Spicing up bank robberies, hating on yard sales and buying a fake piece of baseball history

- If you’re going to pull a multi-million-dollar heist from a bank, you had darned well better be creative. Don’t just go in there and hand the teller a robbery note threatening to blow their head off and don’t go in with guns a-blazin’. Take time, plot it out and come up with something interesting, creative and unique. Give the rest of us something to talk about after the fact and make us respect the effort you put into your plan. The kind of effort I’m asking for is what robbers who stole $5.5 million from a southern Iraqi state bank on Saturday put together. They pulled off their robbery after giving guards tea laced with a sleeping drug, which seems like something you’d typically see in a bad Mission: Impossible sequel, but damned if it didn’t work. Because of their tainted tea, the robbers were able to carry out the robbery without firing a single shot at a bank near Najaf, the country’s Interior Ministry said. The stolen money amounts to 6.5 billion Iraqi dinars. Authorities say that a recent surge in such robberies is likely tied to insurgents seeking to fund their military operations. To carry out their dastardly plan, the bank robbers in this instance worked with an associate who was a member of the bank's guard force and gave the drugged tea to the guards. Once all of the guards passed out, the robbers were able to make a rather casual entry into the bank, collect their loot and make off with the cash. Police were able to arrest two individuals in the aftermath, but so far they have not recovered any of the money. The Interior Ministry said the two captured suspects are simply trying to make money and are not part of a terrorist organization, but they can’t say for certain. In the meantime, members of the bank's guard force are being investigated and all leads are being pursued. Personally, I just want to tip my cap to the bank robbers for finally adding some originality and ingenuity to the bank robbing business…………

- I hate yard sales. No, scratch that. I freaking hate yard sales with a burning passion. People digging out boxes and boxes of their old crap, sorting through it and slapping arbitrary price tags on items they haven’t used in years, then expecting losers to come along and buy that junk as if it were new, must-have merchandise just doesn’t do it for me. Hearing some old person with nothing better to do than cruise the local yard sale circuit on a Saturday morning haggle with some soccer mom about whether to pay $1.25 or $2.00 for the chipped monkey lamp or the used Thighmaster is ridiculous on so many levels I can’t even begin to express it. Safe to say I was glad to be nowhere near the state of Missouri this past weekend as no-life-having losers from several states descend upon southeast Missouri's 100-mile stretch of Highway 25 from Jackson to Kennett for the annual 100-mile Yard Sale. This is an annual happening in which small towns across the Hwy. 25 band together to turn the yard sale phenomenon into a multi-community event and partner it with restaurant specials and other benefits to cash in on all the extra traffic from shoppers along the trail. The event has grown so large that the Missouri Department of Transportation warns drivers to be careful along Highway 25 over the course of the weekend and advises those with lives, hobbies and self-respect who are not-so-coincidentally not participating in this farce to avoid this highway because of excessive traffic. MO-DOT also places message boards out on the road warning of these travel issues. The yard sale on steroids also has its own Web site - 25yardsale.com - created by several local groups in southeast Missouri to help bargain hunters print a map and look for other tourist stops along the way. As someone who is always looking for reasons to celebrate and enjoy his own home state, I think I can chalk my state not having this oversized yard sale debacle within its borders as a victory……….

- As the months and years between a major, historic sporting event and the present pile up, inevitably the number of people who claim to have attended that event rises exponentially until it is several times the actual number of people who were actually there or could have fit into the venue to begin with. By the time the event is 10 years in the past, the number of people who swear that they were in the stands that night swells to the hundreds of thousands even if the event took place at a stadium holding less than 50,000 max. As such, I’m sure that years down the road, a lot of people who were nowhere near Sun Life Stadium in Miami for Saturday night’s perfect game thrown by Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay’s perfect game will claim that they witness the feat on a muggy south Florida spring night. The difference this time around is that tens of thousands of people who did not attend the game will actually be able to produce a ticket to prove that they were indeed there for the game and that ticket will be 100 percent legitimate - more or less. As of today, the Marlins are selling unused tickets to the game in which Halladay pitched the 20th perfect game in major league history, a 1-0 victory over the Marlins. All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office, giving you a chance to fake being there for a truly momentous occurrence in Major League Baseball history. In actuality, paid attendance that night was about 25,000. While that’s actually a relatively large crowd for a Marlins' home game (which can draw as few as 10,000 or so fans on an average night), it’s also a ridiculously small crowd for a perfect game. True, it’s impossible to know if or when a perfecto will happen, but it is Roy Freaking Halladay pitching in your town for one of maybe two times in a season and you can’t get out to watch it in person? The Marlins should have tripled the price of those after-the-fact tickets just to stick it to all of the would-be liars who want to pretend that they were a part of history…………

- Wonder if this is what the good folks at Honda had in mind when they inked punk rockers Paramore to headline this summer's Honda Civic Tour? Something tells me that the automaker would have wanted a different band out there fronting the tour with its name on it if they knew that a topless photo of Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams would be posted to Twitter. The picture, which features the red-headed singer looking into the camera with her shirt pulled down over her chest, looks to have been taken by Williams herself. Why she was taking topless pics of herself on her phone, only she and whomever she was (allegedly) sexting with know. What we do know is that the image was posted to her Twitter account late Thursday night, allegedly by someone who hacked into her account. "Well ... My night just changed drastically," Williams tweeted in response. "Got hacked." The photo was quickly deleted, but as with anything that appears on any Web site for more than .0004 seconds nowadays, it was captured in screen shots and went viral across a wide range of blogs and media sites. Paramore fans (especially male fans, I’m guessing) gathering on Twitter to show their support for Williams, who was enjoying a good run in life prior to the incident. She does a guest spot on bubble-gum rapper B.o.B's "Airplanes," which has reached No. 2 on Billboard's Digital Songs chart, and her band is set to join Tegan & Sara and New Found Glory on this summer's Honda Civic Tour. I don’t think this is the kind of exposure Williams was hoping for leading up to the tour, but power punk bands like hers are plentiful and you always need something to make yourself stand out, so perhaps this is that something special for Paramore………..

- Everything in and around Microsoft is dying a slow, amusing death these days, so it’s only fitting that the company’s Internet Explorer 6 Web browser is now truly a dated relic of the past with less than 5 percent market share in the U.S. and abroad. That stat comes courtesy of Web analytics company StatCounter. Internet Explorer has been one ginormous headache for Web developers and users for years and its incompetence was a driving force behind the growth in popularity of alternative browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome. A litany of security holes and a propensity for breaking nearly every web standard in the book were just two of the many criticisms of the browser, which was the default browser on many Windows machines in the late ’90s and early ‘00s. IE6 reached its peak with a 90 percent market share in 2002 and 2003, but has steadily declined in popularity ever since. Somehow, it managed to stay on the computers of millions of people (I blame old folks and Third World countries) for several years even after Internet Explorer 7 and 8 were released. But at long last, IE6 usage in the U.S. has fallen to 4.7 percent from 11.5 percent in the last 12 months, indicating that the browser is in the final stages of its drawn-out death. Sadly, IE8 holds 30.49 percent market share in the U.S., followed by Firefox 3.6 with 19.85 percent and IE7 with 16.64 percent market share, meaning that nearly half of Web users still use a version of what is truly one of the worst browsers in the history of the Internet…………