LOL dogs: Capshun this

I can haz mashed potatoes frum da kfc?

For those of you who haven't seen the Lol Cats and Lol Dogs, you're missing out. Star photographer Brittany Randolph set up this one with Gracie and some potatoes.

Try your hand at captioning the photo a la Lol Dogs in the comments section.

Plz to have capshun? Thx.

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Pumpkin head Gracie really is happy to wear her costume. She knows it makes her cuter and, thus more petable.

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Gracie chills out in her pumpkin hat after pet therapy at Cleveland Pines nursing home on Tuesday.

Lulu and Gracie have learned to change channels

Lulu wasn't in the mood to watch Conan. She evidently prefers Craig Ferguson.

Free stuff for readers!

I received an e-mail that cracked me up last week from a marketing company. They were representing a company called Toilet Tattoos that makes toilet seat decals.

Of all the things to send to journalists for possible publication.

I got a good laugh out of it, then cruised through the company's Web site, http://www.toilet-tattoos.com/, which has all of the decals for sale - holidays, potty training stickers, cute designs. In all fairness, the designs were pretty cute, and if I were one to decorate for holidays, I'd consider it. They definitely are a conversation starter...

So for my blog readers' benefit, I also requested samples to give away.

So here's your chance.

Want to win a cute toilet seat decal?

The first three people to comment on this blog post will win one each. Just make sure to include a way for me to contact you and your name. Employees and independent contractors of The Star or Freedom Communications and their immediate families aren't eligible to win. Sorry!

Raining something larger than cats and dogs

This has been a year of seemingly near-death experiences for me.

Over the summer, I shared my almost deadly experience with a jar of beans with readers, but that story pales in comparison to my adventure earlier this month.

We have a regular group of people who get together on Wednesday evenings for a time to relax and watch television, gossip about community goings-on and to share a meal. Every now and then, we'll take it on the road, so in early October, we decided to go to Maggiano's in Charlotte because I had a $10 off coupon.

It happened to be rainy and driving there made me very nervous. We pulled off the side of the road to make sure everything was OK after hearing a strange noise.

Actually, we did it twice. We were all a little spooked.

What are the odds, in the middle of a drought, for it to rain cats and dogs on a Wednesday night?
Well, it was evidently raining significantly larger animals, too, as you'll see.

We arrived at the restaurant, had a wonderful meal, then walked a few steps over to the Cheesecake Factory and ate dessert. We finished around 11 p.m. and began driving back in the rain.

At which point, I should introduce you to our trusty navigator, Kathryn. She has Google Maps on her BlackBerry.

Unfortunately, she reads them upside down, backwards and sideways.

Our other passengers include Justin and a giant bag of dog food on the other side of the back seat.

The navigator missed a turn.

Then we missed another.

And then she told us to take a right instead of a left, maybe even a left instead of a right. We stopped for gas, asked for directions and got going in the right direction. While we were turning around, Justin attempted to become a backseat driver, or so I thought. Cranky after getting lost and stressed out in the rain, I retorted, “I do have a license, you know.”

Immediate regret (and an apology).

We make it to Matthews.

It’s still dark and rainy, but we’re almost to I-485. We round a curve in a mixed residential-business area and bang — we hear a gunshot from close range, the back window busts and glass flies everywhere.

Scared, I begin calling 911.

“Um, ma’am, I think our car has been shot into,” I tell the operator.

Calm at first, I start shaking on the inside as I pull off at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away, far enough that the shooters won’t chase us, I think.

We stay in the car until four police cars with K-9 officers in tow come blaring into the parking lot. We all get out and the police begin investigating.

One walks over to the back “shot-out” window.

“Um, ma’am, was this fur here before?”

Fur???

Deer fur.

Embarrassment pelts the three of us and we start laughing hysterically.

It’s not funny, but after the scare we’ve had, it’s hilarious.

And it’s an experience the three of us won’t soon forget.


And the irony of all this is that I started working on a Web page for shelbystar.com that focuses on deer-car crashes only days before my incident.

As if BlackBerries aren't addictive enough

There are some days when I'm glad to be both a Verizon Wireless and a BlackBerry addict. Today, the Associated Press is reporting that RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry, will have a new version out soon - and that its touch-screen is better than that on the iPhone.

Here's what the AP story said:

NEW YORK (AP) _ Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, is taking on Apple Inc. with a touch-screen phone that puts a new twist on the technology.

RIM is known for its e-mail-oriented phones with large keypads. With the new model announced Wednesday, the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone.

But RIM has listened to users who find the iPhone's glass screen awkward to type on because its virtual buttons provide no tactile feedback. The Storm's whole screen is backed by springs, and when pressed, it gives under the finger.

The long-rumored Storm will be available from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and from Vodafone Group PLC overseas before the holidays, the companies said. No price has been disclosed yet.

In an unusual twist, the phone will work both on Verizon Wireless' network and on Vodafone's, even though they use incompatible technologies. Like a few other Verizon Wireless handsets before it, the Storm will be equipped with radios to handle both networks, making international roaming a possibility. The iPhone, carried by AT&T Inc. in the U.S., can already roam internationally.

The addition of a touch-screen phone to the BlackBerry lineup, the mainstay of e-mail-addicted executives and managers, is a testament to the effect of the iPhone. RIM's share of the U.S. smart-phone market has stayed above 50 percent, but the iPhone has clearly helped expand that market.

Here's how it works, according to AP:

As a Web browser, the Storm more closely emulates the desktop experience than the iPhone does. That's because the screen can distinguish between light touches and firm presses. A light touch can move around a cursor, while a firm press activates a link, much like moving a mouse cursor has a different effect from clicking a mouse button, said Mike Lazaridis, RIM's co-chief executive.

Coverage is harder in the digital age

Photographer Jeff Melton thinks I have a pair of cursed shoes. Every time I wear them to work, there's some sort of big fire, wreck or other event that spells out bad news for people in the county.

The first time I wore them, there was a murder. Since then, I've forgotten all the places those ill-fated shoes have taken me.

But lately, even without the shoes, bad things keep on happening in Cleveland County. The past two weeks have been prime examples of that. I've been to a fire that displaced a family near Boiling Springs, a fatal wreck at a dragstrip, and tonight I went to a bad wreck near Polkville.

For the record, I have a love-hate relationship with these types of events. I hate them because they make me nervous beyond words. I don't know where I'm allowed to stand and who I'm allowed to talk to, much less who I even need to talk to. Like many journalists, if these types of events happen at night, they keep me from sleeping.

On the flip side, I love them because it's always a challenge to get the information I need to make a good news story.

It's also hard to piece together information from so many people - some of whom might not be telling the exact truth. Some of them politely refuse to give information. Others aren't nearly as nice. It's hard to balance not bothering emergency workers as they help victims, clean up messes and investigate what happened.

But in the digital age, it's even harder to know what we should and shouldn't get on video.

Tonight was a prime example.

On the Web, I posted a video of the two cars and of people cleaning up the scene. While I was on the scene, I got footage from a distance of the helicopter that was getting ready to take a patient to the hospital and of the outside of an ambulance holding a patient.

For the record, most journalists try not to get footage of actual patients if they don't have to (which is what I did by just getting the outside of the ambulance).

At any rate, an emergency official asked me to turn off my camera for a while before the helicopter took off. I did so without a second thought. It was the right thing to do.

It was also the right thing for that person to ask me to do so, and I appreciate that person letting me know - because I don't know of a single journalist who a) would not have wanted footage of that, and b) who would have known that you're not supposed to get footage of a helicopter taking off.

With all that said, we all want to do the right thing, and emergency officials should have no qualms about telling journalists the rules, especially in the digital age. And in a lot of cases, we simply don't know what our boundaries are and need direction. Just do it nicely,as the worker did tonight, because we're just doing our jobs, too.

Sigh of relief from the battle-tested Flamingoes

Remember back to the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett is on her knees in the dirt hollering that she will never go hungry again.

Now transpose that to an ill-fated and pink-clad bunch of baseball players and insert the words, "I will never play fantasy baseball again!"

For those of you who follow my blog, you've heard me whine about the inevitable fate of the Flamingoes, my ill-fated fantasy baseball league team. I joined in this year and set a goal of coming in ninth place. There are only 10 teams, so I thought that wasn't too lofty a goal.

Unfortunately, the Flamingoes caught the bird flu around late May and suffered through the loss of three pitchers, two outfielders, an infielder and a utility player or two.

All within three weeks.

And that isn't something you can come back from, as my poor pink friends found out. No matter how hard I tried to doctor them, they kept dropping dead.

Soriano. Peavy (he later came back). Some dude who broke his wrist. Another who practically shredded his ankle. One guy missed games as a penalty for brawling. And the list goes on and on.

But even after all that, I received a glimmer of hope today.

Yes, I'm still the loser out of the bunch, but it turns out that my team had the highest batting average in the league. Small consolation, but it just might be the turnip that keeps my proverbial Scarlett in the league next year.

And I already have a goal: Just beat one person.

Not too lofty, right?

New tech-ey stuff

I recently updated the Firefox browser on my work computer, subsequently wiping out some of the extensions I regularly use and wreaking havoc on settings. For some reason, the download went awry.

So I installed Google Chrome, the new browser from (you guessed it) Google. I also downloaded Flock, which touted itself as being a "social networking" browser. But after trying them both out for a couple weeks, I decided to try my luck again with Firefox, which has been my favorite since the first version came out.

So I reinstalled the newest version of Firefox and transferred my favorites back. I then went about trying to get all the same extensions I had before, with mixed success. But I also came across an extension I didn't have from before. It's called Last FM and works a lot like Pandora.

Don't know what Pandora is?

It's a Web service where you enter in artists you like and it finds music by those artists and similar artists. You can give the music a thumbs up and it'll play more like it. A thumbs down will make it come up less often. You can also see what your friends are listening to on Pandora. For example, my roommate likes to listen to Jazz, while my friend Jennifer has a Pandora station for Timbaland. Personally, I have a "Classics" station that has some of my all-time favorite songs and artists in it - from the Rolling Stones to Sugarland.

At any rate, Pandora is great.

But this new Last FM is better, simply because I don't have to go to a Web site to have access to it. It's at the top of the browser window.

Clever.

And convenient, too, which is why I can go from Miranda Lambert to John Hiatt to Nelly Furtado to Timbaland - all without having to hit a button. (Unless I click on the heart button, which marks the song as track I love.) And, unlike my iPod, I don't have to purchase the music.

And that makes me like it even more.