the net.  They seem to cast too wide a net.  For example. SmartFilter is reported to classify as nudity any sites that include photos of Michelangelo’s “David.”  Others are reported to block sites that talk about breast cancer.