Salma Hayek shares the wealth, proving breast really is best.

Aw, Koala love.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t want people to know how much he loves ABBA.

Yeah, a flesh-eating bug: that’s what’s wrong with Michael Jackson.

Are you wearing your e-condom yet?

These guys have some massive balls… er, nuts.

While gay marriage remains illegal in most states, life just got easier for folks with gay friends who are planning to marry thanks to Hallmark Cards’ new line of greeting cards.

The language inside the cards is neutral, with no mention of wedding or marriage, making them also suitable for a commitment ceremony. Hallmark said the move is a response to consumer demand, not any political pressure.

“It’s our goal to be as relevant as possible to as many people as we can,” Hallmark spokeswoman Sarah Gronberg Kolell said.

Regardless of your opinion on gay marriage, with only two states legally recognizing such ceremonies it’s hard to see how Hallmark believes the new line will be relevant to many. So why can’t they just say they saw a need and decided to fill it?

Because, frankly, I’ve been wracking my mind trying to figure out just what to send Ellen deGeneres to congratulate her on her new trophy wife.

Gannett Company, which publishes 85 newspapers throughout the country, is reporting a whopping 36% drop in second-quarter profit this year. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is trimming their editorial staff by 50 while hiring 95 more reporters. The move was prompted by Rupert Murdoch’s realization that every story run in WSJ is handled by 8.3 people before it ever makes it into print, an inefficiency which certainly contributes to the cost of publication.

Even the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s getting in on the belt-tightening act, cutting 200 employees and eliminating some of its targeted news sections.

With news dinosaurs Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report all suffering massive drops in advertising pages and circulation, the folks at Small Dead Animals are waiting for the asteroid that will put MSM out of its misery.

Naturally, the print media is blaming the economy for the decline of advertising dollars and subscriptions. Apparently they’re too busy looking for scapegoats to read their own back issues, because the death of print media has been predicted for quite some time. It’s ironic, then, that newspapers — which online enthusiasts blame for being continually one step behind — are just now becoming aware of their seemingly inevitable demise.

The thing is, it’s not for lack of people actually interested in reading the news. Even as print readership has fallen off, online news readership has blossomed, a trend which should have prompted print media to examine its weaknesses. Unfortunately — for traditionalists, at least — there’s little that print media can do to lure its readership back. The medium itself is passeé.

I’ve always been a news junkie. As far back as I can remember, I’ve started my morning with the news. True, when I was 9-years-old and reading the morning paper over my bowl of Cap’n Crunch I was more interested in the comic section, but back then I’d occasionally read an entire story if the headline caught my attention. My morning news habit has not changed in the past 3 decades, and to this day I feel out of sorts if I don’t start my day catching up on world events.

When we were visiting the in-laws last week, I didn’t have internet access and actually found myself reading a dead-tree newspaper for the first time in several years. It was discomfiting to settle for poorly written stories that barely skimmed the surface of an issue while realizing that immediately educating myself further on a topic or reading a dissenting opinion wasn’t an option. More than once I found myself questioning statistics in a story about the election or the war but I couldn’t hop online to do some fact-checking of my own.

No wonder so many technophobes can’t discuss politics beyond sound bites and headlines, I found myself thinking. How can we ever consider our voting populace educated if they’re limited to merely accepting biased statements as “news”?

But therein lies the biggest limitation and turn-off for many readers: you either know and accept that a newspaper or news magazine has a political prejudice and will be running slanted stories that leave you in the dark or you assume you’ve got the full story when, in fact, you probably don’t. (And you know what they say about people who “assume” things.)

That’s the real change the internet’s brought to MSM: readers who are interested in the issues no longer have to depend upon a paper to decide for them “all the news that’s fit to print”.

Don’t understand the situation in Darfur, much less know where the place is? Hop online and read Wikipedia, then explore from there. Wonder why Conservatives think Obama’s secretly a Muslim when, after all, he attended a (possibly racist) church? Do some exploring and decide for yourself.

When you read the news online, additional information is just a mouse click away. When you read it in a newspaper or magazine you’re not just subscribing to their publication but to their political biases as well.

Having been through the whole Dan Rather/National Guard memo debacle in the last election, I know better than to trust the accuracy what I see in print. MSM’s political bias has, in my mind, become a given.

Judging by the drop in subscriptions and advertising revenue for print media, even people who don’t spend their entire days at the computer are starting to realize and reject this limitation, too.

So is this the beginning of the end for newspapers and news magazines in printed form? Quite possibly. But it might also signal a new beginning, too: that of the curious, self-educated reader. News organizations desiring to stay in business might want to take note and work with that. A good start: eliminating the annoying registration requirements and paid access to archives which simply send online readers looking for a more convenient source of news. An even better approach: stop fearing the blogosphere and start linking to it, instead.

Unless, of course, newspaper and magazine editors really are afraid readers will discover just how biased their stories are.

The news from the Phoenix Mars Landing just keeps getting more amazing. First came the discovery that the red planet may once have featured lakes and rainfall.

Now it appears that Martian soil appears capable of supporting life.

“We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past present or future,” Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists.

“It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. … It is very exciting for us.”

I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to learn one day that the first colonist on Mars will probably be those pot-growers about to be put out of business in Mendocino County.

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to hear the story.

Verizon gets bashed a lot these days, sometimes deservedly so. I’ve been a customer of theirs for years, and yet I’ve never hesitated to complain about the way they nickel-and-dime me to death. (Selling me “Unlimited” text messages that really means only 100 non-Verizon text messages, for instance.)

Sometimes, though, they get things right like the recent improvements that have tripled my signal strength.

Or the way they helped an 80-year-old man who’d taken to calling his late wife’s old cell phone number every day for three years just so he could hear her voice again. Unfortunately, the message was lost when the company archived old greetings and messages, leaving the man bereft.

Until they learned about what had happened, that is. They restored the message, and now Charles Whiting can hear his late wife’s voice whenever he wants.

Sweet, huh?

Remember when I marveled at the way a man’s wedding ring can turn him from an attentive, helpful guy to a slacker, sloppy spouse?

I wasn’t kidding.

Now, thanks to Rammer, I also have the statistics to prove it.

[S]cientists analyzed surveys gathered in 2002 from 28 nations, from 17,636 respondents (8,119 males and 9,517 females) as part of the Family and Changing Gender Roles III Survey. All respondents were either married or cohabiting with a significant other.

Overall, they found men spent about 9 hours a week on housework compared with women, who spent more than 20 hours weekly.[...]

Regardless of the couples’ relative earnings or work hours, cohabiting males reported more household hours than did their married counterparts, while the opposite was true for women, with wives picking up the broom more often than live-in girlfriends.

The scientists attribute this change to the “traditionalizing” effects of marriage, which is to say that, while shacking up, both sexes feel responsible for helping out with household chores. Once married, though, both genders seem to view housework as primarily the wife’s responsibility. So, the reasoning goes, husbands slack off from the efforts they’d previously made while wives wonder what the hell happened.

But does bringing up the subject help remedy the imbalance? Oh hell no.

So, as for why women gain weight after that wedding ring slips onto their fingers? Chances are it’s because they’ve since realized they already picked up 180ish pounds of dead weight, so what’s another 40 going to matter?

Today would have been Mr. Rogers’ 80th birthday.

To honor the gentle man who led so many of us as children to understand ourselves and our communities, March 20 is now Wear a Sweater Day.

In celebration of this event, Mr. McFeely (he of the Speedy Delivery service) has a special request:

“We’re asking everyone everywhere — from Pittsburgh to Paris — to wear their favorite sweater on that day,” he asks in his best speedy delivery voice. “It doesn’t have to have a zipper down the front like the one Mister Rogers wore on the program, it just has to be special to you.”

Wouldn’t you know that today it’s finally going to reach into the mid-60s here in Kansas where we’ve been shivering almost non-stop since early December? I’ll still be wearing my sweater, though. I was a big fan of Mr. Rogers as a kid, and both of my own children were, too.

Won’t you wear one, too?