Looks like Stephen Colbert is trying to become the greatest living american. As part of that, he's trying to get to be the first search engine result for that phrase. He already ranks in first for giant brass balls.

You can help the cause by linking to http://www.colbertnation.com/cn/letter-from-stephen.php and using "greatest living american" as the anchor text.

Hey, check out this commercial! Subway's sandwiches are so much healthier than a Burger King chicken sandwich! Wait a second, is it really? Sure, they compared the fat content, but let's see what's really going on here:

In a currently airing commercial, they compare a particular Subway sandwich with chicken to a Burger King sandwich with chicken. They cherry pick the fat numbers as an illustration of the relative healthy qualities of each sandwich - the Subway sandwich predictable has little fat, while the Burger King sandwich has an excessive amount. The viewer can then extrapolate from this context free statistic that the Subway sandwich is good for you, while the Burger King sandwich is not. My problem is not that Subway is lying about the Burger King sandwich being good for you - the sandwich they chose for their illustration (the Tender Crisp) is a whopper (ha!) to the body - but both the assertion that Subway sandwiches are good for you and the way they go about doing it.

Subway deliberately chooses the worst (nutritionally speaking) chicken sandwich Burger King makes. Let's look at one of the worst sandwiches Subway makes - the tuna sub. The 6" version has 530 calories and 31 grams of fat, not to mention over 1000 mg of sodium. The chicken teriyaki (the subject of the commercial, I believe) has over 1200 mg of sodium - almost the entire recommended daily requirement. Burger King makes a chicken whopper - this has only 570 calories and 25 grams of fat - very similar to the Subway tuna (a sandwich that you might foolishly think was actually going to be good for you). I hate cherry picked statistics.

I don't mean to be too hard on Subway here - I actually like some of their sandwiches, I like that you can get fresh vegetables on them (which is in my opinion really the thing that sets them apart from other fast food restaurants). But Subway is still fast food - this means it is processed with way too much salt, and there are plenty of unhealthy options on their menu. You need to be especially careful if you order a 12" sub.

I'm posting about this because of what I recently discovered. I was trying to look up nutrition facts for myself on Subway's website and I saw that they listed the 6 grams of fat subs in their own section, and many of them have over 1000mg of sodium in them. Then, I saw some fine print all the way at the bottom of the page:

Subs with 6 grams of fat or less include Italian or wheat bread, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, green peppers and olives. All other sandwich values include cheese unless otherwise noted.

So the 6g of fat subs don't include cheese or any sauce/mayo. While you might not have cheese, your sub is going to be really dry with just the ingredients they're counting. And whatever you add to change that (sauce, mayo, oil) is going to be where a bunch more fat and calories come from! So I took a look at Burger King and McDonalds just to see, and surprise! When you select a sandwich, they give you the nutrition for everything in it. And the sandwiches with cheese are listed differently. So you get all the ingredients for a sandwich (including mayo, ketchup, whatever) selected by default, and then you can uncheck whatever ingredients you don't get. And I'm pretty sure that selecting a healthy option at one of those places will be a lot closer to some of the sandwiches at Subway when you count all the ingredients you actually get.

Between not including ingredients and just focusing on the fat content comparison (instead of calories and sodium where Subway can get quite high), Subway's being sneaky and making themselves appear to be a healthier option than they really are.

The latest album from Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero, just went on sale yesterday. It's already stirred up a bunch of internet chatter because they leaked tracks from the album by leaving USB drives at concerts for fans to find and spread online. From wikipedia:

A viral marketing campaign has emerged to promote the album's concept. Clues from tour t-shirts have led fans to discover websites that describe an "Orwellian picture of the United States circa the year 2022,"[53] and a telephone number that returns a clip of "Survivalism." In addition, the Year Zero song "My Violent Heart" was reportedly found on a thumb drive in the bathroom stall at a NIN show in Lisbon, Portugal (as were other new tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight" at other European concert venues) ahead of their debut on MySpace. This suggests that the band itself covertly distributed the new music. Fan participation in this alternate reality game has caught the attention of the media; MTV News, USA Today, and Rolling Stone have cited fan-site The NIN Hotline, forum Echoing the Sound, fan club The Spiral, and NinWiki as sources for new discoveries.

What's crazy about all of this is the scope of Year Zero. It's hardly just an album, and Reznor has created a whole world around it, including planning to make a movie version of the upcoming album which would be the second part of Year Zero, saying "Essentially, I wrote the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist."

Fans buying the CD yesterday discovered something more. Playing the CD causes it to heat up, and people found that when they ejected the CD, it had changed colors and revealed a code of 1's and 0's. It turns out that code points to one of dozens of websites that serve to create the entire intricate backstory for Year Zero. How extensive is it? Take a look for yourself. And here's a list of the websites that have been discovered so far that are part of a trail of clues into the story. From ninwiki:

The websites suggest that in Year Zero, there is no longer a distinct separation of Church and State. Perhaps due to an onslaught of bioterrorism attacks, the government has assumed totalitarian control and used the threat of future terrorist attacks to justify their absolute power.

Proven Related Websites
The Mailstrom, Free Rebel Art, U.S. Wiretap, The Price of Treason, Open Source Resistance, Viability Index, Exterminal, Grace The Teacher, Red Horse Vector, Church of Plano, Consolidated Mail Systems, 105th Airborne Crusaders, Be The Hammer, Another Version of the Truth, Act Patriotic, One Country At A Time, Art Is Resistance, I Am Trying To Believe, The Water Turned To Blood, Judson Ogram Correctional Facility, Hollywood in Memoriam, Cedocore, Secure Broadcast Informatics, Solutions Backwards Initiative, Operation Swamp 0000, Operation Chip Sweep, Brian Tsunoda, Mining For Life, Exhibit Twenty Four

Like Nine Inch Nails or not, you've got to admit they're really into what they do, and their fans can't be anything but pleased with all of this. After all, some of the websites lead to additional free tracks as well.

Apparently Coke just surprised people with a "better than expected quarterly profit...as the continued rollout of Coke Zero helped boost sales in many countries."

So it looks like Coke Zero is doing better than expected. And I'm finding the news to be quite interesting since I'm just starting to replace my usual regular Coke intake with Coke Zero. I'm one of the people that has always drank regular Coke, and find the taste of Diet Coke to be too drastically different (and too sweet) to drink it as a substitute. And yet I've still considered it just for the cut in calorie intake. But I still couldn't do it.

Then Coke Zero came along, touting that it too has 0 calories, but it has the same regular Coke taste...how perfect! So I recently gave it a shot and unsurprisingly the claims were not entirely true. Yes, cutting out all of the calories by using a different sweetner means losing the original taste. But there was a difference...Coke Zero definitely tastes closer to regular Coke than Diet Coke, and it also feels more satisfying in a way I can't explain.

And to those worried about the health risks of the substitute sweetener aspartame in Coke Zero and other diet soft drinks (as I originally was...I remember hearing all sorts of health issues were linked to it), look at this page and put your fears to rest.

Don't forget that it's free cone day today at Ben & Jerry's! I wonder if they've got the new Stephen Colbert flavor available in stores? In any case, the weather's just starting to warm up a bit so this is good timing.

If it weren't for the last 10 minutes, this episode would have been a total waste. Nothing useful happened, and it was fairly obvious about what was going to happen to Palmer well before it actually happened.

But in the last 10 minutes the VP got to throw a wrench into Jack's plan to save Audrey, and now Jack's working against the law again, which is always crazy and awesome, like when he had that prison break in an earlier season and was causing all kinds of mayhem (as Mark and I were talking about here earlier today).

I won't say what was in the preview for next week, but it looks like it's going to an action-packed episode!

Here's the link for the character countdown.

I got a phone call that's never fun today.

AmEx: "Did you charge $1996.00 on your American Express Card at Coach today?"

Me: "Um, no...I'm at work. The only thing I've charged today was lunch."

AmEx: "It looks like you've had some fradulent charges on your account. We need to cancel your card and send you a new one. Can we cancel it, and then I will transfer you to get a new card issued?"

I agreed and once the card was cancelled I asked for the phone number for getting my card reissued and I hung up the phone. I didn't want to give any personal information to whoever had called since I couldn't verify that the call was form American Express to begin with. And just realizing I was thinking that, I wondered how my card info could have been compromised to begin with since I'm pretty good about being careful with it.

I called AmEx customer service and they immediately saw what was going on.

AmEx: "It looks like you had some fradulent charges on your card. There's actually been a ton of charges, but they've all been declined. The card was cancelled, but the process stopped before getting a card reissued. I can transfer you to do that now."

*I get transferred and they verify my mailing address*

AmEx: "We can send you a new card which will reach you in about a week. Will you need it sooner than that?"

Me: "Yes, if it's possible"

AmEx: "We'll send you a temporary card overnight and you can use that until your card arrives. Since you've been a valued member since 2005, it will be free of charge."

Me: "Awesome."

What craziness. But I'm quite pleased with how quick and easy it was to get the situation resolved, and that the red flag went up in the first place. The apparent fradulent charges hadn't even appeared online yet (I was ironically checking my transactions online when I got the call). Apparently my account number was keyed in, so the fradulent charge could have been made online and they can't track down how it occurred.

Not the show, but a real life prison breakout. This sounds like it's right out of something like 24.

[Two men] paid for a helicopter ride at an airstrip near the city of Sint-Truiden, about 40 miles east of Brussels, saying they were tourists from Marseilles in southern France, pilot Eric Mathieu told the RTL-TVI network. After takeoff, they produced a pistol and hand-grenade, ordering Mathieu to fly to Lantin prison outside nearby Liege.

Mathieu said he touched down while about 200 prisoners were exercising in the yard. One climbed on board while his accomplices threw tear gas canisters into the crowd. The helicopter then landed less than a half-mile from the prison, where the three men got in a waiting car and drove away, VRT television news said.

RTL-TVI identified the fugitive as a Frenchman who was in pretrial detention on charges of fraud and theft. RTBF said he had previously escaped from prisons in France and Spain.

That's pretty crazy...it'd be awesome if any news copters caught any footage of the escape. You'd think after the guy had escaped two prisons already that maybe they'd keep a closer eye on him. And that guards in guard towers would be unaffected by the tear gas on the ground and could shoot and disable the people involved or the helicopter.

What a sweet episode this week. Ari's always hilarious when he's frantic (see end of season 2), Drama and Turtle had their usual shenanigans, and Sloane's smile at the end was great. I feel like these last few episodes have been better at developing the characters than previous episodes, though I suppose that could just be due to the fact that the show hadn't been on for several months.

The question I have from the episode is: Doesn't Amanda have caller ID? She must have known E was calling. I'm guessing the next episode will show Vince accepting Ari's offer, provided Ari can fulfill his promise.

How mad would you be if you were watching your favorite team in a thrilling playoff game that was entering quadruple overtime, only to suddenly see an infomercial come on instead? That's exactly what happened to some viewers of the Dallas-Vancouver NHL game on Thursday.

Versus, which carries the bulk of NHL games in the U.S., said it was looking into what happened to the Dallas-Vancouver game in some regions. "Versus has received reports that last night's Dallas/Vancouver game was switched to an infomercial in the fourth overtime," the network said in a statement. "We are obviously very disappointed to hear that some fans in a few select markets have reported that they did not see the end of this great game.

"The game did run in its entirety on the Versus network feed, but based on the information we have received we are currently working with our affiliates in the affected markets to find out what caused the problem and to make sure that this doesn't happen again during the playoffs."

The game, a 10 p.m. ET start, ended at 18:06 of the fourth overtime when Henrik Sedin scored to give the Canucks a 5-4 win in the opening game of the Western Conference quarter-final series.

I'd be simultaneously pissed at Versus for the programming error, and thankful for ESPN's auto-updating scoreboard.