Poor Mojo Newswire

. . .

The company's product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, is also believed to be gone.

The company's Moscow-based management has told employees it blames the "global economic downturn" — the kind of pat excuse every boss is giving for layoffs, even when mismanagement or a bad business plan is really to blame. The brutal, abrupt cuts suggest something different: That Sup founder Andrew Paulson (above), who paid an estimated $30 million for LiveJournal a little over a year ago, has realized his expensive mistake in buying at the top of the bubble. Someone familiar with the company tells us Paulson lost the CEO job last summer to Annelies van den Belt, a former News Corp. executive, and was given the meaningless title of chairman; he's essentially out of the company now.

The attack on 33 celebrity accounts caused Fox News to apparently admit that news commentator Bill O'Reilly was gay and prompted a confession from pop celeb Spears that her vagina was four feet wide "with razor sharp teeth."

“Today’s Swinger is Tomorrow’s Square”, illustrated by John Severin, appeared in the 1974 annual Super Cracked (It was most likely a reprint from a 1970 issue). In it, the writer predicts that young people will embrace the “skinhead” look, home computers (”Electronic Home Teacher”) and even the ipod: as “electronic brain stimulators” and a “musical computers” that young people are hooked on.

The title says everything that needs to be said about the final episode of Generation Kill, Wire creator David Simon and company's brilliant adaptation of Rolling Store reporter Evan Wright's book about his experience as an embed with a Marine recon battalion in the Iraq War. In a stunning three-week campaign through the country, the Marines have forged their way through Iraq, overcoming poor armor, equipment failure, and inept, potentially disastrous decision-making at the top in order to get to Baghdad. Once they arrive, the war has created such chaos and destruction that the best they can do are little things, like defusing an unexploded bomb lodged in a garden where children play. It fits beautifully into an ongoing theme both here and on The Wire: That decent, well-intentioned people can make a small difference, but they're doomed to be let down by their leaders.

Music and Lyrics by Joss Whedon

Performed by the Writers

WHEN YOU START NEGOTIATIONS

WITH INTEGRITY AND PATIENCE

AND THEY JUST CRY “BATTLE STATIONS!”

WHAT’S TO LIKE?

WHEN YOU ASK A SMALL AMOUNT AND

THEN ENCOUNTER COUNTER’S COUNTER

AND THE DEAL IS TANTAMOUNT TO

“TAKE A HIKE”

YOU CAN’T SIT AROUND WITH YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND

YOU PULL IT OUT, YOU STAND UP AND

YOU STRIKE

"Obviously the crew did not realise that the phone was still connected and, of course, the 999 call was all recorded on tape," said the source.

The unnamed ambulance staff were arrested after the tape was handed to the Sussex Police Major Crime Team.

However, Coleman's campaign, which contends the recount should have included about 650 absentee ballots it says were improperly rejected in the initial count, has indicated it will challenge the certification.

Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan said his team believes the recount process was broken and that "the numbers being reported will not be accurate or valid."

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities.

Printing is still just as easy and cheap as it ever was, but given the option, we now prefer to save - or upload - instead. That tells us something about our appetite for convenience, but even more about what we want from photographs in the first place. The object itself, no matter how crisp and permanent, how lush or mysterious, turns out to matter less than our ability to capture, store, and share an image. Without the print, photography's magical power - to freeze a moment in time - is still ours. In fact, although we continue to think of the photograph as a physical thing, we are finding out that it better serves our needs without being printed.

But as with each of our advances, something else is being lost. It is easy to think of the print and the digital image as the same thing, but they're actually very different. Even as cameras tout their ever-increasing megapixels, nearly everything we view is projected out at 72 dots per inch, the standard resolution of a monitor. The resulting pictures are back-lit, vivid, and very easy to scan, so we hardly notice how hard it is to look into them.

A quick review for newcomers to the story. Payack's million-word claim first popped up on our radar in early 2006. In February of that year, Payack told The Times of London that "the one millionth word is likely to be formed this summer." Then in August 2006 he said it would happen that coming November. In early 2007 I observed that the Million Word March seemed to have gotten stalled, and speculated that it might have had something to do with the serious debunkage the claims had received from Jesse Sheidlower on Slate and our own Geoff Nunberg on NPR's "Fresh Air." As it turns out, the more likely reason for Payack's slowdown had to do with rolling out his book to cash in on the lexico-quackery.

It's April 29, 2009 -- plus or minus a few days. That is when the English language is expected to acquire its millionth word. This prediction comes from Global Language Monitor, an organization in Austin, Texas, which uses proprietary software to track and analyze trends in language. "Global English" is its particular focus.

A million words doesn't really seem excessive, given 1.35 billion speakers of English on the planet. That works out to only one word for every 1,350 speakers.

But the decision about just what is "a word" is not always absolutely clear cut. And just how do you count? Is dogs a separate word from dog? The Economist exudes skepticism but can't resist at least a brief celebration of the richness of English vocabulary, from the Scottish Highlands to Australia to India.

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr believes that Israel's use of American weapons against civilians "is becoming very problematic." She notes, for example, that the 2000 pound bomb which killed a Hamas leader and members of his family on Thursday "is part of the billions of dollars that Israel has spent buying weapons from the United States."

Israel's use of American-made weapons in attacking Gaza has been a matter of offical concern for years. In 2002, the State Department announced it was monitoring possible violations of the Arms Export Control Act after the Israeli military used an American-made jet to drop a laser-guided bomb that killed a Hamas leader and 14 civilians in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood.

“The messages say that the Palestinian resistance missiles will reach you wherever you are and your government won’t be able to protect you,” said Abu Mujaheid, spokesman for the Palestinian Resistance Committees.

Hamas says it can send up to 70,000 text messages but so far there have been reports of just dozens. “[Israel is] sending text messages and interrupting Palestinian radio and trying to scare Palestinians with their messages so we are running a counter campaign by sending text messages to Israelis,” Mujaheid said.

At 26, Smith is three years younger than Peter Davison when he signed up to play the fifth Doctor in 1981.

Smith will first appear on TV screens as the 11th Doctor in 2010.

During Pike's ongoing recovery, he and his girlfriend missed their eagerly awaited night out to see British comic Eddie Izzard. Pike's father wrote Izzard, asking if the comic could send along a note to ease Pike's disappointment and depression.

Izzard refused. Instead, the star of The Riches and Valkyrie showed up at the hospital and performed his entire 90 minute stand-up set at Pike's bedside.

JPG Magazine editor-in-chief Laura Brunow Miner, in a post on the magazine's blog on Thursday, said that jpgmag.com would close next week and publication of the print version of the magazine would be halted....

Nearly 200,000 photographers have contributed material to JPG since it was taken over more than two years ago by 8020 Publishing, now known as 8020 Media.

In September, 2004, Heather and I went for a walk in Buena Vista Park and started dreaming up a community project. The idea was to create a printed venue for all the awesome photographers we saw online. That afternoon I checked: jpgmag.com was available. A couple months later, we launched the site. ...

Discussing it later, Paul assured me. “It’s no big deal, it just means I’ll have some extra stuff to do, but otherwise we’ll be equal partners.” I believed him.... After 11 years of working at other people’s startups, I was finally the cofounder of my own. It was a dream come true....

Unfortunately, issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing....

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one.

People who still rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air signals — whether it is through rabbit-ear aerials on TVs or antennas on the roof — will see their screens go dark when the changeover happens. To avoid that, those people have to switch to cable or satellite TV, buy a television set with a digital tuner or buy a converter box that can translate digital signals from the airwaves into analog.

To subsidize the converter boxes, most of which cost between $40 and $80 and can be purchased without coupons, the government has been letting consumers request up to two $40 coupons per home. But any day now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the arm of the Commerce Department in charge of administering the coupon program, expects to hit a $1.34 billion funding ceiling set by Congress.