Cyrus Farivar

The Associated Press; October 12, 2006: By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:09 p.m. ET TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — A teenager who put her bra on a car antenna before it flew off and led to a highway accident will be charged with littering, a prosecutor said. Emily Davis, 17, of Bowling Green, told investigators she took her bra off while her friend was driving on Interstate 75. James Campbell, who was driving behind the girls, said he swerved to…

I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this prize. As he wrote in the International Herald Tribune earlier this year: It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic that even after all these years I still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writer’s authenticity does depend on his ability to open his heart to the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand…

New York; October 16, 2006: Colbert in person is one of those rare comedians who like to dissect comedy, especially his own comedy, and especially what makes his own comedy funny. This is owed in part to the nature of his show—he plays an abrasive character who is, on the surface, designed to be repellent but is actually meant to entertain—which means he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly to pull off this trick. When he was…

This may be old news to some, but I just discovererd that Belkin, maker of all sorts of gadgets, was founded and still thrives in Compton, California. Inc. wrote about the rise of the business in this ill-fated city back in 2003. It’s not too much of a stretch to compare Belkin to its inner-city surroundings in Compton, Calif.: neither possesses the kind of buzz-generating, love-at-first-sight glitz that inspires devotion. Pipkin balked, in fact, when his real estate agent first…

Best part of the game: within two minutes of the final out, the folks in the right field bleachers (where my brother and I were sitting) started chanting: Yankees suck! Yankees suck! I can’t wait for the ALCS.

It’s been a little while since I last blogged about Nauru, a tiny island in the South Pacific (Population: 13,000) that entered into a Faustian tale of strip mining itself into oblivion during the bulk of the 20th century. It’s latest industry is running Australia’s awful offshore detention facility for refugees. This past week, The Age ran a story about Mohammed Sagar, a 30-year-old Iraqi refugee who has been held on the island for the last five years. His companion,…

Best thing about Parallels Workstation? My Gameday Audio (which I paid good money for) finally works on my Mac — well, Engadget’s Mac, to be precise. For the life of me I can’t get it to play natively on my MacBook.

The A’s won their first game today against the Twins, and lead the Division Series 1-0. With any luck, they’ll win Game 2 and will have a solid shot of defeating the Twins when my brother and I go to Game 3 on Friday, thus advancing to the ALCS. Oh, and I also bought a pair of tickets to the ALCS too. I’m still gunning for an A’s vs. Dodgers series.

For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve been on an informal quest for the last few years to figure out how many Americans have passports. Last I blogged about it, I discovered a Slate article, which said there were 44 million passports in existence. Howver, before that, I saw in a Computerworld article from 2005 that said that there are 57 milion passports in circulation. Today, I read in The New York Times that “The State Department estimates…

My old ocf.berkeley.edu email account has gotten spammed to high heaven, so I’ve decided to no longer check it. So if for some reason you’re still emailing me there, I will no longer respond. My current email continues to be cfarivar [at] cfarivar {d0t} org.