Remember the froofraw about the Russian and Canadian ice dancing teams in the Salt Lake City Olympics. Now comes a story that the whole thing was masterminded by a Russian crime boss better known for drug dealing and illegal arms sales. Apparently, though, he also fixed Moscow beauty pageants as a sidelight.

And they say guys don’t like skating….

Remember how, last month, word came out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers was going to rename its consulting branch Monday? I think this is a good thing, but IBM has spared us all a lot of fun; it’s buying the division for $3.5 billion.

In the process, it’s dumping the name Monday, which was supposed to take effect next month.

“Too bad – it could have been called ‘Big Blue Monday,’ ” Bill Carlino, editor of Accounting Today, told the New York Post.

Ah, well. Now we’ll have to find something else to make fun of. Fortunately, it’s a big world.

Angela Gunn points out this amusing and odd piece from the WAPost:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone 淼 Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Not a lot of jobs in the Times under “Dictator,” last I checked. (Why yes, I do check. Why do you ask?)

A columnist with the Cornell Daily Sun had trouble with his local Kinkos when he tried to get them to photocopy some of his published work.They demurred on copyright grounds:

I was miffed by his self-important anal-retentiveness. “I wrote that article, look, my picture is on the top,” I said. He told me that didn’t matter, that corporate Kinko’s was overburdened with copyright lawsuits, and consequently he wasn’t about to run my copy job.

OK, so he wrote the article. I bet it’s a nice picture, too. Doesn’t mean he owns the copyright. In fact, the bottom of the very web page that carries the diatribe carries the following legend:

But I suspect his refusal to print my writing samples sprouted from seeds buried deeper in the human ego. It was an exercise in power. He totally had the power of refusing to copy my articles. And he didn’t.

Jane’s Defense Weekly is not a publication noted for its levity, so it’s probably true that Boeing is now experimenting with anti-gravity propulsion.

The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: ÎGRASPâ ÷ Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.

A GRASP briefing document obtained by JDW sets out what Boeing believes to be at stake. “If gravity modification is real,” it says, “it will alter the entire aerospace business.”

Ya think?

The Russian government is apparently not facilitiating contact with Podkletnov, for what should be obvious reasons. There’s more:

The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnovâs claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an Îimpulse gravity generatorâ, are capable of producing a beam of Îgravity-likeâ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object ÷ enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.

Podkletnov maintains that a laboratory installation in Russia has already demonstrated the 4in (10cm) wide beamâs ability to repel objects a kilometre away and that it exhibits negligible power loss at distances of up to 200km.

The possibilities of weaponization are left as an exercise for the student. However,

The paper points out that Podkletnov is strongly anti-military and will only provide assistance if the research is carried out in the Îwhite worldâ of open development.

Nat Polish dug out this scientific abstract for a paper presented earlier this month regarding superconducting antigrav .

Think they’re not watching? Think again. From the Village Voice:

As John Ashcroft’s Citizens Corps spy program prepares for its debut next month, it seems scores of American companies have already become willing snitches. A few months ago, the Privacy Council surveyed executives from 22 companies in the travel industryot just airlines but hotels, car rental services, and travel agenciesnd found that 64 percent of respondents had turned over information to investigators and 59 percent had lowered their resistance to such demands.

I first wrote about disposable cell phones nearly two years ago, but they finally look like they’re about to hit the market.

Reuters reports that Hop-On says it’s gotten FCC approval to sell a mass-market recyclable cell phone with 60 minutes of service. Price: $40.

“Hop-On mobile devices are plastic, two-way phones the size of a deck of playing cards. Users talk and listen to callers via a microphone/earpiece connected by a thin wire. Customers buy scratch cards in increments of additional talk time of 60, 90 and 120 minutes, according to company officials. “

The first phones will run on CDMA networks — Sprint and Verizon. A second wave, priced at $29, will run on GSM networks — Voicestream (a/k/a T-Mobile) and Cingular. In all cases, toll charges will be extra.

If you like Slashdot (not to everyone’s taste), here’s their discussion of this.

The New York City school system is about to get a new chancellor: Joel Klein.

Yes, that Joel Klein. The one who (successfully, so far) represented the U.S. government in its antitrust case against Microsoft. The one who was, until today, the U.S. head of Bertelsmann. (What this means for Bertelsmann, one of the world’s five largest meda companies and the CEO of which was pushed out yesterday, is fodder for another article.)

Here’s what the NYTimes says about it.

Interesting. Klein is the second chancellor in a row to come from the business community rather than the education industry. Klein is also very much the choice of Mayor Bloomberg, himself a successful businessman. (For those of you who don’t follow city educational politics, Bloomberg recently got control of what used to be called the Board of Education — which has eluded mayors for decades — and appears hell-bent on implementing some serious systemic reform.)

Story in the NYTimes this morning that Ziff Davis, hobbled by debt and crushing declines in the tech advertising market, will probably go Chapter 11 this week. At one time, Ziff Davis also owned a thriving events business that included Comdex, which it spun off and is now called Key3Media. So, should Ziff have kept the events biz? Umm, probably not; it’s being delisted from the NYSE today. That’s what happens when you’re trading at 5 cents.

Fortunately, Ziff doesn’t owe me any money, though I do have an assignment from them, which I probably need to inquire about.

When the New York Sun launched this past spring as the first new daily broadsheet in decades, some thought it odd that there wasn’t a companion website for the right-leaning daily. Myself, I considered it a good idea to concentrate on the main deal and wait to go online until the underlying machine was spinning steadily.

The Sun’s site now appears to be up and running, though I haven’t seen an announcement of it anywhere. www.nysun.com carries a small selection of major stories from that day’s edition, with a list of other pieces that you can see my actually getting a copy of the print edition and paying 50 cents.