Pith & Vinegar

• The color brown has been trademarked. UPS now owns the rights to your water closet.
• How Mr. Rogers saved PBS and turned a Nixon hack’s hackles into hearts of gold.
• If one wanted an indictment of the modern consumer, one need not look farther than the pages of Vogue magazine whose capricious editor, Anna Wintour, gets parodied in the film adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, starring Annie Hathaway as the dowdy assistant cum Pygmalion fashionista. Our editor went to elementary with Annie and Gawker has the picture to prove it.

• “When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that ‘we’ll never be able to collect intelligence again,'” the former official said. “They’d whine, ‘Why do we have to report to oversight committees?’ ” [NewYorker]
• The FCC doesn’t feel like investigating the NSA.
• Grim irony. Our post on bulldogs sometimes contain auto-delivered Google ads for Puppyfinds.com, a scammy doggy sale site. Damn robots.

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