Fido flunky

If you think you’ve seen everything, think again, and also take comfort in your ideas about that stupid hobby of yours that someone said might make a good business because, well, it can’t be as silly as nameadog.com, where, for $30 and a picture of your pooch, site owner Jenny send you just the exact perfect name for your dog, so you don’t have to go to all that trouble!

Jenny will send you three names, and if you find you don’t actually like them she’ll return your money, satisfaction guaranteed!

So if you’re still sitting on your fat ass wishing you could think of a way to make Google gazillions from just one good Internet Idea like Dog Namer, here are some other professions to consider:

• Errant Sock Replacement Services


• Seasoning Consultant (how much salt is too much?)


• Diet Coke Selection Expert (With lime? Vanilla? Plain? TAB? Splenda? Bottle or can?)


• Carpet Height Admin.


• Boredom Aleviation Manager


• Web Site Navigation Label Specialist


• Shirt Tucking Advisor


• Meme Wrangler

WiFined

Benjamin Smith III of St. Petersburg, Florida used to park his SUV outside the home of Richard Dinon for one reason only — to steal his WiFi! Shocked and appalled, Dinon called the police and had Smith arrested for using someone else’s bandwidth.

Is this even a crime? If Dinon left his WiFi network wide open, which he did, and Smith was sitting outside on a public street and just happened to have his laptop and just happened to find the signal and just happened to… you know, it is kind of creepy. But is it stealing?

Florida law enforcement arrested Smith for unauthorized access to a computer network, which counts as a third-degree felony. So I suppose it really is a crime — at least in Florida.

Duck soup

For those of you biting your nails out there over the pending global disaster known as Avian Flu, good news! It appears that the deadly strain just waiting to be unleashed will have a much easier time getting from Asia to the rest of the world! Yay!

The flu has spread to migratory flocks of birds rather than captive chickens and other fowl, and 5,000 dead ducks (and geese) have been found at Lake Qinghaihu in western China — and being that this is western China, that means they’re closer to Europe, and you, and me!

So far, avian flu hasn’t made the leap to human communicability, but the World Health Organization believes that if (when?) it mutates, millions will be dead before it’s over. All it needs is to be passed to a human already carrying a human flu virus — but that’ll never happen.

Death race 2005

The party that spent countless news minutes to position itself as the banner holder for a “culture of life” is speeding up the death penalty so the government has less impediments to kill its citizens on death row.

Dubbed the “Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005,” congressional Republicans are just oh so tired of those damned criminals getting away with murder, literally, so they’d like to be able to kill them with less messy litigation.

Looking at the numbers, Texans absolutely love killing, while 9 other states perform at least one execution per year and the rest of these United States that allow executions only manage to kill someone rarely. Twelve states have no death penalty.

The U.S. is among 76 countries that retain the death penality for any crime at all, and is joined by such human rights luminaries as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria, Sierra Leone, Libya and North Korea on that list. Currently, 85 countries have abolished the death penality altogether, 24 are abolitionist in practice (no killings in 10 years), and another 11 won’t kill its citizens for ordinary crimes.