We don't miss him, by the way. If you go out there and ask any one of my players or staff members, we don't miss him. We don't miss his attitude. We don't miss the whining. We don't miss it. Good riddance. See you later. ”
— White Sox GM Kenny Williams, on Frank Thomas
From the NY Times:
A Milestone for iTunes; a Windfall for a Downloader
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
It may well have been the best 99 cents Alex Ostrovsky ever spent.
Early yesterday, he paid that amount to download "Speed of Sound," a song on the Coldplay album "X&Y," from the iTunes Music Store, the Internet music shop that Apple Computer started less than three years ago.
He did not know it, but it was the billionth song the site had sold, and Apple was not about to let that go unnoticed.
So at 12:45 a.m., Mr. Ostrovsky's phone rang. It was an Apple employee, telling him that in addition to the song, Apple was giving him a 20-inch iMac, 10 iPods and a $10,000 gift card for the iTunes store. It is even establishing a scholarship at the Juilliard School in his name.
Mr. Ostrovsky, 16, was still trying to absorb it all yesterday. His phone had been ringing all day, alternating between reporters wanting to know his reaction and friends wanting to congratulate him.
At one point Mr. Ostrovsky, who lives in West Bloomfield, Mich., went to an Apple store to look at iMacs. "Everyone there knew who I was, too," he said. "It's just surreal."
He has pretty concrete ideas about how he will use the prizes, though. The iMac stays with him — "I'd been asking my parents for a new computer for a while, so this was a dream come true," he said. He will keep an iPod, and family and friends will get the rest. But the $10,000 gift card has him a bit flummoxed.
"My sister has already called from New York to talk about divvying it up," he said, "and I'll probably buy some music for friends."
But he will also buy more for himself. Until now, Mr. Ostrovsky has not been a frequent user of the iTunes store. "I've downloaded maybe 50 songs, but I was always more likely to borrow CD's from my friends," he said. "I'm certainly going to download more songs now."
That would certainly be music to Apple's ears.
From today's New York Times:
So what do women do now? The results of two major studies over the past two weeks have questioned the value of two widely recommended measures: calcium pills and vitamin D to prevent broken bones, and low-fat diets to ward off heart disease and breast and colon cancer.
How can we recommend low fat diets and vitamin supplements to our patients without being dishonest with them? I expect this question is be opening debated come Monday in our offices and examination rooms. Evidence based medicine is what we look towards to counsel our patients but EBM can also confuse us as well.
The phone rings and the lady of the house answers, "Hello."
"Mrs. Ward, please."
"Speaking."
"Mrs. Ward, this is Doctor Jones at the Medical testing Laboratory. When your doctor sent your husband's biopsy to the lab yesterday, a biopsy from another Mr. Ward arrived as well, and we are now uncertain which one is your husband's. Frankly the results are either bad or terrible"
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Ward asks nervously.
"Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer's and the other one tested positive for AIDS. We can't tell which is your husband's."
"That's dreadful! Can't you do the test again?" questioned Mrs. Ward.
"Normally we can, but Medicare will only pay for these expensive tests one time."
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?"
"The people at Medicare recommend that you drop your husband off somewhere in the middle of town. If he finds his way home, don't sleep with him."
From Today's WSJ....
WASHINGTON -- A federal advisory committee voted Thursday to recommend that stimulants prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder be required to bear the most serious type of warning on their labels.
The 8-7 vote, with one abstention, by the Food and Drug Administration committee was to recommend the agency add so-called black box warnings to Ritalin and other ADHD drugs relating to heart risks. Doctors prescribe the increasingly popular drugs to about two million children and one million adults a month.
