Wrigley - Investor Relations - Press Release

TRENDS GONE TOO FAR, VOL. 296: "Mint Mojito" flavored gum is now in stores. Is the chewable Cosmopolitan for Kids sure to follow?

REST IN (BLANK): Charles Nelson Reilly, well known for being a regular Match Game panelist alongside Richard Dawson and Brett Somers, has died. I'm hard pressed to think of a better rembrance of his career than this SNL sketch.

EVEN THE BEST SPELLER NEEDS GOOD LUCK: As you're preparing your entries for our annual National Spelling Bee pool, here's a few more to consider:

• ALOTT5MA fave Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe (KS), the lone rookie to make it to prime time last year, is back for seconds.
  
• Second-timer Isabel Jacobsen of Madison, Wisconsin, whose coach (who himself competed in nationals decades ago) has drilled her in the fact that "more than 10 percent of contestants are eliminated by misspelling a word with a French origin."
  
• Eleven-year-old Jonathan Schut of P.E.I., who's spending an hour a day studying with his mom.
• Paige Tang of Jackson, Tenn., who's gone from misspelling "vigilante" last year to the Nationals, though she hopes "they don't ask many words from other languages" because "words from Latin, Greek and German have a lot of letters and can be hard to spell."
• Brownsville (TX)'s Blessing Taclobao, finally free from the local immovable object that was four-timer Nidharshan Anandasivam.
• West Virginia's Sam Matherly, who says "I just got braces this year, and glasses, and then I won the spelling bee. Now, I’m officially a nerd," with a goal of winning the Bee now, the Nextel Cup next.
  
• Saskatchewan's Anqi Dong says he doesn't care about the cameras in his third attempt; he just wants to win.
• DC's Olivia Laesch explains the importance of all those etymology questions.
• Did you know that the favorite word of four-timer Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan of Colorado was pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis? That's hardcore.
  

Wednesday, live coverage begins. Oh, and Samir Patel is now saying that "I'm not doing it for the prize alone, but if it wasn't for the prize, I probably wouldn't be doing it."

"IF YOU WANT SOMEONE TO COME AROUND TO YOUR POINT OF VIEW, IT'S NOT WISE TO CURSE AND THEN TELL THEM THEY'RE IDIOTS:" The year's not even halfway through yet, but this profile of Judd Apatow (and his posse) in the NYT Magazine is a contender for the ALOTT5MA-y for Outstanding Magazine Profile. Two particularly interesting observations in there worth discussing:

• Aren't The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, for all their explicit content, essentially morally conservative films? One is about a guy saving himself for true love, and the other is about the need/desire to a make a relationship work "for the kids."
• While the comedy in vogue in the late 90s (Sandler, Carrey) took the "I'm a loser, so let me exert my rage on someone else" angle, Apatow's films (both as writer, director, and producer) are about internalized rage and self-loathing rather than the desire to hurt someone else.

The observation in the title (from Apatow in the article) also strikes me as a significant lesson (and one I'll freely admit I've had my difficulties learning and implementing) in a wide variety of areas, including, but not limited to, politics, but that's for another blog.

"HAS ANYONE HERE ACTUALLY SEEN A FOOD STAMP?" Amherst College President Tony Marx has made it a mission to recruit more low-income students to campus and give them the resources to thrive. Sunday's NYT highlights Anthony Abraham Jack, a member of the class of 2007 graduating this weekend, who was raised as one of the children by a single mom earning $26,000 a year as a school security guard, and who during his four years at the Fairest College earned one of only ten A+ grades in Calculus in the past thirty years and became the College's Rhodes Scholarship nominee this year.

Do read Jack's own words, in which he convincingly argues he did not come "from the bottom to the top". May he and his classmates fulfill the College's motto, Terras Irradient, and give much light to the world.

TRYIN' HARD TO LOOK LIKE GARY COOPER: And we have a winner in the category of "largest ratio between length of Wikipedia entry (approximately 1,300 words) and actual importance"--yes, Wikipedia has an entry for Taco Ockerse, which discloses not only his last name, but that there is a Best of Taco album with contains 16 tracks, only one of which is any version of "Puttin' On The Ritz."

MEMORIES ARE JUST WHERE YOU LAID THEM: In an all-Idol special edition of Entertainment Weekly, they've again tried to rank the Top Ten All-Time Idol Performances, a feat they last attempted in 2005. Here goes:

1. Carrie Underwood, "Alone" (top ten, sure. #1?)
2. Kelly Clarkson, "Stuff Like That There"
3. Clay Aiken, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (Ease! Your! Mind! I still prefer That Immigrant Mouse Song)
4. Fantasia Barrino, "Summertime" (either this or the Clarkson is my #1)
5. Jennifer Hudson, "Weekend In New England". (I just cited this for the quintessential Idol Glory Note. Last time, the EW folks listed "Circle of Life" instead. Toss-up.)
6. Chris Daughtry, "Hemorrhage (In My Hands)". (That's how you introduce yourself in the semis.)
7. Melinda Doolittle, "My Funny Valentine". (Ditto. 2007's best performance?)
8. Elliot Yamin, "A Song For You". (Odd. Where's my Constantine? Where's Bo?)
9. Ruben Studdard, "Nights On Broadway". (No, no, no, and not just because I can only think of the Barry Gibb Talk Show when I hear it now. "Superstar".)
10. Katharine McPhee, "Over the Rainbow". (Over "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree"?)

Most egregious omission? No Tamyra Gray, no Jordin Sparks, and I also have a soft spot for Paris Bennett's "Midnight Train To Georgia", which I think exemplifies that which Melinda was missing this season. They've also got a worst list, which I'll blog about later, but I should note that this is on it.