Few Writers Use 'Dear' in Emails and Text Messages

Jeffrey Evans: And the Winners of the Stupidest Text Messages of the Year Are...
This is a list I did not want to write and, hopefully, I will never have to write again... but I doubt it. The "Texties" are awards given by my company, TigerText, to individuals who made the most egregious texting errors of the calendar year -- the folks who had the worst "I'm such an idiot for sending that" moments of 2010. We judged the "winners" based on the following criteria: absurdity of message sent, creativity in language, thoughtlessness, personal reputation destruction, and the imp...

Can bankers and financiers be patriots?
If you worked in the West Wing, you would find “a distinctive whiff of the boardroom” throughout the offices and corridors today, according to Julie Mason, the Washington Examiner’s White House correspondent. That’s how she describes the difference between Obama’s new Chief of Staff, William Daley, and the “political operatives” who Daley will oversee. I like the “whiff of the boardroom” line. Julie’s article explores some of the negati...

HEH: The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine. Abraham Lincoln
HEH: “The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln ...

James Buchanan's Activist Blunder
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. Tags: Abraham Lincoln, james buchanan, South Carolina, the civil war President James Buchanan’s critics rightly condemned him during the Secession crisis of 1860-’61 — but they did so for exactly the wrong reason. The naysayers blasted the president for passiveness in the face of disunion, for failing promptly to reinforce endangered federal forts in the South. True, the president retreated from sending reinforcement...

2011 Tax Day pushed back to April 18
Procrastinators will get three extra days to file their taxes this year, but it has nothing to do with sympathy from the IRS. Taxpayers have President Abraham Lincoln to thank for the Internal Revenue Service's decision to give everyone an extension from April 15 to 18. Since an obscure holiday in Washington called Emancipation Day falls on April 16, a Saturday, it will be observed on Friday, April 15, the IRS said Tuesday. The holiday commemorates Lincoln's freeing of 3,100 slaves in the Dis...

What is radicalism?
Editor's note: Two years back on this site, we quoted David Bromwich's essay on Lincoln calling him a "constitutional radical." A year ago Weiss wrote a piece from Cairo called, The Reluctant Radical. Lately the scholar Noel Ignatiev sent Weiss an email saying that Bertrand Russell grew more radical with age. We asked him to explain the term. The hallmark of radicalism is the willingness to destroy what one has in order to create something new. It was best expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his S...

Who'da thunk? Reading Constitution out loud called 'fetish'
In a nation founded upon the U.S. Constitution, one might think that reading the founding document out loud on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives might not be Controversial, but some on the left suggest those promoting its voicing have a "fetish." Among them is Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com, who penned a column titled, "Read It and Weep: How the Tea Party's fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble." Dictionaries define "fetish" as an object of irrational reverenc...

D.C. Holiday Pushes Tax Filing Deadline to April 18
Wednesday, January 05, 2011 By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Washington (AP) - Taxpayers will get an extra three days to file their Federal Tax returns this year, and they can thank the nation's capital for the extra time. The filing deadline is delayed because the District of Columbia will observe Emancipation Day on Friday, April 15. By law, local holidays in the nation's capital impact tax deadlines the same way federal holidays would, the Internal Revenue Service said. Taxpayers ...

SMS of Death
This will be hard to fix: Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between Mobile Phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as Text Messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries," that run on a phone. Network operators use these files to, for example, ...

Google phone bug misdirects texts
A small number of phones using Google's Android system have been affected. Google says it will fix a Mobile Phone bug that mistakenly sends Text Messages to the wrong people. The Glitch, which has hit a small portion of the company's Android mobile phones, first emerged last year. Those affected say some of their texts have ended up in the hands of random recipients. After investigating the issue, Google said it had "developed a fix" and would be rolling it out soon. It is n...

Thirty Three Things (v. 30)
1. Why are thousands of dead birds suddenly falling from the sky? Let’s quickly review the facts. Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 red-winged blackbirds and starlings fell from the sky within a one-mile area over the town of Beebe, Arkansas. The last few days have also seen a mass fish kill, in which an estimated 100,000 drum fish washed up on a twenty-mile stretch near the town of Ozark, Arkansas, which is about 125 miles away from Beebe. And th...

More Threats Against Schools
BAY CITY, Texas - The Bay City Independent School District says its junior high and High School campuses have been placed on “high alert” after threatening Text Messages were received by Students and teachers. The texts were apparently received sometime Thursday morning and read, "FWD: Hey! Forward this to everyone, (that letter)...1 rule broken, two girls die at the jr. high and 2 from high school, dnt go! The school will be on lockdown," according to the BCISD website. Both Bay Cit...

Ommanney says book still on the way
For those desperately wanting a copy of D.C. Housewife Catherine Ommanney's book "Inbox Full" (and we're sure there are a lot of you), you'll have to wait a wee bit longer. Ommanney, who has been pimping the book for months on her Facebook page, tells us that its release was delayed because of technical problems. "Because with its presentation (i.e. text boxes) there were a couple of tech [problems] on Amazon so that has been corrected and should be [available] again in the next 48 hours," Omman...

Eavesdropping on GSM Calls
It's easy and cheap: Speaking at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress in Berlin on Tuesday, a pair of researchers demonstrated a start-to-finish means of Eavesdropping on encrypted GSM cellphone calls and Text Messages, using only four sub-$15 telephones as network "sniffers," a Laptop computer, and a variety of Open Source software. The encryption is lousy: Several of the individual pieces of this GSM hack have been displayed before. The ability to decrypt GSM's 64-bit A5/1 encryption was ...

A divorce so nasty that the judge joined in
For a fictional judge to lace a Divorce ruling with sarcastic scorn for the no-longer-in-love parties is one thing. It's daytime soap gold. But in real life no one on the bench begins their august opinion with "Paging Dr Freud, paging Dr Freud" or pauses along the way to ponder the word "dickhead". Do they? Not often. But an opinion given by Judge Joseph Quinn in southern Ontario, in the case of Larry vs Catherine, has become a viral must-read in Family Law practices all across North America pre...

Court: No Warrant Needed to Search Cells, Texts
Like this Story? Share it: Police can search an arrested suspect's cell phone Text Messages without a warrant, a California court ruled. (iStockphoto) (AP) San Francisco - The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that police do not need a warrant to search a cell phone carried by someone under arrest. The justices determined a Ventura County deputy had the right to conduct a warrantless search of the Text Messages of a man he had arrested on suspicion of participating in a Drug Deal. The sta...

Gizmos get smarter, from lounge room to kitchen
The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Photo: AFP More tablets to rival the iPad and 3D TVs are on the way, writes Asher Moses in Las Vegas. GADGET lovers rejoice: this year the iPad will have strong competition, appliances will send Text Messages and 3D TVs might go mainstream. The organisers of the Consumer Electronics Show - which this year has more than 2600 exhibitors and closes tomorrow - said about 100 new tablets were unveiled, including several from Motorola, Dell, Samsung, Asus, Panasonic, L...

Plea Deal for Muslim Dad in Arizona Who Murdered His 20 Year-Old Daughter for Being too "Americanized" in US Honor Killing
State prosecutor Stephanie Low said Almaleki  admitted purposefully running down his daughter." -- " 'By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,' Low said. 'This was an attempt at an Honor Killing.' " Noor Almaleki was the Murder Victim in an Islamic Honor Killing. In Nvember 2009, her Muslim father deliberately ran her over with his car, backed up, then ran her over again...

Your Cell Phone Is No Longer Private
In a rather shocking opinion yesterday brought to light by MSNBC's Bob Sullivan, the California Supreme Court has ruled that you have no expectation of Privacy as to the Text Message folders on your cell phone. Let me take a step back to review the facts, some of which I've gleaned from the opinion below: Gregory Diaz drove his friend Lorenzo Hampton to meet someone in Thousand Oaks. Hampton sold some Ecstasy to that someone in the backseat of the car, and the buyer happened to be, oops!, an un...

The promise of a song in Zimbabwe
As a child named Happiness belted out ‘Amazing Grace’ at a school party, the writer recalled the song’s promise in her own life....

A Nation of Cowards
Erasing "nigger" from Huckleberry Finn—or ignoring our failures—doesn't change anything. It doesn't provide racial enlightenment, or justice, and it won't shield anyone from the legacy of Slavery and racial Discrimination. All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection. Which is a shame. If there's anything great about this country, it's in our ability to account for and overcome our mistakes. Peddling whitewashed ignorance diminishes America as much as it does o...

Find Homelessness solutions
Do you find it interesting, that most of us working stiffs, never consider the breath and depth of  Homelessness in our community? The information provided in this document is designed to assist organizations who recognize the need for housing programs in there community. After much thought and prayer the St. James Primitive Baptist Church in Lewisburg has accepted the facts, raised by Solutions for America in the article posted on www.solutionforamerica.com. The writer states, the most imm...

Village Voice says NY reporter fabricated sources
The weekly alternative newspaper The Village Voice has pulled a freelance writer's piece on college Debt after concluding he fabricated sources and quotes, prompting a separate review by the Daily News of dozens of articles The Writer contributed to the Tabloid. The Voice's editor, Tony Ortega, said in a statement posted on its website that New York-based writer Rob Sgobbo had invented a Berkeley College Student and a U.S. Government Accountability Office spokesman quoted in a Wednesday article ...

Director Ed Burns casts his vote in favor of Comcast-NBC Universal merger
Comcast's the one for Ed Burns. The filmmaker ("She's the One," "The Brothers McMullen") has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission supporting the cable giant's proposed Merger with NBC Universal. While many in the Hollywood community have expressed concern about what the effect of the nation's largest cable and Broadband provider controlling a giant programmer would mean for independent programmers, Burns argues the deal will be good for fil...

True Hit
Jan 17, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 17 • By John Podhoretz Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. The Writer-directors Ethan and Joel Coen, whose new movie is the remake of the 1969 John Wayne western True Grit, may be the most controlled and controlling moviemakers in America. So in command of their craft are they, and so literate and knowing about their intentions, that one can generally presume what we experience when we watch a Coen movie is pretty much what they want us...