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The Associated Press published this story about an AskMen.com poll that came to this shocking conclusion:

Men want actress Jessica Alba as a girlfriend.

Really? I never would have thought men would want a totally hot celeb-babe for a girlfriend. And even more amazing is that fellow actresses Sienna Miller and Angelina Jolie round out the top three.

Wow! Fascinating stuff.

Of course, the funny thing is that, according to the AP story, “readers of the online magazine were asked to vote according to the woman they would most want a relationship with, would consider marrying or thought best-suited to be the mother of their children.”

Now, Miller and Jolie seem to have the motherhood thing down so I can see where they would at least meet some of that criteria.

But I’m trying to figure out what Alba has done except look super hot to make men desire her as a girlfriend. Of course, there is this reason, which is always a good one. The other could be that men think she really is the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman (as in the photo above)…and they would like a girlfriend who would just disappear sometimes.

At 11:38 a.m. EST on January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from launch pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, with a crew of seven aboard, including Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, was selected as the winner of a nationwide contest conducted by NASA to be the first teacher in space. She had planned to give lessons from space to students around the world.

McAuliffe never got the chance.

Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, Challenger disintegrated in a ball of fire as it streaked into space miles above the Florida coast. A design flaw in the O-rings of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters (SRBs) in conjunction with freezing temperatures produced a leak in the seal on the right SRB. A lateral flame from the broken seal compromised the external fuel tank and caused a catastrophic structural failure of the vehicle.

I was always fascinated by the space program. One of my favorite shows as a kid was PBS’ “Cosmos” with Dr. Carl Sagan. I was a freshman in high school in January 1986. Because of McAuliffe’s presence on the mission, many schools gathered the students in auditoriums to watch the launch as a group that morning. My high school did no such thing. I was sitting in my Italian I classroom as one of the students filing in said rather nonchalantly that the space shuttle exploded. It stunned me. I was assuming it was just some accident on the launch pad, but my classmate described pretty much what actually happened.

As someone who has been a space/science geek and a news junkie since a very young age, I was itching to get out of school and to watch the news coverage and see it for myself. Fortunately, a snow storm led to an early dismissal that day.

While I was on the school bus, the Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” came on the radio. There’s a line in that song that says, “It was winter 1963…it felt like the world would freeze…with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles.” The JFK reference stuck with me. Kennedy was a major supporter of the U.S. space program and the complex from which the Space Shuttle launches bears his name.

Tragically and, sadly, fittingly, the Space Shuttle Challenger had become my generation’s equivalent to JFK’s assassination in ’63.

NASA Photo — back row, left to right: Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis and Judith Resnik; front row, left to right: Michael J. Smith, Francis “Dick” Scobee and Ronald McNair.

I must say that I don’t watch Oprah Winfrey or care very much about what she has to say, but I admire her for changing course on her opinions about James Frey’s faux memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” which was revealed by TheSmokingGun.com to be more fiction than fact (that link also includes the definition of FTBSITTTD for those who don’t know it).

After coming to Frey’s defense in a phone call to “Larry King Live” two weeks ago, Winfrey yesterday brought Frey back on her show, where “Pieces” was named to Oprah’s book club last fall. This time, however, Winfrey ripped into Frey for deceiving her, her viewers and the general public. She also grilled Frey’s publishers and apologized for making that phone call to Larry King.

So now I am eagerly awaiting Frey’s true memoir titled “A Million More Little Pieces: My Shattered Career as an Author.”

I love catching mistakes by the Associated Press. Granted, it’s not difficult since there seems to be at least one every hour, but obviously I don’t spend that much time looking at every headline and every story.

But the following were very easy to spot.

I am a big fan of the AP NewsFlash on NJ.com and I check the site quite frequently during the day for breaking news and interesting stories. This set of technology headlines caught my eye yesterday:

As you can see, the story sent at 5:45 a.m. has the headline U.S. scientist intangled in stem cell scam. A few hours later, the AP remembered how to spell and sent the story again at 9:20 a.m. with the corrected headline, U.S. scientist entangled in stem cell scam.

The other day, a big story in the sports world was that Jackie Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, was against a movement to retire baseball great Roberto Clemente’s No. 21 throughout professional baseball, as they did for her father

All day I had seen stories about Jackie Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, saying she did not agree with a movement to retire Roberto Clemente’s No. 21 throughout Major League Baseball, as they did for her trailblazing father in 1997.

So it was a bit odd when I saw this headline on Newsflash:
Now, wait a minute. Did she change her mind? Of course, she didn’t. The AP headline writer just screwed it up because he or she failed to see the word “not” in the lead, as you can see in the actual story:

Stewie Griffin, the one-year old obsessed with total world domination from “The Family Guy,” will serve as virtual host of an Internet talk show starting later this year, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

I think it’s time for a sexy party…

The Walt Disney Company announced today it plans to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion in a sale the two companies hope to complete this summer.

Pixar is the computer animation studio responsible for a string of Disney hits, including “Toy Story,” “The Incredibles,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.” Pixar’s chairman and chief executive officer is Steve Jobs, more widely known as the CEO and co-founder of Apple Computers.

The deal will make Jobs the largest single Disney shareholder and will put him on Disney’s board of directors.

Although he won’t supplant Robert Iger as Disney president and CEO or George Mitchell as the company’s chairman right away, this sale makes Jobs an even more powerful force in Hollywood and effectively hands him the keys to the Magic Kingdom.

Press release

CNET News.com Special Coverage

I love the Tour de France…and I love London…so I am happy with this news.

From a Reuters story via Yahoo! News:

London will host the first stage of the 2007 Tour de France, the city’s mayor Ken Livingstone announced on Tuesday.

“I am proud to announce that London has successfully bid to host the Grand Depart of the Tour de France in July 2007,” Livingstone said in a statement.

The route will be announced at a later date and is expected to include landmarks like Queen Elizabeth’s residence Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament.

Livingstone said the prologue, or warm-up, stage would be held on July 7 and stage one would be held a day later.

Read the very short press release.

Apparently, I’m completely fine…and since around the time I first saw the cardiologist on Dec. 23, I haven’t really had any of the chest pains I first experienced Nov. 18 (I remember the date because it first happened while I was at a Rider basketball game).

I had a follow-up appointment with the cardiologist Friday and — after two hours in the office’s waiting room — he told me all my tests and exams came back normal. He wants me to go back to my regular doctor — the one who quickly had me concerned about heart disease — so he can find a cause for the pain, but since I’m not experiencing it anymore I’m not sure how I’m supposed to approach it. I mean, do I walk in and say, “Well, doc, I’m fine…cure me?”

But my cardiologist wants me to follow through with it so I guess I have to make the appointment. Yeah.

Oh, just before leaving for another patient, the cardiologist asked me a question I didn’t want to hear: “Do you drink a lot of coffee?”

Crap.

Of course, the answer to that is “yes.” I have been trying to keep it to just two cups a day since this all started, but if I have to completely give up coffee, I might as well just let my heart rot away.

And decaf just won’t help either…please, what the hell is the point of decaf?!

I came across this fascinating story in The Washington Post about a gift presented by Major League Baseball to each of the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran for 444 days from 1979-81.

The gift was a lifetime pass to any major league or affiliated minor league baseball game. Some of the recipients stored the passes away, but others used them to help rebuild their shattered lives…

Safe at Home

(Photo: Ricky Carioti – The Washington Post)

I love Hollywood…only in a town built upon the superficial and trivial can a scandal arise over two actresses wearing the same couture dress three years apart.

It seems Reese Witherspoon (right) wore the same Chanel dress to this year’s Golden Globes ceremony that Kirsten Dunst (below) wore to Golden Globes after-parties in 2003, resulting in “damage control” from both the Witherspoon and Chanel camps.

Osama bin Laden just threated the USA again…New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area are still trying to rebuild and recover from Hurricane Katrina…and, according to The Onion, the U.S. government is going out of business.

But none of that matters in Hollywood…where two women wearing the same dress three years apart equals a disaster of Southeast Asian tsunami proportions.

I haven’t been this “passionately apathetic” about something since the world-shattering Kate Moss scandal.