Hi. I'm Newley Purnell. I cover technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. I use this site to share my stories and often blog about the books I'm reading, tech trends, sports, travel, and our dog Ginger. For updates, get my weekly email newsletter.
AP:
Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, has died, his ex-wife said Saturday. He was 65.
Pryor died of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley sometime late Friday or early Saturday, Flyn Pryor said. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.
CNN:
At some point you knew it would happen: The U.S. would draw into a Group of Death at the World Cup.
It finally happened on Friday as the No. 8-ranked Yanks were placed in Group E with three-time world champion Italy, the Czech Republic (ranked No. 2 in the world) and rising African power Ghana.
Wow. Yahoo has bought del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site — and a tool I can’t imagine using the Web without. (Here’s a good del.icio.us tutorial, if you’re interested in learning more about it.)
SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” — that’s search engine optimization — is a thorough examination of best practices in ensurating the Web sites are listed effectively in search engines. It’s necessarily a little inside baseball, but if you have a Web site or are curious about how search engines work, it’s worth a look.
Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has just added a new title to his panoply of blogs (such as Gawker, Lifehacker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and, of course, Gridskipper). It’s called The Consumerist, and it’s akin to Consumer Reports — but with ample heapings of cynicism and style.
Click for a bigger version — I’m quoted at the top
Thanks to a kind reader for pointing out that my post yesterday about Friends of the Earth’s misleading climate change poster was excerpted in today’s Express (which is the Washington Post‘s free daily paper).
They used a snippet in their round-up of DC blogs — it’s on page 41 (here’s a PDF version, if you’re so inclined).
And if you missed this update to the post, check out what my friend Ben Preston has to say — he’s a climate scientist himself and points out some of the mixed messages the FOE is sending with their posters.
SNP:
The “3 Tierras Premium Cigar” from Felipe Gregorio, Inc. is being billed as the world’s first double-barrel shotgun cigar.
It’s two cigars fused together at the mouth-end.
The Cigar is said to be made with a Dominican-grown piloto-Cubano leaf mini cigar and a Habano #92 Nicaraguan tobacco mini cigar. The two cigars are merged into a pyramid-shaped head, which is wrapped for about one-third the length of the cigar with a third leaf of Brazilian Arapiraca.
The Cigar is offered in Escopeta (two 5 x 30 cigars) and Lupara (4-3/4 x 26) varieties. They’re sold in 20-count boxes. The Escopeta variety is priced at $4.80 and the Lupara variety is priced at $4.25.
What, exactly, does Howard Dean need to say to get canned? Would somebody please shut this jackass up? I mean, seriously, the guy is a fool.
I’m sure he’s not the only one who thinks the war in Iraq can’t be “won” (if “winning” means a complete end to violence in Iraq in the short term and the entire dismantling of the insurgency — insurgent movements, by their very nature, don’t ever go away completely). We need to re-define what “winning” looks like, formulate a plan for a successful withdrawl from the country in the next year or two, and devote our resources to protecting our own country from domestic terrorist attacks.
But Howard Dean can’t be bothered to craft the DNC’s message in any coherent way. He is a bombastic, grandstanding whiner; this is actualy about what I expect from him, sadly.
AP:
WASHINGTON — Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, likened the war in Iraq to Vietnam yesterday and said, ”The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong,” comments that drew immediate fire from Republicans.
AP:
RANSON, W.Va. – Either they misjudged the distance or they couldn’t take the traffic. For reasons that mystify authorities, five deer that made their way onto the top of a five-story parking garage suddenly leaped to their deaths Sunday.
Police Cpl. Steve Cox found the does’ bodies on a service road to the Charles Town Races & Slots, next to a security van they’d narrowly missed.
“They took the plunge,” he said. “It was just absolutely weird.”
Best part:
The carcasses were given to passers-by for butchering.
I think it would be stating the obvious to say: Only in West Virginia.
Over at Gridskipper, I point out some cool photos of DC — including some intriguing pics (like the one above) taken of the city in 1977.