The Morning News Consumes my Morning

A big tip of the hat to The Morning News, which kicked off the following chain of events...

First, they noted this tribute to Dave Barry, who is apparently in semi-retirement. Dave isn't carried by my local paper, so I haven't been keeping up with him, but I'm still sorry to see him inching towards bona fide retirement. A fantastic humorist; just read the tribute. Anyway, I went looking to see how "semi" this "retirement" is, and found that it hasn't stopped him from doing his annual gift guide, which includes winners like this:

Sporty Electronic Bug-Zapping Racket

Here's the ideal gift for the person on your holiday gift list who enjoys playing sports AND killing flying insects. This is a tennis-racket-shaped device that, thanks to the scientific miracle of batteries, has electricity in it, so that when you swat a flying insect, the insect is instantly electrocuted!

OK, maybe not instantly. We tested this device extensively last summer while on vacation, and we found that, if you managed to make contact with a flying insect, the zapper tended to stun it, rather than kill it, so it wound up sort of flopping around on the floor.

The bad news was, this meant that you had to then kneel down and finish the insect off with more zapping. The good news was, we were with a 7-year-old boy who really enjoyed doing this.

Be advised that this device is capable of delivering a mildly painful shock to a human. Be further advised that this feature is especially popular with 7-year-old boys.

Then, noting that the Miami Herald is registration-only gives me the opportunity to plug BugMeNot, which in turn gives me the opportunity to plug the BugMeNot Firefox extension (just right-click on the annoying login at the site of your choice, pick "BugMeNot", and have it automatically populated with anonymous working credentials).

Oh, and I also owe TMN for pointing out there's somewhere in the neighborhood of a gazillion stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (give or take a bazillion).