Avon, which hit a 52 week high yesterday, has announced a new men's fragrance created with Patrick Dempsey.  It's called Patrick Dempsey Unscripted, and will be available in the US in November and globally in 2009.  Normally, this wouldn't be something I'd be interested in writing about (I buy Burberry Brit from Holt Renfrew), but I started thinking about how this partnership could be expanded.  Isn't one of Avon's largest consumer groups actually its distributors, and aren't the majority of Avon distributors female?  I would have thought that bringing Patrick Dempsey on board to create a women's perfume would have been a guaranteed hit.  Is it coming down the pipeline, did Avon miss the boat, or am I missing something?  Maybe they simply couldn't get the trademark rights for the perfect title:  McDreamy.

Microsoft, after unveiling the Surface computer and multi-touch wall prototypes, is now showing off a spherical version.  While its uses may be limited, it could work well in a public environment like a lobby where multiple people need to quickly access small amounts of information.  So far, the prototype software includes a photo viewing tool, a globe, and an interesting Pong-style game; all manipulated solely by touch.  With the Surface now in use at certain AT&T stores, it may not be long until the public gets to try out this new version as well.

With the DOW currently above 11,100, a turn around in the stock market doesn't seem quite as imminent as it once did.  Merrill Lynch just reduced their CDO exposure by $11.1 billion after the market close today.  However, as a Merrill Lynch shareholder, you've just been diluted by 20%.  Also, even though the Sirius/XM merger has now been approved, shareholders of both companies aren't exactly feeling like winners.  Even Jim Cramer isn't touching the common stock.  We're going to need a bigger catalyst than another short squeeze if the next rally is going amount to anything, and it seems like it's going to be a long time before we get one.

As I was complaining a few days ago about Tesla, I got thinking about which small car company could one-up them and make a car more like what I had in mind.  My favorite candidate was Fisker, though I figured they'd continue to base their creations on modified Mercedes and BMWs for a long time to come.  However, it turns out that they are indeed building what could loosely be called a competitor, though it's a hybrid and not a 100% electric car.  It's called the Karma and, as Autoblog reports, it will be available in 2009.  With proper dimensions and significantly more style, this is the first "green" sports car I would actually like to be seen in.  As a bonus, Henrik Fisker also penned the Aston Martin DB9; the most beautiful car of all time.

Michael Arrington posted on TechCrunch two days ago that he'd like to see a simple web tablet produced for around $200, and wants help building it.  Named the Firefox Tablet (at least for now), it would bypass any desktop interface and be used primarily for browsing and Skype.  If you think about it, everything from instant messaging to e-mail to wordprocessing can now be done from within the browser, and with an iPhone-style touch screen keyboard, it would probably be all you need for your away-from-home computing.  It'll be very interesting to see where this goes.

As a side note, Loren Feldman thinks he's delusional!  I look forward to his expanded explanation later.

TechCrunch posted a story yesterday announcing Tesla's unveiling of their first showroom.  I have to say I'm not very impressed.  The showroom isn't jaw-dropping; it's bare, and not in an Aston Martin "minimalist luxury" kind of way.  In addition, I'm really disappointed with their first car.  Those in the technological "know" correct the rest of us who say it's simply a rebadged, electrified Lotus Elise, but that's still the concept it's derived from, and the dimensions are almost the same.  I was really hoping for a car that rivalled the Mercedes Benz SL550 or other gas powered convertibles in its price range, but the car doesn't even come close to offering similar features.  In my mind, for hybrids, the Honda Insight was an impractical experiment, the Toyota Prius was a more reasonable experiment with extra seats, and the first solid, respectable example that I would actually buy was the Lexus LS600h.  I can't help but feel that it will take a very long time before the first electric car capable of servicing a properly discriminating customer will ever be built.

If you've ever wanted to sign up for a web account or newsletter, but didn't want to share your real e-mail address because of privacy or spam concerns, you may have already used a temporary e-mail service.  The best one I've ever used is GuerrillaMail.com, and I'm not being paid to say this.  I've found it to be significantly better than its competitors because it never actually asks you for your real e-mail address, and all your temporary mail is delivered to the online interface.  The account also automatically expires in 15 minutes, but you can ask for more time.  It may not work as well for someone who wants a longer term inbox, but nothing beats it for the quick stuff.

I was alerted this week to a law that I've always thought must be out there; I just never had a title for it.  In contrast to Murphy's Law, Muphry's Law states that "if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."  The earliest source I can find for this law is The Society of Editors Newsletter from March, 1992, though I suspect that it's resided on hot-under-the-collar forums and message boards since the beginning of computing.

I had another topic all ready to go for today's blog entry, but then TechCrunch asked people to speculate on what Facebook would announce at their F8 Developer Conference next week.  I decided a few minutes of creativity was an appropriate price to pay for a shot at fame and a TechCrunch T-shirt, so I'm forecasting that they'll be announcing their own Fphone to complete with the iPhone and Gphone.  Okay, it's a long shot.  However, would it ever work?  Apple iPhones are a must-have item for the tech crowd, but what's the must-have item on a college campus?  Other than beer, for the last few years it seems to have been a Facebook account.  With Amazon releasing the Kindle, could Facebook be the next web property to experiment with hardware?

CNBC had Donald Trump on this afternoon to announce his sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian billionaire for one hundred million dollars.  Note that this is not Mar-a-Lago, which he maintains is the greatest mansion in the US, but another property that he picked up at auction for $41M a couple of years ago.  Donald sure picked an interesting time to get this done considering the issues in the US real estate market right now, though I have to admit that I'm still pretty happy for him.  Fox News also covered the story here.