If you live in coastal Washington or Alaska, get yourself down to the beach:

Thousands of pairs of Nike basketball shoes are washing up on beaches from Washington state to Alaska after spilling from a container ship in Northern California.

There’s just one hitch to finding a free pair.

“Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates,” said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. “The effort’s worth it ’cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!”

 

According the NYTimes, Coca-Cola is offering its customers an electronic payment payroll service.

Restaurants, of course, tend to have low-wage employees who are barely on the grid. Many of them do not have checking accounts — and it is the rare company indeed that pays on-the-books wages in cash. Workers who don’t have a banking relationship with anyone rely on check-cashing services, which take up to 2.5 percent of the checks they cash.

Coke will market debit cards to restaurants, which will offer them to their employees. The benefit for the workers is that Coke’s $1.50 monthly charge is far less than check cashers’ fee. The benefit for the employers is saving time and money on processing checks. The actual banking part of the business will be run by Citibank and MasterCard.

It turns out that other businesses with transient employees do much the same thing:

A number of other employers, including McDonald’s, FedEx and Sears, Roebuck, currently offer their employees payroll cards, and enrollment has quickened since Visa and MasterCard entered the arena in 2001 and widened the cards’ acceptance to all locations that accept their brands.

Offering the cards are payroll processors like Paychex in Rochester, human resource companies like Ceridian in Minneapolis, and more than a dozen banks, including the Chicago-based Bank One and Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. And even more businesses specialize in payroll cards.

In the relationship chain that Coke is envisioning, however, it’s not the employer or the banker or the payroll service. Rather, the company is leveraging its relationship with its customers to market a third-party service that’s quite outside what one would think is its normal line of business.

What’s next — Coke offering expansion financing? Or does it do that already, too?

 

There’s a case study in the NYDaily News — apparently a propos nothing but this Sunday’s Grammy Awards — that breaks down the cash flow of a hypothetical hit album by a hypothetical rock quartet. It illustrates all the people that get paid along the food chain, including some odd recoupable record company expenses, like a 25 percent “packaging deduction” and a 15 percent “free goods charge,” off the top, most of which the label keeps.

The bottom line is that a gold record (500,000 copies) selling at $16.98 will gross roughly $8.5 million, of which each member of the hypothetical quartet will pocket about $40,000. (The case study doesn’t take songwriting royalties into account.)

So for every $16.98 album you rip, you’re costing a performing artist about 34 cents, and the lawyers, producers and labels about $16.64.

 

I’ve got a friend I haven’t met, name of Jerry McGinn. Like me, he’s a Downholder — an alumnus of UPI. He and I are on an e-mail list of about 400 other Downholders, and discussion frequently veers away from the Old Days and toward an analysis of current events.

Iraq is on a lot of our minds lately, and Jerry’s written a particularly good rant about why he’s less than comfortable about where our government is leading us, and why. It was an e-mail, written on the fly; I’ve edited the wirespeak but the rest is Jerry.,

If you’ve ever filed an expense report, you probably have a funny story about it. Here’s one from Steve Otto, a sportswriter for the Tampa Tribune:

“They want my long johns?” I repeated, in disbelief.

“They aren’t yours,” she said. “They belong to the Tribune.”

The most famous expense account story I know has several versions, all identical but for the name of the publication. People Who Should Know have sworn to me that it really happened at Time Magazine, so here it is.

A reporter based in Los Angeles was sent to Alaska to cover a story in February. The reporter, living in LA, did not own an adequate winter coat, and so bought one and put it on his expense report. The report was bounced back by New York, with an attached note: “Time Inc. does not buy personal goods for reporters on assignment. Parka expense denied. Please resubmit.” The reporter did so, with a report that had the same bottom line and an attached note: “Expense report resubmitted. Go ahead — find the parka.”

Oh, OK, one more. In her excellent memoir And So It Goes, Linda Ellerbee tells the story of NBC reporter Jack Perkins, being reassigned to New York after many years in the Orient. He cabled something like “Presume NBC will pay to move personal effects and junk to new assignment.” Of course, the accounting office consented, which is how NBC got stuck moving a full-sized Chinese junk halfway around the world.

 

It’s not like you Britain’s The Sun newspaper is the height of journalistic credibility, but I just came across a kind of neat automotive review while looking for something else.

Seems there’s a company that’s done some work to the Mini Cooper S that allows the cute li’l critter — already no slouch — to <ahem> get out of its own way with a bit of alacrity:

 … 0 to 60 in 6.6 seconds and a top speed of 145.

145mph. In a Mini.

Sweet. This is a car that would earn its British Racing Green paint job.

 

If you want to know what you’ll be allowed to know about Gulf War II while it’s going on, you need to read this item.

Editor & Publisher — the newspaper industry’s trade magazine — is reporting which papers will be sending how many reporters and photographers to Iraq, what units they’ll be deployed with, and what they’ll be allowed to report.

[Col. Jay] DeFrank [director of press operations for the U.S. Department of Defense] confirmed Thursday that more than 500 journalists will be embedded with troops involved in the expected invasion of Iraq.

Those journalists, by the way, will not be required to have completed the Pentagon-run “boot camps.”

 

The Blackberry messaging network is down. So have mercy — or at least pity — on any twitchy exec you see for the next few days. It’s hell being off the grid.

You know the Blackberry — the pager-sized device with a thumb-operated keyboard that lets you send e-mails wirelessly. Al Gore wears (or wore) one; he apparently got word to hold of on conceding the 2000 election as he was on his way to give his concession speech.

I’ve got one that I don’t use, because I decided that I don’t need to get my spam quite that quickly.

 

Things are a little tense here in the Center of the Universe. The ratcheted-up terrorism alert means more cops and more visible cops on the streets and in the subways. My local subway stop this evening had *seven* officers on the platform. In midtown Manhattan, I spotted two Emergency Service officers patrolling in full winter gear and heavy external body armor.

Apparently, we’re about to have a National Guard presence in the subways for the next few days, and there’s nothing that quite relaxes a civilian population like the National Guard. This despite late reports that the heightened alert is based at least partly on a lie.

 

Like many geeks, I’ve got a ton of different e-mail addresses. For the last eight years, though, there’s been one main place to reach me. As of tomorrow, I’m shutting that address down. The thing has become a spam-catcher: roughly 70 pieces a day, offering me various toys, nutritional supplements, and nekkidness of all varieties.

Most everyone knows my new address of preference, and mail through the weblog will always find me. But, lord, I do hate being run out of my homestead.