Pintervention

Happy Friday. Here's today's Lance Lawson puzzler, taken from the pages of this paper in the late 40s. Solution at the bottom of the page.

CONTROVERSY "Single Mom, Sorry." A good excuse to not tip?

What if the bill is $140? Voila: Reddit controversy. (I'd post the link but the URL would probably trip the filters.)

Interesting quote from the Daily Mail: "Several single mothers refuse to belief the receipt is real, saying the Redditor is exacting a vendetta against them." That's entirely possible, given the eek-a-girl! terror the female sex brings out in some of reddit's users, who are either socially-inelegant types who live through digital surrogates, or plain old classic-flavor sexist dolts who think the internet was made for trading pictures of 15-year-old girls while telling grown-up ones to make him a sandwich.

As for the thread itself, like most long discussions about tipping and customers in restaurants, it will make you despair for humanity.

And he's sincere. You should see the trolls.

VIDEO

I saw that before BuzzFeed found it, by the way. (I typed that wearing a hipster mustache and an ironic T-shirt.) Also: I don't believe this is real. "Coke Zero challenged unsuspecting train passengers to unlock the 007 in them for their chance to win exclusive tickets for the new James Bond movie SKYFALL." Yes, and no one in Coke Zero's legal department thought there's be any problem with this.

The end is excruciating, with all those dum-dee-dee-dee dum, dum-dum-dum dum-dee-dee-dee dums.

TECH This story about an expensive sports car for sale outside of Zynga's HQ suggests the car is a metaphor. Possibly a parable.

Right. Because most of this stuff has a faddish vogue that convinces the start-up founders they're geniuses, and makes the angels happy, then crashes when the billion-fingered herd moves on to the next toy. Here's an interesting story about a game that had huge download numbers and great reviews - but it's a financial bust because in-app purchases are so scant.

I hate IAP; when I see a free game on iTunes app store with a sidebar that says "Top Purchase: 10,000 coins" I never bite. But I'm not the target market for those things, anyway.

Well, that's over. The founder's account is here. Excerpt:

But it worked for a while, because he kept at it, plugging away at the expense of his money and health. One of a thousand such tales, I'll bet.

So what the deuce is Airbnb? If memory serves, sieve that it is, it's an online registry of apartments and houses that lets people rent their homes to people they've never met. Checking . . . yep. For example: here's a list of some places in the Twin Cities. It's all above-board, and wonderful life-long relationships are born, but I can't help thinking that some modern-day Dahmer is thinking "whoa, they come to me? I don't have to go get them?" Also, staying in a stranger's house just gives me the creeps, if the owner is still there. If you're surly when it's early, you can just grump in peace at a hotel restaurant. Stay at someone's home, and there's a chance you'll be greeted in the morning with "Hope decaf's okay!"