SFL Friday -- And the Pulitzer Goes To.....

Can you imagine all the good karma a practice like this generates:

In December, a Staten Island judge said debt collectors seemed to think their lawsuits were taking place in a legal Land of Oz, where everyone was supposed to follow anticonsumer rules invented by some unseen debt-collection Wizard.

Last month, a Manhattan appeals court threw out a credit-card case, saying a debt collection company had sued the wrong person but pursued the case anyway.

“I think these judges are outraged at the status quo, and they’re trying to change it,” said Janet Ray Kalson, a Manhattan lawyer who chairs a City Bar Association committee that has studied the deluge of credit-card cases.

Debt-buyer businesses purchase lists of names and amounts supposedly due — for pennies on the dollar — from credit-card companies and sometimes have no real evidence about who they are suing or why.

They then file tens of thousands of suits, often with little to back up their claims. A Nassau County judge said this winter, for example, that one of New York City’s high-volume debt-collection law firms, which has close ties to a debt-buying company, did not provide “a scintilla of evidence” that there was a debt at all in a case against a Long Island woman.

Hey, a job's a job, right?

Yes it's Friday and the waves are kicking up, and I have the warmth of the sun within me tonight (within me tonight).

The Sliding Scale of Modern Journalism:

You had Woodward and Bernstein bringing down a corrupt President, Tom Fiedler hiding in bushes to "catch" a canoodling candidate, and now we have Glenn Garvin going undercover to figure out that reality shows aren't all that "real."

Next on Glenn's list -- Captain Kangaroo was neither a true Captain nor a true marsupial.

I smell Pulitzer, my heavily-bearded, red-glassed (glassy eyed?) friend.

What else -- big win for animal lovers. Way to go, Tally!

More news you already knew:

One of the most pronounced changes over the 10-year span dealt with sex outside of marriage. In the 1999 survey, 41 percent of the respondents said nonmarital sex was wrong. That figure dropped to 22 percent in the new survey.

Yet sexual activity - marital or not - seems to be less frequent overall for this age group. In the new survey, 28 percent said they had intercourse at least once a week, and 40 percent at least once a month - both categories were down roughly 10 percentage points from 2004.

Asked if they were satisfied with their sex lives, 43 percent in the new survey said yes, down from 51 percent in 2004.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics!

I guess we'll have to just work harder to get ourselves in the right statistical pool this weekend.

And don't forget to save the date, don't be so sensitive, and why can't we be more like Brazil?

Happy Mother's Day!!