News in TonyTown

South Carolina’s first lady, Jenny Sanford, said Monday that writing her much-anticipated memoir of her husband’s affair was a “cathartic” and “cleansing” experience.

Sometimes I stumbled over stuff that makes absolutely no sense what so ever. Not that they have no purpose but the designs of it just doesn’t match up with what the product is really supposed to do. But then again I start thinking about what the world would look like if everything was designed and created just the way it should be. The world would then be ultimtely boring, wouldn’t you think?

So, what can you do with a roll of paper? Or the thing that is supposed to hold the paper. One thing that I for sure didn’t know was that apparently people steal toilet paper from public restrooms. So much that there are companies and design firms constantly trying to come up with the ultimate toilet paper holder to keep the paper secure. Believe me, I thought I would never see myself write toilet paper and secure in the same sentence but that is apparently how things are and it’s getting bad. So bad that even secure toilet paper holders with lock and key can’t even hold the paper secure.

If a secure toilet paper holder can’t keep the paper put what and who can? Well, designer Mauricio Sanin Mazuera think he’s got the right idea and have designed one of the coolest toilet paper holders I have seen to date called the “Guardian“. The shielded holder resembles a robot with a red tongue. Yup, you read it right! The tongue is to be secured inside the water canister and the hooded paper holder cannot be taken or removed none the less share more paper than the person needs.

I wonder, are people going to do whatever now to actually steal the robot toilet paper holder instead? Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But the fact remains that I am still shocked that people steal toilet paper from public restrooms. Maybe not now with an army of red tongued robot paper holders standing guard in the most sacred public places.

“This is ‘Magic’ and this is ‘Jack’,” the little girl says in the video ad, holding her two cute puppy dogs up to the camera. The girl’s father, magicJack inventor Dan Borislow, then asks her, “Kylie, did you know that your dad is going to let everybody try a magicJack in the whole country for free?”

Free for 30 days, that is. magicJack is a popular service comparable to VoIP, except that after you hook its app into a USB port on your broadband connected computer, you plug the USB gadget to the RJ11 slot in your telephone. The cost: $39.95 for the initial year and $19.95 for subsequent years to make local and long distance phone calls.

Iran’s envoy to the International International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the window for nuclear negotiations is still open — even as tensions rise over Iran’s decision to defy the world on uranium enrichment.

More than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York, many of them adolescent Orthodox Jews, have been sickened with mumps since August, health authorities said Monday.

“iPad hoopla” has passed, according to a survey by electronics shopping site Retrevo, and consumers have lost interest after the product’s unveiling less than two weeks ago. More than twice as many respondents said they were uninterested after the iPad was announced compared to a week prior. Of course, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics—three times as many said they were confident they would buy one after finding out the product’s details.

Retrevo did similar surveys to gauge interest in Apple’s new portable touchscreen device both before it was announced and after. The week prior to Apple’s big media event, 26 percent of those surveyed said they knew about the device but weren’t interested. After the announcement, that number jumped to 52 percent. However, 3 percent said they would buy an iPad sight unseen. The number that would buy an iPad after Steve Jobs showed it off went up to 9 percent.

In his hectic, noisy laboratory at the University of Maryland, Michael Pecht is wary when it comes to assessing whether Toyota’s suggested repair of sticky gas pedals will have any real impact.

A second round of snow is heading toward Washington, D.C., and surrounding cities, where residents are still digging out after a record-setting blizzard.

A man pulled alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti’s capital may have been trapped since the January 12 quake that leveled much of the city, doctors said.

Biofuel production in the US has met with fairly mixed success, as the cost and fossil fuel use of corn-based ethanol has severely cut into the benefits provided by avoiding the use of fossil fuels. It’s been a somewhat different story in Brazil, which has embraced ethanol derived from sugarcane and seen more promising results. The government has set aggressive targets for both ethanol and biodiesel production, but a study that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science later this week urges caution: unless the goals are met through an integrated agricultural strategy, they’ll drive deforestation that will offset most of the benefits.

The study looked at the expansion of the two crops that are expected to drive biofuels growth in Brazil: sugarcane for ethanol, and soy beans for biodiesel. To reach the country’s 2020 goals, there will have to be a major increase in the production of both of those crops. Even assuming major increases in the efficiency of their production (the authors assume an increase at double the rate of the past 20 years), there’s simply no way to get there without expanding the amount of land devoted to farming them, and there’s no way to do that without secondary consequences.