Man Calls 911 After Eatery Runs Out Of Lemonade

(AP)  Authorities said a Florida man, 66, was arrested after calling
911 recently to complain that a fast food restaurant ran out of
lemonade. After a drive-through employee failed to respond to the
man's threat of contacting the police, the irate diner called 911, a
police report alleges.

He spent about 5 minutes talking to the 911 operator about his complaint.

Boynton Beach said the man was charged with abuse of 911 communication.

Your Dad named you WHAT?

AP - An Oregon man says people usually think he's joking when he introduces himself as Rip Van Winkle. But that's the name on his birth certificate. Really. Van Winkle told the Corvallis Gazette Times that his father and grandfather were nicknamed Rip, but his dad made things official for his son, figuring the nickname would eventually stick to him too.

Online records: Survey finds many states lagging

Americans can easily learn about their state songs and state flowers with a quick search on the Internet, but most will have a harder time checking whether their children's school buses are safe or a local gas station is charging too much.

The surveys were conducted by newspaper and broadcast journalists, journalism students, state press associations, and reporters and editors from The Associated Press.

"This is the first comprehensive survey of its kind," said ASNE FOI Committee co-chair Andy Alexander. "It tells us that many states understand that digitizing public records is key to open government in the 21st century. But it also tells us that, with a few exceptions, states have a long way to go before they become truly transparent.

Steve Martin funds theater production amid an Oregon high school controversy

Martin to Ore. troupe: Show will go on, on my dime

LA GRANDE, Ore. (AP) — Steve Martin has offered to pay for an off-campus production of his play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," which was banned from a high school because parents objected to what they called adult content.
The actor and comedian said in a letter to a newspaper that he wants to keep the play, conducted in other high schools without controversy, "from acquiring a reputation it does not deserve."
The 1993 play imagines a meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in a Paris bar as they are on the verge of great achievements in painting and physics.
It is aimed at explaining "the similarity of the creative process involved in great leaps of imagination in art and science," Martin said in the letter published Friday in The La Grande Observer.
He said he disagreed strongly with local characterizations of the play as having to do with "people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects."

Portland St. wins Big Sky

OGDEN, Utah (AP) — Julius Thomas got free for a tie-breaking dunk with 3.5 seconds left and Portland State held on for a 79-77 win over Montana State on Wednesday night in the Big Sky Conference tournament championship game.

The Vikings repeated as conference champions and clinched their second consecutive NCAA tournament berth.

North and South

Hi everybody-
This story came out just before midnight Sunday night/Monday morning.

I'm intimately familiar with every detail discussed in this story, and wanted to share it with you to ask that we all keep the region and its people in our thoughts and prayers.

I copied and pasted the story from the AP below.
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SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea put its armed forces on standby for war Monday and threatened retaliation against anyone seeking to stop the regime from launching a satellite into space in the latest barrage of threats from the communist regime.

The warning came as U.S. and South Korean troops kicked off their annual war games across the South, exercises the North has condemned as preparation for an invasion. Pyongyang last week threatened danger to South Korean passenger planes flying near its airspace during the drills.

N.Y. Philharmonic plays concert in North Korea

Musicians get standing ovation
The Associated Press
Tues., Feb. 26, 2008

PYONGYANG, North Korea - The New York Philharmonic performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” and North Korea’s anthem for Pyongyang’s communist elite Tuesday — a historic feat of musical diplomacy aimed at improving ties with the isolated nuclear power that considers the U.S. its mortal enemy.

The Philharmonic is the first major American cultural group to perform in the country and the largest delegation from the United States to visit its longtime foe.

The unprecedented concert, shown live on television inside North Korea, represents a warming in relations between the nations that remain technically at war and locked in negotiations over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs.

Kim Cheol-woong, a North Korean pianist who defected to South Korea in 2002 because of the lack of musical freedom, said last week that regular citizens in the North were prohibited from listening to or playing foreign music produced after 1900.