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Aww…puppies.

So cute…but why am I showing pictures of these puppies?

Well, it’s because these Colombians allegedly used these puppies…

…to smuggle millions of dollars of liquid heroin on commercial flights into New York City for distribution on the East Coast.

And, yes, I know the puppies were technically couriers and not pushers…it’s called alliteration…and artistic license.

(AP Photos)

After some hesitation, my great friend Jason Pester has joined the blogosphere!

Congratulations!

The Philly Daily News’ Attytood blog on Philly.com came up with this one:

‘Addicted to Oil’: An excerpt from President Bush’s State of the Union address

This is still a work in progress, but I sat down at my keyboard last night for the first time in 2006 and came up with this song.

I wanted to rock out a little bit since so much of my stuff has been, well, depressing…so I couldn’t resist throwing in some 70s-style synth and faux funk rhythm guitar (which I need to replace with the real thing at some point) into the mix.

Enjoy…

I Want You to Know (demo) – 3:58 / 3 MB

When I was researching Apple Computers’ newly announced iTunes U program to see how Rider could benefit from it, I checked out how Stanford is using iTunes.

On Stanford’s iTunes U Music Store site, there are a number of lectures, guest speakers and news stories in both audio and video formats. One area of particular interest was the music section since Westminster Choir College is an important part of Rider University.

When I checked out Stanford’s music selections, there was a compilation of songs by the university’s students, alumni, faculty and staff. I decided to listen to a song by Natalise called “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” and — although a bit underproduced — it turned out to be a really good dance track.

I decided to investigate further…meaning I Googled her name. Well, of course, it turns out she has incredible looks to go along with her musical talent. But then I read this on her bio page:

Despite being a straight-A student at one of the nation’s most prestigious schools, Natalise could not ignore her calling. She made a pact with her parents that if she could graduate from Stanford in only three years, they would let her pursue her real dream of having a musical career. Naturally, Natalise — who majored in communication, while working on her songwriting and singing occasionally at community-based events — won the bet.

Stanford…in THREE years?! So she is gorgeous, talented and smart! That’s a killer combination.

I’m not really into dance or pop music, but I admire someone who is talented and works hard at her craft. I mean, she could have taken the easy route by going on “American Idol” or something, but she’s doing it her own way so I don’t mind giving her a little more exposure.

So check out her site and her stuff on iTunes.

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: