Tonight's interview, in comparison with the last one at least, was somewhat cordial and centered around Frank's calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards on mortgages for condominium purchases.

In March, Fannie Mae said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70 percent of the units have been sold, up from 51 percent, the paper said. Freddie Mac is due to implement similar policies next month, the paper said.

In a letter to the CEO's of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold "may be too onerous" and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments, according to the paper.

The legislators asked the companies to "make appropriate adjustments" to their underwriting standards for condos, the paper added.

So O'Reilly expressed his concerns, somewhat legitimate concerns we might add, that Frank's proposals would lead us down the same road that got us into so much financial trouble previously, and Frank explained his position. But what was probably the best thing about this entire interview was Frank looking as though he'd rather be any place else in the world other than on television with Bill O'Reilly. He actually picked his fingernails during much of the time O'Reilly spoke, but who can really blame him?

Unlike with Sarah Palin's emails, there's not really a public-spirited reason to post the screenshots the hackers took, except, of course, pure voyeurism. The detail-by-detail, appointment-by-appointment depiction of the lifestyle of a rich and famous actress is all engrossing stuff for the masses (and for us). And yet it feels oddly unsatisfying — the same drip, drip, drip of minutiae that the Internet famous overshare on blogs and Twitter.

Screenshots of the shayek@mac.com email account, released by habitués of the online bulletin board 4chan, appear to be authentic. Breaking into the account was a simple matter of knowing Hayek's birthday — September 2 — and guessing at her security word (they claim it was the name of her best known movie role) to reset the account's password. Public-records searches show that the 323-area-code phone number Hayek listed in a sent email belongs to the actress. A spokeswoman for Hayek has not returned a call requesting comment.

The glimpses into Hayek's life revealed by her inbox are fascinating, even if mundane: The stranger-suckling actress has been invited to America Ferreira's 25th birthday party. She downloads a bunch of iPhone applications from the iTunes App Store — and she gets spam from Apple, just like the rest of us. As for the perks of being famous, a driver was scheduled to meet her flight arriving in Abu Dhabi. American Express has given her a new Gold card. (What, she doesn't rate the exclusive black Centurion Card?) Balenciaga and Stella McCartney deliver designer clothes to her apartment. She schedules "Japanese face massages." And she gets scans of stories about her in the celebrity weeklies.

• Rosie O'Donnell, contradicting Barbara Walters' rosy description of relations on The View: "I’m not saying they loathe each other, but the fact of the matter is, there was not a lot of camaraderie off camera.” [LAT]
• Bill Clinton supposedly wants Hillary's old job if she becomes Secretary of State, and so gave a backrub to New York Gov. David Patterson. A better headline would have been "Happy Ending?", Six. [P6]

• Paris Hilton's ex, the Greek shipping heir she was all over after breaking up with Benji Madden, has not been waiting for a girl like her: He's smitten with Annabelle Dexter-Jones, daughter of Foreigner lead singer Mick Jones and, obviously, much classier. [P6]
• Winona Ryder's "mystery illness" brought an airplane down early and warranted hospitalization in London. But everything's suddenly OK now! [Daily Star]
• After previously offering to let Anderson Cooper ogle her chest, NeNe Leakes of Real Housewives of Atlanta is hip to the CNN anchor's desires: "He is THE silver fox, and I just wish he’d come over on this side of the street." [People]
• There are rumors that married Mel Gibson was tight with "a dark-haired beauty named Oksana" on the set of one of his movies, and now the wife is supposedly suspicious. Someone should reassure her: Oksana is a name of Hebrew extraction!
• Marc Jacobs is "seriously considering marriage." Just one... last... three-way... [NYM]
• Justin Timberlake would only wear a black leotard on Saturday Night Live if he was guaranteed residuals. [Gay Socialites]

[Agency Spy. More new ads at Valleywag]

Accessing PsyStar's website has become problematic, though it's not clear if it's due to court inunction or just the amount of public interest the company has generated. You have to give PsyStar credit for their moxie, though — running Windows, Linux or OS X on the same, relatively inexpensive and modifiable box as demonstrated in a promotional clip from PsyStar is the stuff übergeek dreams are made of.

TIM THE IT GUY — Even an Apple Store employee called Friday's iPhone launch "Not very Apple-like". It would've been a lot shinier had Apple stuck to releasing only one complicated product at a time. But no, some marketing whiz decided to debut an all-new phone and upgrade the old phones on the same day. On top of that, Apple unveiled an applications store and also forced users of Apple's $99-a-year online email and sync .Mac accounts to self-migrate to a completely different platform — whether or not they were buying an iPhone. Here's why compared to previous Apple launches, Friday was one big mistake:

Unike most Apple products, none of Friday's new toys were simple retail boxes to be sold over the counter. Each required its own special technical prep -– carrier activation, a software upgrade, or a self-migration process. Apple failed Change Management 101: They scheduled too many logistics and IT changes for the same day, with each change performed before anxious customers' eyes. Any one of Friday's problems would've been defendable on its own. Instead, it seemed as if Apple were trying to disable as many customers as possible.

You never go into McDonald's and find they've got a new burger, plus an upgrade to the Quarter Pounder, plus a whole new kind of sugary drink all debuting on the same day. Mickey D's sticks to one rollout risk at a time, and lets everyone else get their Big Mac as usual. That's what added insult to injury: Apple's stores, nearly empty because they could handle only a few iPhone buyers at a time, were closed to customers who'd come to buy a laptop.

When the next-generation iPhone comes out, I hope they put aside the other new goodies for later. Release one change per week as a separate launch. That's what's frustrating: Friday's four-way fiasco could have been a month's worth of buzz.

(Photoillustration by Jackson West)

Through its .Mac subscription service, Apple currently offers Mac-only versions of email, bookmarks, file storage, and photo sharing. Google offers all the same services for free, though it charges for extra storage. Apple might well hand its Web businesses over to Google, in exchange for a share of the revenue. Competing with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in online applications would seem like a fool's game.

Why it might not happen: Steve Jobs has long bragged about being the only company that "makes the whole widget," by which he meant hardware and software. Nowadays, the whole widget means hardware, software, and services. Apple has proved it can develop software for Windows with iTunes; ceding the Web to Google might be too much of a blow to the corporate ego.

BusinessWeek gives Apple's iPhone and iPod much of the credit, but also blames Vista; 90 percent of office workers remain on XP. One factor BusinessWeek didn't account for: the Internet. As more of what people actually do with a computer takes place on the Web, the less it matters what type of computer users access it with. Now you know why Steve Jobs has Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the board — it's not for his personal charm. (Photo by atp_tyreseus)

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

"This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways," said Gráinne Fitzsimons. "We've performed tests where we've offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior."

[Science Daily via Neatorama]

Cajun,

I know in the the past you've written about Apple and Microsoft and the way that they market themselves, so I thought that you might find this interesting.

A few nights ago, I participated in a focus group. Though the company conducting the focus group wasn't revealed to us, it was obvious that it was Microsoft because all of the marketing material that we were presented with dealt with, well, MICROSOFT. What became apparent to all 8 of us in the group was that Microsoft was in the midst of preparing an advertising campaign that would make it appear that its software and the PCs that run them are a younger, hipper product. They showed us a number of sample ads that seemed to emphasize global community, peace, love, happiness and environmentalism, etc., and how Microsoft products can bring the world together and make it better place. All of us in the group were struck by how Apple-like the ads were. Some even expressed thoughts that they appeared to be straight rip-offs.

But what struck me as the funniest thing out of all of this was that it appears as though Johnny Knoxville might be their answer to Justin Long. We were shown some marketing material featuring Knoxville, including one commercial in which he falls and drops his PC in Jackass type stunt, but then a "don't worry about losing your data if your computer becomes destroyed because you're a jackass because the new Windows automatically backs up to files for you" message was delivered.

I thought you might find it interesting. And please don't use my name if you mention anything about this on my blog because they made us sign confidentiality agreements.

Cheers,
[Redacted]

That honor has to go to Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself, heard of him?