Random

It wasn't us, it was him.

Yes, that man with the weird ideas we hired from Apple. He made us do all those things that drove our customers away in droves.

So now that he's gone, please come back. We beg you. We'll be the old JC Penney. The one you all loved.

Although maybe you didn't all love it enough to keep shopping there, which is why we hired the man with weird ideas from Apple.

But we were wrong. You were right. Well, many of you. We think.

This seems largely the subtext of a new ad released by JC Penney.… Read more

Who among us hasn't -- just once in our lives -- put a couple of things in a test tube, a bottle, or our mouths and wondered what might happen?

Occasionally, this might have difficult consequences. But rarely does someone try to arrest us for it.

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot wasn't so lucky.

This student at Bartow High School in Florida allegedly thought she'd put a couple of household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle, just to see the reaction.

The reaction was that she was expelled and marched off in handcuffs, accused of felony possession/discharge of a dangerous weapon.… Read more

It's hard to know whether those who can't spell are stressed, oppressed by excess multitasking, or merely uneducated.

The people behind the highly nutritious Snickers bar decided to prove that it might be none of the above.

It is, they posited, merely hunger that drives you to ignorance.

So, as AdAge reports, Snickers got together with Google to see whether they could encourage better spelling of Google search terms, as misspelling was causing Google's servers to seize up and spew smoke and curses.

I made up that last part.

As part of the campaign, the Snickers-sponsored machines … Read more

Occasionally we sprinkle advice around here. It's intended to be both gracious and helpful.

Today's homily is for those who are paid by cell phone manufacturers to use their phones.

The advice is this: Please, please remember to use their phones.

I mention this only because of the latest telephonic faux pas committed by the very fetching Spanish tennis player David Ferrer.

It's the Madrid Open this week, so he thought he'd inform his almost 370,000 Twitter followers that he was so very, very happy with his new Samsung Galaxy S4.

Perhaps his competitive adrenaline … Read more

When real, normal people get a hold of Google Glass, they might be fascinated.

Equally, they might be underwhelmed. Their sense of underwhelment might increase with every mocking comment they get from other real, normal people.

In any case, Google Glass won't be thrust into the real, normal world for a year. Or even more.

Meanwhile, we have to struggle with the knowledge that tech personality Robert Scoble wears his in the public toilets. During the weekend, he even posted an image of his hirsute, unsuited torso, complete with head and Google Glass on nose, in the shower.

Though … Read more

I have always believed that the old and the new can coexist with extreme joy.

Microsoft appears to believe this too.

In a promotion that melds the dying world of magazines with the living world of Wi-Fi, select copies of Forbes are enjoying a Wi-Fi router, which oozes 15 days of free Wi-Fi through T-Mobile.

This fetching gift was first noticed by someone on the Slickdeals forum -- handle BigMacG4 -- who wondered whether anyone else had been fortunate enough to be gifted this way.… Read more

If you've never been to a wedding that ended in a punch-up, you really haven't lived.

There's always something so bracing in seeing people devolve to their true, animal state, drunk and flailing their fists.

Someone at Microsoft clearly has recent experience with such a thing, as the company Monday released a new ad that describes the constant spat between fanpersons of Apple and Samsung as a battle between two tribes of the insane.

We are at a wedding. Everything seems fine, until someone with a very large Galaxy phone gets in the way of someone with … Read more

"You scratch my back and I won't lacerate yours."

Saturday night, politicians and the media gathered for the White House Correspondents' Dinner and made a lot of jokes about the truth, in order to make themselves feel temporarily better about their tortured selves.

Netflix, meanwhile, smiled in a manner not unlike Kevin Spacey at his most snake-like.

For in the midst of all the fun, somehow a fine ad for the company's "House Of Cards" played to a very receptive world.

It was called "House Of Nerds." This dinner is, after all, … Read more

Planning a burglary always seems to take so much time in the movies.

Joints must be cased. Hoods must be bought. Cars must be tuned to perfection and driven by people who aren't terribly clever.

One man, though, allegedly used technology to bypass some of these irritants.

As the Kansas City Star reports, Steven Alva Glaze stands accused of 14 counts of criminal damage, attempted burglary and real, actual burglary.

The owner of one of the homes believes that Glaze found a simple way of discovering if she and her son were home. He allegedly placed a GPS device … Read more