John Travolta struts his stuff on a red and blue Plexiglas dance floor in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. Last year the floor was sold at auction for $6,000 (£3,400). Not enough, thought the seller, who promptly took it to Los Angeles and sold it again, this time for a more respectable $160,000. Now the first buyer is in a Manhattan court trying to reclaim his bargain. Meanwhile, an icon of the great days of disco gathers dust in a Staten Island warehouse.
A taxi driver writes: Larry Arnstein drove a cab in New York and has finally come out and said it: drivers get a disgraceful kick out of ignoring road signs, cutting up other road users and terrorising pedestrians(who are, he says, “an insult to the Industrial Revolution”). For anyone wanting an alternative to The Highway Code, he has written it in The Bad Driver’s Handbook: Hundreds of Simple Manoeuvres to Frustrate, Annoy and Endanger Those Around You.
Powdered dog biscuits are to be sent to starving Kenyan children. But not everyone approves, despite the good intentions of the makers of Mighty Mix (“a great taste your dog will love!”) in New Zealand. Barry Coates, of Oxfam, would prefer food to be produced within Kenya, “and the fact that it’s coming from a dog food manufacturer could make people suspicious”.
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Information is increasingly held electronically and can be recovered, along with e-mails and internet site accesses. The secretive investigation firm Kroll is keeping more than most in a booming business for what lawyers are calling “electronic discovery”. A Kroll Ontrack computer in Minnesota has storage for two petabytes. Er? An archive intending to store every web page so far produced has a capacity of one petabyte — that’s a million gigabytes.
Jessica Alba is the woman whom most men consider best-suited for motherhood, at least according to 2.5 million readers of an online men’s magazine. “We encouraged readers not to go by looks alone,” says James Bassil, editor-in-chief of AskMen.com. That probably explains why next on the list were Sienna Miller, Angelina Jolie and Adriana Lima, a Brazilian supermodel.
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Sources: National Public Radio (New York), ABC News, Dominion Post, AP, The Sydney Morning Herald