Technically Incorrect

What would you do if a bank you were standing in were to be held up?

Would your loins twitch a little? Would your palms pour water like a fountain at the Bellagio?

Or would you whip out your BlackBerry and twitter?

I only ask because Tuesday, according to the Associated Press, Annemarie Dooling was in an HSBC bank in Manhattan when someone decided to hold it up.

Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that on her Twitter feed she describes herself as "Jet setting, Manhattan drinking, design obsessed sicko; producer for a talk show website", Dooling thought she'd make use of her BlackBerry, with which she happened to be fiddling at the time.

In one tweet, Dooling said everyone in the bank was discussing this movie.

(Credit: CC Loufi/Flickr)

Yes, she thought it might be fun to twitter the whole experience.

"My bank was just held up _ with me in it. HSBC 34 and 8," she offered to her then 1,900 followers.

She added: "Also my whole trackball is GONE!!! I'm locked in the bank still."

Strangely, some people thought she should have been doing something a little more civic-minded. But in a subsequent e-mail to the AP, she explained: "Honestly, the cops were called and everyone was safe and my main concern was reaching out to my friends, fam, and co-workers, which is why I tweeted."

And her tweets continued to be informative. For example: "no i didnt hit the floor. i didnt even notice and he was two people in front of me."

They even became amusing: "cops just said 'wouldnt it be boring if they all did it the same way?' ha. just let me out, Paul Blart."

This was New York, however, so it wasn't long before the critics began tweeting daggers: "someone on Gothamist just told me to fall down a man hole. geez, get a life, buddy."

Which might just have been a witless reference to the teen girl from Staten Island who texted her way into a manhole.

Though not all of Dooling's tweets were well-received, I feel desolate in telling you that the robber got away.

While preparing myself for a feature-length period being upended by Bruno, the Austrian arbiter of taste, I was struck by a sight almost as strange as Bruno in khakis.

The screen was adorned with an ad for U2. Well, it appeared to have been paid for by BlackBerry, but I wonder just how much it might do for perhaps Canada's finest brand.

As some erudite commentators have pointed out, the ad bears a remarkable resemblance to an Apple ad featuring Coldplay. And even to an Apple ad featuring, um, U2.

Which might make one wonder just what machinations might have occurred in order for such a faintly familiar work to see digital light.

What is really quite beautiful about the BlackBerry brand is that it was created without the obvious help of advertising.

It's not that BlackBerry has never been advertised. It's simply that people bought into the brand because they loved the feeling of that business-like machine so close to their fingers and pelvis, rather than because they espied an ad that made them laugh, cry, sing or perhaps even lose their victuals.

It's rarely easy to create ads that feature the extremely famous. They tend to have very strong opinions as to how they should be seen. So is it possible that BlackBerry might have ceded some influence to Bono in the configuration of this work?

When U2 signed a deal with RIM, Bono was positively vertiginous in delineating the difference between RIM and Apple. The Toronto Globe and Mail quoted him as saying: "Research In Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't--access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular."

While it would be lovely to be touched by the spectacular, this spot doesn't seem pass the spectacle test. Right down to the typeface at the very end, which bears an unnerving resemblance to Apple's.

"BlackBerry loves U2," it says. Might the implication be that Apple didn't? Could it be that it was Bono rather than BlackBerry who influenced the ad to be so similar to Apple's, in some slightly odd nose-thumbing gesture in the direction of Cupertino?

It's already a rather peculiar menage-a-trois, given that Bono was a founder of Elevation Partners, which holds a substantial stake in Palm.

So while pondering these peculiarities, I think back to "Bruno." The movie ends with a rather touching charity ditty, featuring Bruno himself. And Sting. And Snoop-Dogg. And Elton John. And, wait, there's Bono again.

He's everywhere, isn't he?

Social crises come upon us like paparazzi down the alleyways of Hollywood. In what seems like a flash, we turn around, smile, and see what we have become.

So it is imperative that I warn you of a deeply concerning trend that may well be sweeping the world: the use of laptops and mobile devices in bed.

A company called Credant Technologies, which appears to specialize in something called endpoint data protection, suspected that the world was heading toward something untoward between the sheets. So it commissioned a survey to discover whether workaholia was causing melancholia.

The results will numb.

It appears that 57 percent of those who said they worked in bed (more than a quarter of those surveyed) said they whipped out their devices between 2 and 6 hours a week. Eight percent said they spent more evening time on their devices than talking with their partners.

Does she seem happy to you?

(Credit: CC Riot Jane/Flickr)

I am sure your first thought (after counting the number of hours you are mobile while prostrate) is to consider the effect this must have on these poor people's loved ones.

Do they screech and howl in frustration? Do they scour the bars, the health clubs, and the monasteries for new lovers, ones who are less inclined to connect with others while reclined? Or do they, perhaps, have makeovers that cause them to look slightly more like something designed by Apple, BlackBerry, or Dell?

While you consider the possibilities, might I attempt to ease your involuntary eyelid-twitch by describing a little of the methodology of this survey.

A mere 300 people were asked about their digital proclivities. And all 300 were employed in the City of London, where it is perhaps inevitable that workers need to use their laptops just before snoring, being a city with a proclivity for more than few afterwork pints.

However, I would be interested to hear from those whose relationships; television viewing; trashy novel reading; hygiene of the hands, feet, nose, or other bodily areas; oh, and sex lives have been affected by a deep and lasting need to be connected to work, when they should be connected to their reason for living.

People, if you don't put your Apple or BlackBerry away...your gadgets may be the only things joining you in bed.

James Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, doesn't tilt at windmills. He butts them with the hardest part of his skull.

Which, when it comes to the crusty, decaying, worm-infested windmill that is the National Hockey League, is no bad idea at all. Rather a hockeyish gesture, too.

The National Hockey League is about as relevant to U.S. sport as the HGH-free baseball player.

Please try wafting down the street and bellowing about the NHL playoffs, which are currently occurring to a national indifference only rivaled, perhaps, by the interest in Tara Reid's welfare. You will be greeted with both sympathy and a call to the nearest paramedic.

So here comes Mr. Balsillie, the BlackBerry maker, who likes hockey so much that he apparently wanders onto the ice at 5.30 in the morning to hone his stick skills and, who knows, his right hook, with a passionate urge to bring an NHL team to Hamilton, Ontario.

The NHL, whose talent for self-destruction matches that of Michael Vick, doesn't seem to welcome dealing with Mr. Balsillie at all.

Over the last five years, he has tried to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators and the NHL hasn't been fond of the enthusiasm with which he went about those tasks.

Now a team in another picturesque coldbed of hockey, Phoenix, has gone bankrupt. And Mr. Balsillie can taste coyote. For this is the name of the ill-fated Arizona franchise.

Hamilton, Ontario. Home of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

(Credit: CC Blueberry87/Flickr)

Mr. Balsillie seems rather aware that he is not the NHL's first choice for a loving date.

Of his quest to buy an NHL team, he told the Toronto Star: "I spent five years looking for a front door. And you get all this characterization (of me): 'Brass,' 'club rules.'"

Yes, the same sort of thing that denied Mark Cuban a chance to buy the Chicago Cubs.

"I tell you, by complying with the club rules you get 100 per cent denied the very thing you're looking for (...) There was no other team coming to Canada. It wasn't going to happen. There was no chance. Certainly not Hamilton. Guaranteed."

The NHL strangely believes that it is so frightfully important that every US TV channel ought to beg to cover its puck-chasing punchfest. It wants to give the impression that hockey is a US sport. It seems rather reluctant, therefore, to allow for another team in Canada.

Yet most of the players are Canadian. Much of the money is Canadian. And the playoffs are, as I am sure you will have etched onto your nose and kneecaps, currently being aired on Versus. Yes, that is the cable channel that also brings you bull riding.

A court on Tuesday will first have to hear a dispute between the NHL and the Coyotes' current owner as to who has legal control of the team.

But Mr. Balsillie has bid $212 million, a far larger bite than the only other rumored bid of $130 million. He also has created a Website, makeitseven.ca, that is the rallying ground for those who would like to see Canada have a seventh NHL team.

It isn't success that keeps sports franchises alive. It's excitement. In the Bay Area, people will go to watch the often hapless Golden State Warriors to offer the team a little hap simply because the Warriors are peculiarly interesting.

They will go to watch the NHL's San Jose Sharks because they have turned flattering deception into a furiously exciting art form. And, well, because there are few other outlets for active aggression in San Jose.

Similarly, the people of Hamilton, Ontario will lose whatever marbles they might have over their Coyotes. They will worship them, caress them and stroke them like puppies returned from outer space.

As Balsillie himself told the Star: "I'm clearly just a passionate hockey fan."

Oh, and just a note for the dear, wise, chilly executives of the NHL- he knows how to make money.

Despite their calm demeanor and sweet, jovial humanity, it appears that the British are Europe's worst sleepers.

Sixteen percent of Brits claim their nights are not like white satin. (The finest European sleepers are, in fact, the Spanish, of whom only 2.4 percent report problems. We can learn a lot from the Spanish.)

While the British do accuse stresses associated with their jobs, their bank accounts, or their miserable spouses of keeping them up and getting them down, there is a new abomination for insomniacs: gadgets.

Yes, we can now happily diagnose a new disease for which some fine commercial entity might create a pill: electronic insomnia.

(Credit: CC Lee Nachtigal)

BlackBerrys, laptops and cell phones are triggering problems before bedtime, problems that creep into sleep like lice into locks. It seems that men over 30 find it hardest to switch off because they can't switch their gadgets off.

You'd think the traditional British remedy of eight pints of lager would do the trick, but apparently not.

The best way to get from one place to another here in New York, where I'm on a business trip, is to walk. Except that walking has become increasingly hazardous.

It's not the nastily dressed business folks who come up behind you and insist on brushing your shoulder as they waft to another interesting appointment. It's the people walking straight at you, typing into their BlackBerry. (My statistically insignificant research showed 75 percent were BlackBerry users. You know, men in cashmere coats and tasseled loafers.)

It happened to me the first time just outside a Cellulite Center on Madison Ave. A man was walking in full stride from the north, pushing his thumbs into his keyboard as if he was a masseur trying to rid a client of a very difficult adhesion.

Naively, I believed that he had to look up at some point before he crashed into my two-pack. Instead, his BlackBerry Storm put a dent in my duodenum. It all happened in peculiar slow motion, like a Volvo crash test.

He looked up, gave me a momentary stare as if he was heartily pissed that I'd disrupted his messaging, and marched on without so much as an "excuse me."

The next time I was about to be struck by someone caught in their BlackBerry blind spot, I danced out of the way, using a move I'd seen Mark Cuban perfect on Dancing With The Stars. The rather hairy man didn't even look up.

A policeman sets an excellent example. See how he stands still and texts?

(Credit: CC Moriza)

Then I decided on a new tactic. I would allow people to walk into me, even perhaps nudging my way slightly into their path, just to see whether and how they would react.

The score so far: three incidents. Two people looked up, as if I had dropped my trousers in the middle of their business meeting. And one told me to expletive watch where I was expletive going.

This leads me to wonder whether walking and PDAing might be worth a little DAing. Surely, some fine district attorneys might find it in themselves to create a little misdemeanor out of this peculiar habit. You know, like jaywalking. Or leaving animal excrement forlorn and unbagged.

Or perhaps, at least, we could have little texting areas on street corners every three or four blocks. Sponsored by BlackBerry. Or Volvo.