The vegan advocacy group is the nonprofit The Cancer Project. On its website, it backs up its hot dogs=cancer argument this way: “In 2007, the American Institute for Cancer Research published a landmark report showing that just one 50-gram serving of processed meat (about the amount in one hot dog) consumed daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer, on average, by 21 percent.” Well, OK. I believe it. No one ever told me that a hot dog a day kept the doctor away. But this lawsuit against Nathan’s Famous and the owners of Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National goes way too far — and kudos to the Times for treating this story with the “Oh, please” tone it deserves.

These hot dog lovers have nailed it. Sure, a mishmash of animal byproduct packed into a synthetic tubular skin may not be the best thing for us, but it’s hardly the worst, and if the courts start demanding warning labels on hot dogs (in New Jersey? Really? Should of tried Oregon first.), then we ought to slap ‘em on just about every item in aisles 3-11 of the supermarket. This is America — most things we put into our bodies are bad for us.

As if the lawsuit wasn’t bad enough, The Cancer Project’s also posted an absurd scare ad online, in which cute kids, in between delicious shots of hot dogs, pizza and some sort of bologna, lament their cancer symptoms. Check it out. Then eat a chili dog in protest.

(Photo: permanently scatterbrained/Flickr)

This month we’ve got a number even more inconceivable: $23,148,855,308,184,500. That, according to MSNBC, is how much Visa erroneously charged several of its credit card customers.

That’s about as under as statements get. For $23,148,855,308,184,500 — or more than $23 quadrillion — Seale could have bought a lot more than Wolfgang Puck. The celebrity chef makes $16 million a year, according to Forbes. Puck would have to work for nearly 1.5 billion years for Seale to see a return on his Puck purchase. So what else can you get for $23 quadrillion?

• Visa, 463,000 times over. The credit card company has a market cap, or total stock market value, of about $50 billion.
• More than 17,000 iPhone 3GSs for every single person on earth.
• 857 billion fully-loaded Toyota Priuses (Prii?). That’s more than 2,700 Toyotas for every person in America, or about 125 of the hybrids for every single person on earth.
• The new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium — the most expensive sports venue ever built in the USA — 15.4 million times over. That’s nearly two Yankee Stadiums for every single person in New York City.
• Every team in the NBA, more than 2 million times over. So buck up Kansas City residents. You may not have an NBA franchise of your own, but for $23 quadrillion, each of the 2 million residents of the Kansas City area could buy every team in the NBA…if there were 2 million NBAs.
• America’s $11.6 trillion national debt, nearly 2,000 times over.

Visa attributed the astronomical overcharge to “a temporary programming error” and a “technical glitch” that affected “fewer than 13,000″ transactions. MSNBC reported that a “Visa representative said affected customers will have any overdraft fees removed.” Phew.

(Photo: Halcyon/Flickr)

I hate to say it, but if it’s smart, Macy’s — or any other giant consumer debt-fueling machine that makes America so, er, great — shouldn’t ever spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on newspaper advertisements again. Ever. There are now far better and cheaper ways to reach and sway potential customers. Newspaper advertising revenue is never coming back. Much as I love newspapers, there’s only one way for the newspaper advertising spend of intelligent businesses to go: down.

Which brings us to General Motors, the smartest, best-run company in America. According to the same stats, in 2008, GM more than doubled its spending on U.S. newspaper advertisements, from $145.9 million in 2007 to $320.9 million in 2008. What to do if you’re a bloated, outmoded manufacturer of lousy, unpopular, expensive cars, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, begging the government for massive bailouts and sucking the exhaust of savvy foreign competitors? Double your advertising in a dying medium, of course!

General Motors was the country’s third largest newspaper advertiser in 2008, second largest magazine advertiser, fifth largest national radio advertiser and third largest network TV advertiser. Add up GM’s 2008 advertising spending in just those four outlets and you get $1.53 billion — more than three times GM’s market cap. And that doesn’t even take into account the bankrupt car maker’s many other forms of ad spending. This is madness.

This profligacy isn’t just ill-advised. It’s offensive. GM begged and bagged more than $20 billion in federal aid in the last several months before declaring bankruptcy in June. That’s our money buying those ads. I’m happy to help newspapers just about anyway we can — but not through taxpayer-subsidized ad buys funneled through a dying automaker. Then-CEO Rick Wagoner told a Congressional committee last November that if taxpayers didn’t pony up billions for GM, “the societal costs would be catastrophic.” Maybe there’s a dimension to that quote we didn’t immediately pick up on. Without the insane, over-the-top newspaper advertising spending from companies like GM and Macy’s, big dailies that got used to those gushing revenues will likely continue going out of business. And though that really would be catastrophic, it would also be crazy for companies to continue pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into ink-on-paper ads.

(Photo: imageafter)

The BBC story, which piggybacks on an apparently measured scientific study in the journal Insect Sociaux, is bursting with such B-movie hyperbole. “A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world.” The colony “could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.” The ant plague has spread to every continent but Antarctica, and the ants are known for “attacking native animals and crops.” And what’s worse, we’re the engineers of our own certain demise at the hands, er, antennas of our new ant masters: People, it turns out, “are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together…by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.”

Reminds me of the time that sage Simpsons anchorman Kent Brockman mistook a close-up of an ant flying by a space shuttle’s onboard camera for proof that an alien ant invasion was imminent. [Watch]

Back to the BBC: The idea of ants taking over the world — besides being ridiculous — seems to have almost nothing to do with the cited scientific study, in which the researchers described their subject as “this great non-aggressive ant population.” But when you’re competing with Michael Jackson’s death and Mark Sanford’s affair, I guess it takes a screaming, scary headline like this to draw traffic. And it works. As of this writing, the ants story was the most shared on BBC News’ website.

(Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)

However, Anderson’s rather lame explanations — his “screwups” were due to his “inability to find a good citation format for web sources” and the footnotes were lost “at the 11th hour” — along with the critiques — that Anderson should have better attributed Wikipedia passages or put quotation marks around them — miss the most important issue here. Wikipedia is not a reliable source. No respectable author should use it as a primary information source, regardless of whether and how he or she attributes information to the people’s encyclopedia.

I’ve harped on this before — in this book review, and this one — but using Wikipedia as a source of factual information is irresponsible and lazy. Sure, Wikipedia is often right. There’s much to be said for the wisdom of crowds. I often use Wikipedia for quick and dirty background research. But I’d never use anything I learned on Wikipedia in a published story or review without double-checking the fact somewhere else. That’s because Wikipedia entries can be changed (and corrupted) by any single person with an internet connection. On Wikipedia, such people are often cloaked in anonymity. Attributing something to Wikipedia is akin to saying “According to an anonymous internet user who I blindly assume has his or her facts straight.” That’s dangerous.

Attribution is beside the point. Who cares whether Anderson neglected to put quotes around passages he lifted from Wikipedia? His major transgression was using Wikipedia as a source in the first place.

(Photo: saivann/stock.xchng)

Un-be-lievable. Somebody give that paper a Pulitzer.

(In related news, during the same week that it dominated coverage of Sanford’s fall, The State announced that most of its employees must take a week-long unpaid furlough by November and that it’s cutting six jobs. Nice.)

-”McMahon reveled in role of second banana” – Christian Science Monitor

-”McMahon was a one-of-a-kind second banana” – MSNBC

-”As second banana, best of the bunch” – Washington Post

-”‘Hi-yo!’ TV’s McMahon was definitely first-rate as a second banana” – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

-”Sidekick Ed McMahon, 86, was the top second banana” – Cleveland Plain Dealer

-”Ed McMahon, TV’s First Second Banana, Dies” – TIME

-”Here’s Ed: McMahon a second banana for the TV ages” – Associated Press

A few hours after Ed’s death was announced yesterday, I conducted a 24-hour search on the phrase “second banana” on Google News. More than 600 hits. A few hours later, that number was more than 900. At noon today, 1,595 and counting. This may be overdoing it.

And where the heck did the phrase second banana even come from anyway? I asked the Online Etymology Dictionary. Use of banana as slang for “nuts” — as in kooky — was first recorded in 1935. By the 1950s, banana was show biz slang for “comedian, especially in a burlesque show.” Second banana became shorthand for a comic’s sidekick or straight man.

But what about first bananas? My search of Google News and of all major world newspapers on Nexis turned up exactly zero stories in which the name Johnny Carson and the phrase “first banana” appeared. The near-pejorative “third banana” fared slightly better. It’s been used a couple hundred times, and seems to favor (or insult) actors — Jason Bateman and  Casey Affleck — and tennis players, like Mardy Fish and, inexplicably, Rafael Nadal.

Second banana is an appropriate enough label for Ed McMahon — though it’s also an antiquated phrase whose origin and rationale has been all but forgotten. Plus, its ubiquitous application over the last two days has quickly pushed describing Ed McMahon as a second banana from clever and apt to lazy and rote. There must be a better way to eulogize someone than us all using fruity, forgotten Vaudevillian phrases.

(Photo: jazza/stock.xchng)

Crazy, says the California fast food chain El Pollo Loco, which has launched an ad campaign ridiculing its southern fried competitor for, gulp, using “beef powder and rendered beef fat” in its new grilled chicken marinade. El Pollo Loco has even set up a website — beefychicken.com — and posted more attack ads here.

The Los Angeles Times investigated, finding that KFC does indeed boast a “new secret blend of herbs and spices.” But to learn what the heck’s in the secret sauce, “consumers have to turn to Page 14 of a 37-page ingredient document posted by KFC on its website.”

The Times continues:

Misguided? This isn’t India, where cow-revering Hindus who consider eating beef a major no-no skewered McDonald’s several years ago over allegations that the obesity-encouraging Big Mac pusher used beef fat to make its french fries.

You’ve gotta know your audience. Americans love beef. Heck, rendered beef fat may be the best thing to happen to chicken since General Tso.

(Photo: dragonaria/stock.xchng)

In related news, the Drug Enforcement Administration has hired Sammy Sosa and Manny Ramirez to lead its anti-drug outreach efforts in Latin America, the Federal Election Commission has signed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a consultant to ensure that U.S. elections are free and fair, and Republicans have tapped Nevada Senator John Ensign to sit on the Senate Ethics Committee.

(Illustration: Library of Congress)

Moore allegedly prepared bogus documents claiming that the feds owed him various amounts, including $5,950,000,000,000, $2,975,000,000,000 and $6,000,000,000,000.

Of course, Moore wasn’t entitled to a refund quite that large.

To put this in perspective, Moore’s requested $15 trillion refund is equivalent to:

• $48,666 from every man, woman and child in the United States
• $2,199 from every human being on earth
• 373 times the net worth of Bill Gates, the world’s richest person
• 37.3 million times President Barack Obama’s annual $400,00 salary — or enough to pay him through the year 37314509
• 54,273 times the value of Yankees Third Baseman Alex Rodriguez’s 10-year, $275 million contract
• 746,250 times the reported $20 million Will Smith typically pockets for doing a movie. That’s enough to pay the Fresh Prince to do one movie a day for the next 2,045 years.
• 7,619 times Zimbabwe’s $1.96 billion gross domestic product
• 48 times Switzerland’s $310 billion gross domestic product
• $105 billion more than the entire European Union’s $14.8 trillion gross domestic product
• Enough money to buy 18.8 trillion orders of Taco Bell triple layer nachos with enough left over for 73 billion cheesy double beef burritos and several million caramel apple empanadas for dessert.

It’s also more than 1,200 times the IRS budget for 2010.

(Photo: compose/stock.xchng)