• “There are a million things I’m not good at. But Wheel of Fortune, I can do.” Over the weekend, Caitlin Burke drew the attention of game show fans (and random YouTube users) by solving a lengthy puzzle with just a single letter. It left Pat Sajak speechless, and everyone else pretty much in disbelief. Apparently, she read the Esquire article about the guy who got the perfect Showcase Showdown score on “The Price is Right” and used that as her inspiration. Burke, who conveniently works for Esquire’s parent Hearst, explained that she would treat every word like a tiny puzzle within the puzzle, smallest words first. It worked wonders for her – she crushed the competition with $53,000 worth of cash and prizes. And left Pat Sajak without words. source

• It’s been kinda like a soap opera with politics. Over the entire Spring and Summer and part of the Fall, Iraqi leaders have been in a huge debate over who the Prime Minister was going to be. And it appears that we’ve finally gotten to a point where Nouri al-Maliki will get his second term as Prime Minister. And second-place guy Ayad Allawi will get a little bit of power sharing but not much. Here’s how long it took to finally get everyone to get on the same page:

• 248 number of days Iraq’s already-fragile leadership was in flux
• eight number of months it took for Iraq to agree on its leadership
• seven number of hours today’s meeting to decide Iraq’s leader lasted source

• » Hurt feelings: In the time that Iraq’s leadership has remained contested, there were many points of contention. First off, Nouri al-Maliki’s party did not win the popular vote (Ayad Allawi’s party won two more seats in parliament), and both the prime minister and president are chosen by a parliamentary vote. Secondly, there were fraud allegations throughout the entire process. Thirdly, nearly 500 parliamentary candidates (mostly Sunnis) were banned from running for ties to the Ba’ath Party. Finally, it’s Iraq and there are terror attacks all over the place. Hopefully deciding on a leader will help encourage peace in the war-torn region. If we don’t get that, let’s hope the fight over Alaska’s Senate seat lasts nearly as long. (*Fingers crossed*)

• The war over importing contacts escalates. The other day, Google decided to stop allowing Facebook to import their contacts, partly for competitive reasons. Facebook then devised a way around it that was actually pretty clever. Google has now put up this scare page to let people know that no, you shouldn’t offer your data to Facebook so quickly. So, why won’t Facebook bend on this issue again? And what does this mean for other services that aren’t Google? Well, a key Facebook engineer argues that Google doesn’t practice what it’s preaching. This is a pretty drama-laden fight that keeps getting bigger. source

• 36.7% Nokia’s percentage of the overall cell phone market a year ago; they had the biggest share
• 28.2% Nokia’s share of the  market now; they’re losing on smartphones AND dumbphones
• 2004 the last time they fell below 30 percent in worldwide mobile market share source

• The new policy makes no provision for the many voters who cast protest votes.
• A line from the lawsuit filed on behalf of Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller • Explaining that (stay with us, this gets confusing) write-in votes with Lisa Murkowski’s name spelled incorrectly are protest votes, intended to sabotage Murkowski’s widely-pushed campaign to get people to spell her name correctly on write-in votes. But Alaska doesn’t plan to consider them that way. “To the contrary,” the lawsuit states, “the state is indicating that it will now count a protest vote, deliberately cast with a misspelling as a vote for Murkowski. This effectively nullifies the protest and falsely inflates the vote for the write-in candidate. In short, the state has become a super-voter and will override voter intent and recast the votes for the candidate the state chooses.” Or perhaps people in fact aren’t as good at spelling as Miller’s lawyer gives them credit for. source

• agree House Republican leaders want a moratorium on earmarks in the next Congressional cycle. Jim “started the recession” DeMint and other Senators also want them.
• disagree Many Republicans, however, disagree, arguing that it wouldn’t actually save money. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is one of those guys. source

• There are many many others that the FDA wants to put on the sides of packs of cigarettes, and some are amazingly depressing. The problem with these labels is that the design of many of these looks downright amateurish, like they just got a bunch of random stock photos to use. Would a marketing campaign make more sense? We sense a meme coming on. source

• $2 billion in profits for GM in the third quarter alone (*golf clap*)

Three reasons why this is good news:

• one It’s shaping up to be their first profitable year since 2004 – long before we heard anything about auto industry bailouts.
• two Most of the profits came from North America, where the company has been fairly weak in recent years. (Too many SUVs.)
• three GM has an IPO coming very soon, and a solid performance like this bodes well for their return to stocks. source

• 4,500 number of people stuck on a Carnival cruise ship off the coast of Mexico  after the engines were damaged in a fire
• two number of tugboats pulling the damaged cruise ship to shore (at a somewhat speedy four miles an hour)
• 100’s number of cans of Spam passengers of the ship now have after the Coast Guard dropped off some supplies source