Technically Incorrect

Drew Olanoff has drawn a short straw. But he wants to make it into a long one.

He started raising money by launching Blame Drew's Cancer, which lets you accuse his pesky Hodgkin's Lymphoma of being the cause of everything that is wrong in your life.

His latest charitable poke in the eye to life's vicissitudes is to auction his Twitter name. You see, Olanoff was clever enough to declare himself to be @drew in the microblogging macroworld.

And there can be few places in the world more replete with munificent egos than Twitter.

So it is heartening that Drew Carey, a very funny man who, in real life, doesn't look like Drew Carey (he was a fellow pupil at a screenwriting course in Vegas a few years ago), has already put some large chips on Orlanoff's craps table.

He has bid $25,000 to upgrade himself from the somewhat shameful address of DrewFromTV to the rarefied air of just Drew. The Twitter Drew.

Will Drew Barrymore take on Drew Carey to become the true Drew?

(Credit: CC Csztova/Flickr)

Carey, the genial host of "The Price Is Right" has, however, vowed to up the ante. He will offer $100,000 (the money all goes to Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong Foundation) if he has more than 100,000 followers by November 9, the closing day of the auction.

At the time of writing, Carey has 24,000 followers, which is some 11,000 more than when he made his initial offer.

So which other twittering Drews might give Carey a bike ride for his money? Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus has at least as much money as ego, so surely he might bid. He already has 30,000 followers. Yes, more than Carey.

Then there's New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. He has almost 24,000 followers and, so my very fine spies in Brees's home town of Austin, Texas tell me, he is a very fine, upstanding chap.

And what about Drew Barrymore, she of only 18,000 followers? Surely she might look toward Carey, throw a little Hollywoodian tantrum, gird her finest theatrical loins and declare: "But, soft, my liege. I am the true Drew." (I always thought Barrymore should do a little Shakespeare.)

Should you be a very rich Drew, or just want to inflate the bidding, please use the #drewbid Twitter hashtag.

May the finest and most generous ego win. And may Drew Olanoff's cancer go right back to the creepy dark hole it came from.

I know some people like to install live video feeds in their homes.

I always imagined it was because they don't trust their spouses. Or because they're well, a little odd. Perhaps even very odd.

However, Jeanne Thomas, 43, put her live feed in last October when her home was burglarized. Which turns out to have been a peculiarly clairvoyant decision.

She was sitting in her office Wednesday, and, perhaps because offices are somewhat tedious places, she happened to be watching her dogs scamper about at home.

Suddenly, she noticed visitors appearing through her doggie door. Were her doggies having a poodle party while their Mommy was working? These did not appear to be, well, doggies at all. No, these were hound dogs who were slim enough and mean enough to burglarize her house.

One can only imagine the few seconds during which Ms. Thomas must have suddenly experienced a rapidly expanding air pocket in her throat. However, she swallowed hard and called 911.

The Boynton Beach, Fla., police, ever armed and ready, raced over to her house where they apprehended Curtis Williams, 20 and Steven Morales, 19, inside. They caught another couple of suspects at a home nearby.

The accused are charged with trying to make off with a 37-inch flat screen TV, a "gaming machine" (with games), and a safe.

The police, having appeared, as police should do, right at the end of the movie, sped back to their place of work and put Ms. Thomas' video on YouTube.

It is an enchanting five minutes of footage, so please enjoy. Apparently, it makes for more than interesting viewing when you're just sitting around at the office.

Sometimes even the best product creators have to accept that their inventions may have negative effects far beyond their entertainment value.

So, perhaps, deeply evangelical and conservative supporters everywhere will be raising hallelujahs aloft at the news that Google is closing down Lively, its virtual world experience.

Naturally the company has offered the usual public speaking about concentrating on other businesses and accepting that not every bet will work out.

However, there may be a deeper and more moral core to this decision.

Surely no one has been left unmoved by the Second Life divorce scandal.

Here we had a wife of solid virtue discovering that her husband had entered into a seamy and torrid virtual affair on Second Life (or should that be IN Second Life?).

Will this man now return to a chaste married life?

(Credit: CC Bryngfors)

This was a fantasy entanglement between Modesty McDonnell, who looked as if sleaze was a cloud she could not ascend to in a helicopter and Dave Barmy, a man of strange physical proportions and hair that would not have looked out of place on the head of a Brussels drag queen.

Yes, these were mere avatars, but the distress their relationship appears to have caused Dave's First Life wife, Amy Taylor, led to First Life strife and divorce.

(It also led to Dave and Modesty, whose First Life names are Linda Brinkley and David Pollard to become engaged without ever having met. But who could claim this is the Real Thing?)

The timing of Google's announcement to close Lively is, therefore, suspiciously adjacent to news of Dave and Modesty's immodest cataclysm.

And it seems to me that Google has decided that the world (the First World, that is) has changed. The company seems to be suggesting that becoming someone entirely different in a Second World is a socially divisive minefield.

A Lively World, it appears, can be deadly to our fundamental social structures. It will be interesting to see whether divorce rates decline in the aftermath of this brave and good-hearted closure.

I'm not in the habit of watching PBS or science programs. I am not smart enough and I'm always afraid PBS will ask me for money.

However, last night, as part of its Nova series, PBS showed an extraordinary documentary entitled Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. It featured, Mark Everett, better known as E, the lead singer of the indie/alternative/just plain very, very good band EELS.

As a child, his father didn't talk to him very much. He didn't hug him at all. In fact, pretty much the first time Mark had any physical contact with Hugh Everett was when he found him dead on the sofa. "It was weird touching him," he said.

Hugh Everett was generally considered to be a bit weird. Perhaps every physicist is. But Hugh was one of those physicists who felt he was a genius and didn't know how to persuade others of that difficult fact.

He died of a heart attack when Mark was 18. Not long afterwards, Mark lost his mother to cancer and his sister committed suicide. In her suicide note, Liz said she wanted to join her father in a parallel universe, a reference to Hugh Everett's theory, one he spent much of his life trying to get others to respect.

Mark Everett in 2006. He wears the same cap in the documentary

(Credit: CC Ella Mullins)

As I understand it (please be gentle with me here, as I only watched this documentary once) until Hugh Everett posited that matter might exist in parallel universes, the rock star of physics was a man in a woolen suit called Niels Bohr.

Hugh Everett sent Bohr his theory and, while Bohr tried to be polite about it personally, he had many of his scientific groupies trash it as if it were written by Milli Vanilli. The word 'stupid' was used. For those who may not know this extraordinary story, I will not spoil it, except to say that Hugh Everett spent many years of his life in weapons development.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives was an attempt by Mark Everett to understand what it was that occupied so much of his father's mind. Mark's hope was that, in the process, he might understand his father better too.

Please watch this brilliant documentary online or in one of its hopefully countless PBS reruns. If you're not moved by watching a highly intelligent, eccentric rock star try and create some intimacy with his father from beyond the grave, then you died several years ago.

EELS' music is at times melancholy, but always highly intelligent. As Mark puts it: "I get it now. We're both 'idea men' and anything outside of these ideas is a distraction."

Hugh Everett always seemed to get on better with animals than people. So does Mark. Hugh often wore the same clothes all the time. So does Mark.

Discovering just how revolutionary his father's thinking was allowed Mark to begin to forgive his father's shortcomings: "I had been angry at him all these years but, now that I saw so much of him in myself, it became easy to identify with him. I let him off the hook. And life immediately got better."

This program came from a parallel universe to my own, but completely floored me. It wasn't just the human story, but the way it is intermingled with an extraordinary theory of physics. A theory that attempts to open our eyes to a new understanding of our reality.

Today, I have not stopped thinking about whether there is another Mark Everett in another universe with another mindset and another life story.

And I have not stopped thinking about another Hugh Everett in another universe. I wonder what he might be thinking today.