Then you absolutely must visit this Web site. Angel is an Omaha-based greeting card designer. I discovered her clever creations at last week’s Girls Nite Out, an annual fund-raiser for Girls Inc. of Omaha. I purchased five cards that night and plan to buy plenty more.

{I was tagged by mathkiss; thanks!}

Pick 10 songs that you’re really into at the moment, and post them on your blog. It doesn’t matter what genre, or even if it has lyrics, you just have to really like them. After you’re done, tag five people to do the same.

(1) “Big Guns” + Jenny Lewis
(2) “The Greatest” + Cat Power
(3) “All These Things That I’ve Done” + The Killers
(4) “Rise Up With Fists!!” + Jenny Lewis
(5) “Step Into My Office, Baby” + Belle and Sebastian
(6) “Someday You Will Be Loved” + Death Cab for Cutie
(7) “Save the Last Dance for Me” + Michael Bublé
(8) “The Rescue Blues” + Ryan Adams
(9) “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” + Bright Eyes
(10) “What the Snowman Learned About Love” + Stars

# # #

I now tag andrewkendall, carolecrat, thisvintagegirl, oma2bend and idigital to do the same.

Saturday, February 4
6 – 10 p.m.
At The Loft, 11th and Howard
Proceeds benefit the 2006 Omaha Lit Fest

I’m flying to California next week to visit my sister. It’s kind of a last-minute get-away, and I’m hoping the short lead time will help me find a screaming deal on airline tickets.

Can you recommend any Web sites I should definitely check out?

This morning I learned that if you want a glass of chocolate milk made with Nestle Quick, under no circumstances can you use skim milk. It’s gotta be 2 percent milk at least.

With skim milk, the chocolate flakes merely float in the milk and settle at the bottom of the glass, which looks and tastes awful.

Note to self: Buy 2 percent milk next time.

Writer says ex-HealthSouth boss paid for sympathetic stories

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) – A writer who turned out a stream of sympathetic newspaper stories about former HealthSouth Corp. CEO Richard Scrushy during his fraud trial says Scrushy secretly paid her $11,000 through a public relations firm and typically read her articles before publication.

Scrushy, acquitted in June of involvement in a $2.7 billion accounting fraud scheme at the chain of health clinics, strongly denied authorizing any payments to Audry Lewis, a church secretary whose freelance articles appeared in the Birmingham Times, a small but influential black, weekly newspaper.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press show that the PR firm wrote thousands of dollars in checks to Lewis and her pastor, Herman Henderson, who says he was paid to help bring fellow black preachers into the courtroom in a bid to sway the mostly black jury in Scrushy’s favor.

Scrushy said that he only gave money to Henderson’s church for a building fund and Hurricane Katrina relief and that he had recorded conversations to prove it.

The lead prosecutor in Scrushy’s case said there was nothing criminal in what Lewis and Henderson described, and members of the jury have said the only thing that influenced them was a lack of evidence against the defendant. But the payments raise questions about the legitimacy of the ostensibly grass-roots support for Scrushy seen throughout his trial.

During the trial, prosecutors worried that Scrushy was trying to sway community opinion – and possibly the jury – with a Bible-study program he hosts on local TV, as well as a daily show about the trial that aired on a local-access channel purchased by Scrushy’s son-in-law.

Lewis and Henderson said Scrushy still owes them a combined $150,000 for the newspaper stories and other public relations work. An attorney for Scrushy, Donald V. Watkins, said the allegations and the request for more money “could be perceived as a shakedown.”

Scrushy recorded conversations with Lewis and Henderson in his home office and says the tapes prove there was no agreement for any work, including newspaper stories. On the tapes provided to the Associated Press, Scrushy repeatedly tells Henderson the two had no contract for money.

Henderson has said that he suspected Scrushy was recording him during their meetings but thought the tapes were irrelevant.

Lewis’ articles in the city’s oldest black-owned newspaper were uniformly flattering toward the defense before and after money changed hands. But the newspaper moved them to the front page after she started receiving payments from the PR firm.

Between March and June, five articles – four of which were marked commentary – appeared on the front page. Two other articles appeared on opinion pages, and she wrote one letter to the editor.

The day jurors got the case, the Times featured a front-page piece by her saying “pastors and community leaders have rallied around Scrushy showing him the support of the Christian and African American community.”

The PR firm, the Lewis Group, is headed by Jesse J. Lewis Sr. He is the founder of the Times, and his son is listed as the paper’s editor. Jesse Lewis Sr. denied being part of any scheme to plant favorable coverage of Scrushy in the paper.

“We are in the advertising and public relations business, period,” he said.

The editor of the Birmingham Times, James Lewis, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Audry Lewis, who is not related to Jesse Lewis Sr., said she initially wrote the columns and submitted them to the paper for free because she believed Scrushy was innocent. Scrushy liked the pieces and began paying her to write the articles midway through the case, she said.

“He didn’t think he was getting a fair shake in the media, which is why he hired me,” she said in an interview.

Scrushy said he had considered her to be “a nice Christian woman that thought we had been treated badly, and she wanted to help.”

Audry Lewis said she sent unedited copies of her pieces to Scrushy and Jesse Lewis Sr., who had them put in the paper. Scrushy said he looked at some of her stories before publication “to make sure the facts from the trial were correct.”

Documents obtained by the AP show that the Lewis Group wrote $5,000 checks to Audry Lewis and Henderson on April 29, 2005 – the day Scrushy hired the company. Audry Lewis said she later got an additional $6,000 from Scrushy that was routed through the public relations firm.

Separately, a Colorado public relations man who worked for Scrushy, Charlie Russell, said he gave Audry Lewis $2,500 during the trial and signed a contract stating the money was an advance payment for possible work after the verdict.

No such work was done, but Russell denied the payment was for her articles. Russell said he gave Audry Lewis money mainly out of sympathy when one of her relatives died in Detroit and she could not afford to go to the funeral.

I was running into a store in La Vista over my lunch hour, wearing my orange Gap wool coat.

Some smelly man, in a Minnesota Vikings jacket and crazy-messy hair, said, “I like your coat.”

Scary.

Did he really mean my coat? Or something else?

Web sites judged in a blink

TORONTO, Ontario (Reuters) — Internet users can give Web sites a thumbs up or thumbs down in less than the blink of an eye, according to a study by Canadian researchers.

In just a brief one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.

The study was published in the latest issue of the Behaviour and Information Technology journal. The author said the findings had powerful implications for the field of Web site design.

“It really is just a physiological response,” Gitte Lindgaard told Reuters on Tuesday. “So Web designers have to make sure they’re not offending users visually.

“If the first impression is negative, you’ll probably drive people off.”

In the study, researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second. These judgments were not random, the researchers found — sites that were flashed up twice were given similar ratings both times.

They also matched the responses given by subjects who were shown the sites for longer.

But the results did not show how to win a positive reaction from users, said Lindgaard, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. “When we looked at the Web sites that we tested, there is really nothing there that tells us what leads to dislike or to like.”

And while further research may offer more clues, she said the vagaries of personal taste would always be a limiting factor.

“If design were reducible to a set of principles, wouldn’t we find an awful lot of similar houses, gardens, cars, rooms?” said Lindgaard. “You’d have no variety.”

Look no further than a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut. I just wolfed one down in four bites and could possibly eat a second…or more.

Update @ 11:10 a.m.: I have now devoured 1.5 Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Apparently my email server isn’t too happy right now, as I’m told emails sent to wendy@shaggy-money.flywheelsites.com are bouncing back to the senders.

Sorry about that. I hope to have the problem fixed soon. If you need to email me, please temporarily use wendytownley@cox.net.

That is all.