Breaking news: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead! I'm writing it up now!

Here's a story I couldn't fit into the article. Bell Labs' West Coast analogue is Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). PARC's best-known moment is when Xerox let Steve Jobs peek behind the curtain (in exchange for a pile of Apple stock). Jobs walked out with the concepts for the desktop and the mouse, and a few…

I think I have to operate from the assumption that someone's strategy to intentionally tank NBC is backfiring.

Wait, NBC is in first place? Does that mean I have to stop making jokes in every single Newswire about how badly NBC is doing?

That is pretty remarkable. I'll add it to my to-do list. I'd also like to get to the War of the Triple Alliance. Uruguay was fighting both Brazil and Argentina, and asked Paraguay to jump in and help. They did. Uruguay was almost immediately taken over by the enemy and switched sides. So Paraguay was fighting three…

Seriously. When was the last war we fought against someone who *didn't* have CIA training?

It was an unethical experiment in bait-and-switch!

That would have worked, if you hadn't stopped me.

Okay, now that's two corrections I need to issue. I'm on a roll!

I forgot to include this in the body of the article, but I have my first correction to run. In last week's installment on New Coke, I mentioned that the name "Coke II" was coined by filmmaker Miranda July, who was working for an ad agency. Ms. July contacted me to say she didn't actually work in advertising; the…

It's a one-off, although I would imagine if a lot of people tune in, it'd be hard for NBC to say no to doing more.

Hear, hear. Love the smell of coffee. One of my favorite food smells. And I can't drink the stuff.

Favorite international soda? Lilt. It's an Irish 7-Up-like drink, but along with the lemon/lime is some grapefruit, which gives it a nice kick. Plus everything — Coke included — is made with sugar instead of corn syrup so it's less, well, syrupy.

I'm not convinced Diet Coke actually is better for you. No one I know who drinks it obsessively is any thinner than when they started, and it's basically just Coke with hard-to-pronounce chemicals in place of the not-that-natural-in-the-first-place ingredients.

Also, the '90s were the last decade in which there were mainstream rock bands.

Interesting fact: Hoobastank is the worst band name possible. There can be no band name worse than that, ever. "Worst band name" is a settled issue now.

That was an Onion headline: "George Will Orders Two Whoppers Junior"

Wait, what do we suspect it is?

When my younger son was 4, he and his friend came up with the following joke (said in a sing-song voice):

There's almost always a fascinating, heated debate over minutiae. Honestly, it makes the "biggest controversy" heading very easy to fill, because any time I have a non-controversial subject, I can click over to the Talk page and be guaranteed that somebody's arguing about something.