A friend of mine forwarded me the following news tidbit about Mariah Carey:

USA TODAY/Monday, February 8, 1999.   A&E

Mariah Carey was one of the first celebrities to comment on the death of the King of Jordan. Mariah told CNN, "I'm inconsolable at the present time. I was a very good friend of Jordan, he was probably the greatest basketball player this country has ever seen, we will never see his like again."

When told by reporters that it was King Hussein of Jordan who had died and not Michael Jordan, Mariah was then led away by her security in a state of 'confusion.'

...which would be appallingly, riotously funny if true. However, it doesn't seem to be so:

• Urban Legends Reference Pages: Questionable Quotes [Snopes]
  This one appears to have originated with a joke posted to the newsgroups alt.music.mariah.carey and alt.fan.madonna on 7 February 1999, with the USA Today and CNN attributions added later.

It did make it onto a 'real' news site, though (in the last paragraph). Scary...:

• Star less than Noble? [Canoe.ca]

News.com must have done some cleanup of their HTML - Opera now renders their articles properly (i.e. without paragraphs overlapping each other). One less reason to use IE or Netscape...

There was just too much purple on the page, that's why...

Note to people who have Yahoo! Mail accounts: CDNow's got a nice $10-off deal for you if you click on their ad inside the system.

People who don't have Yahoo! Mail accounts, sign up for one and you'll probably get the ten bucks off too. Expires 2/22/1999.

All part of the service...

• 20 Questions About Lord Of The Rings [Ain't-it-cool-news]
  Sean Connery won't be Gandalf (one of the most enduring pieces of net mythology).

• LOTR Q&A #2 [Ain't-it-cool-news]
  Gollum will be completely CGI.

• Cleese: Laughter is best creative medicine [USA Today]
  

  ...there are certain parts of America, like I'm sure there are parts of Germany or Switzerland, where that slightly detached view of life that always goes hand-in-hand (with humor) has not been experienced. There are a lot of good sides to that literalness. There's a directness and an honesty. You can deal with people who have that kind of literalness, but you can't play with them, and that can be a shame.

  I'm concerned about quality of life, and I think it is threatened by the rather manic pursuit of profit.

  The happiest people I met in the last five years work in zoos. They make nothing.

• Philips, others to support Apple standard [News.com]
  

  Increasingly, IEEE 1394 [FireWire] is being touted--and used--as a means to connect a variety of digital devices, from camcorders, stereos, DVD players, cable set-top boxes to PCs and more. Already, the participants said, over three million camcorders with the interface have been sold.

  Today's announcement of a patent pool "to efficiently license patents required to implement the standard" appears to put to rest growing industry concerns over Apple's plans for boosting its licensing fees

• Traumas in adolescent life [Salon, via RobotWisdom]
  The larger lesson I took from these stories was (surprise, surprise) more about me than about the authors: I understood, suddenly, why people had always encouraged my own writing when I was a teenager, even when I was churning out angst-ridden dreck. It was, I realized -- and I say this at the risk of sounding hopelessly gooey -- because writing is a way of explaining your life to yourself, a way of making your life bearable and a way of connecting with other people. And these are all good and important things always, but they're perhaps most important when you're in, say, ninth grade. Given that, the issue of whether a story has any literary merit is pretty much irrelevant.