I’ve neglected mentioning this before, but feel free to take a look now. The guys over at Penny Arcade have rallied the 150,000 readers at their disposal to raise $90,000 for toys to be donated to Seattle Children’s Hospital. That’s pretty sweet, in every sense of the word. I love the pithy quote from one of the PA guys: “They were right when they said video gamers would grow up abnormal. They did, in fact, grow up with big hearts.”

Zing! If you’d like to contribute to the Child’s Play effort, you can visit the site for more information.

The most interesting part, and the non–obvious part of the story, is that the media got the wrong idea about who runs the site. Mike “Gabe” Krahaulik is indeed one of the co-founders of the site, but Brad Walker (the only other Penny Arcade person mentioned in the article) was only brought on recently. Jerry “Tycho” Holkins has been Mike’s partner on that site since day one. And yet the news article makes absolutely no mention of him.

Jerry does make note on the PA site that he wasn’t around (or avoided the cameras), but you’d think that real journalists would be able to get a few simple facts straight, even if those facts were non-obvious at first glance. Who runs the site? It might sound mean to say it, but can you please get that fact for me and not screw it up before you report it? How hard can that be? The fact that most Americans rely on these people (or their cohorts) to get their information about the outside world sends chills down my spine. How misinformed have we already been without knowing it? If they don’t take care with the little stories, then I’m not going to trust them with the big ones.

Yes, I understand that there aren’t very many good alternatives (yet). I’m simply asking you, gentle reader, to take the local and national news with a larger grain of salt than you may currently be doing. When hearing the news, pretend that a 2nd-grader wrote the report, and that it is some kind of fuzzy, generalized re-representation of actual fact, sung to music. That will probably get you closer to truth than taking whatever they give you straight-up.

I’m a little bit more famous than I thought I was. I’ve known for awhile that if you Google for “Josh Lewis” that I’m the first entry you get. Actually, you get this page. I’m the most famous Josh Lewis there is! Forget that guy on Guiding Light.

But I found out today that I’m also the first entry you get when you Google for “blog” and for some reason that makes me a little nervous, and also excited. I mean… that’s a bit like Googling for “Internet,” so maybe people don’t do that very often, but it’s still interesting.

Update: See the comments for the real story. Oops. I should’ve tested a bit more.

I have always maintained that Henson is exceedingly cruel, but this seems a little ridiculous. We bought him a little plush monkey-friend. The monkey was about two inches high and very cute and squishy. We figured Henson would chew on it and carry it around for a few days, even weeks, before it eventually got worn out and was destroyed. The picture at left shows the state of the tiny cloth-and-stuffing monkey after spending only one hour in our house. Schadenfreude indeed. I think that’s hard proof that Dachshunds are German.