You may have heard that Parker Brothers has persuaded the media to do its publicity for them, simply by announcing it will replace one Monopoly game piece with another. The Today show's website obliged, set its text-generator robots to the "cliche" setting and turned out this:

So it's just like going to jail, except it's permanent, which it isn't. Perhaps the piece will be treated like a sex offender and subject to indefinite detention.

No one on the Today show cares what your favorite piece might be. Not the producers, the hosts, the people in the booth, the go-fers getting coffee and bagels. No one. If you burst into a conference room and said "Hey, guys, someone on Facebook just said she liked the iron, too," everyone would look at you in silence until you backed out and shut the door.

The Today poll has 60K votes and 66 comments. People care about this.

YIKES: Unlike yesterday's example of the duct-taped Icelandic drunk, this is not a good use of Vertical Video Syndrome. There are no good uses. That said, this is what happened in New York a couple days ago: the up escalator started going down. Fast. (Via gothamist.)

BYGONE THINGS Guess the subject matter:

It's a piece about . . . phone booths. It mentions one of the internet's earliest delights, the Mohave Phone Booth project. That's what the internet was like back then. You went to skinny sites with unreadable color choices and read about people calling a phone booth no one answered .

Sure, I called the Mohave Phone Booth. We all did. There was also the novelty of the Payphone Project, which collected numbers of payphones around the world, as well as pictures of the sad, abandoned things.

That's it for today; I have to do an interview and finish a column and try to avoid biting down on a troublesome molar. Things to do for the next seven days: avoid chewing; wincing. I still think that putting nerves in teeth was a really bad design decision, but no upgrades on the current model seem to be in the pipeline. See you around.