This is one of those times.

(Link from the Bad Pitch Blog)

While iTunes has always asterisked potentially offensive entries in its database, recently the UK version of the music retailer went on a censoring binge that blanked out hundreds of inoffensive song titles and artist names. The Dick Van Dyke song from Mary Poppins was changed to “The D**k Van D**e” song. Danny Kaye’s innocent little tune “I Thought I Saw a Pussy Cat” became “I Thought I Saw a P***y Cat.” Stranger yet, Johnny Cash and Johnny Mathis had their first names reduced to “J*****y” and Avril Lavigne’s “Hot” read “H*t.”

Is J****y - er, Johnny - used in the UK as slang for a body part? Seriously, I can’t imagine why they’d censor that. Then again, I can’t imagine why they’d censor the word “hot,” either, so we’ll chalk it up to an honest mistake.

Twitter has been pretty stable lately, and the Fail Whale hasn’t made an appearance for me for what seems like at least a month. Even though the service has made great strides recently, and has attracted a lot of mainstream attention from news outlets such as CNN, @biz and @ev are concerned with the service’s “sustainability,” which is understandable. Although when I use ad-supported Twitter programs like Twitterrific for the iPhone, it makes me think that Twitter could include in-feed ads, charge for premium accounts (maybe with a raised follow limit?) or throw banner ads up without upsetting the user base.

Still, I appreciate that Twitter is devoted to getting its act together before figuring out how to make money. But with swelling numbers of users and investors breathing down their necks, how long can they afford to do so?

Matt Millen has been general manager for the Lions since 2001, and in that time the team has only won 31 games, set the record for the most consecutive road losses, have gone through a handful of coaches, and inspired a “Fire Millen” movement that included fan marches calling for Millen to be tarred, feathered and run out of town.

A few days ago I made a declaration on Twitter that I would not be rooting for the Lions until either Millen was fired or the sole owner, William Clay Ford Sr., passed ownership of the team along to his son. I now can cheer for my hometown team again, as this morning I was thrilled to learn that Millen had, in fact, been let go, after a dismal 0-3 start to the season and no hope of things getting better.

Might the end of the disastrous Millen era be a harbinger of good things to come? Most sports fans know about the infamous Chicago Cubs “Billy Goat” curse, which has supposedly prevented the team from winning a World Series over the last century. The Detroit Lions have their own curse, however, known as the “Curse of Bobby Layne.” Bobby Layne was a remarkably talented All-Pro quarterback who led the Lions to three championships in his eight years with the team. After he got injured, the Lions traded him to the Pittsburgh Steelers. As the story goes, Layne was so upset at the Lions the he vowed they wouldn’t win another championship “in fifty years.”

That fifty year deadline is up in 11 days. With the curse lifted, will the Lions be able to turn it around? I have my doubts, but even so, I’ll be rooting for them.

Google has made great strides in creating applications that live on the Web, but the chief problem with that concept is that if your browser crashes (a not-infrequent occurance), you risk losing your work. It looks like Chrome will address this issue by minimizing memory leaks and allowing users to kill processes that hog memory via a task manager.

Of course, the project will be open source. I wasn’t able to find a release date for the beta, but if you know anything, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Google released Chrome about a day after I put this up. Walt Mossberg has the definitive review.

“The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no non-disclosure agreement had been signed, [was] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica’s management,” Turner continued. “We only eventually removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned (the piece was written anonymously).”

Metallica has a long history of alienating their biggest fans, and clearly fears digital media, but this feels clumsy and ham-fisted even for them. If the album mix wasn’t final, they shouldn’t have invited writers to listen to it and then act shocked when they, you know, wrote about it.

Most people use these to transfer files home from work and back again, but the USB drive can also be used to run small open source applications from PortableApps.com. These programs can be used as a digital Swiss Army Knife and can come in extremely handy, especially for work computers that don’t allow you to install software. My favorites have helped me out many, many times, and include:

GIMP Portable - GIMP is an open source graphics/photo editor, similar in many ways to Photoshop. While it isn’t quite as slick as its inspiration, it works great for resizing and cropping images, and if you take the time to learn it you’ll discover it’s extremely powerful in its own right.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - When I browse the Internet, I typically have about 8-10 tabs open in Firefox. In fact, browsing without tabs drives me nuts. If your work computer has an old version of IE, this portable version of Firefox can be a godsend.

PDFTK Builder Portable - One of the strengths of the PDF format is that documents look the same across systems and platforms and they can’t be easily edited by others. One of the downsides is that they can’t be easily edited by you, unless you have Adobe Acrobat. Fortunately this program is around to help you split up and recombine pages from PDF files. This is one of those programs that you might not realize you need until you actually need it, and by that time it can help you avoid some very frustrating situations.

Each of these programs are small in size, so you can fit several of them on any modern USB drive. They’re a great way to put an extra drive to use, and in the right circumstances can honestly save the day.

For most people, the brain is their rational, analytical side. It tells people to be cautious, to take in all of the factors before making a decision. The gut has a more spontaneous, reckless influence. People who work on logic work with their brain. People who work on feeling work with their gut. Right?

Not for me. My gut is, and always has been, my “voice of reason.” In fact, I’m pretty sure my conscience dwells somewhere in my abdomen. My brain causes me to think too much, and by over-thinking, I end up procrastinating or trusting my brain to remember important details that my gut tells me I should double-check. Then when I realize I’ve made a mistake and it’s too late to do anything about it, I feel it right there in the pit of my stomach. It’s my gut’s way of saying, “I told you to listen to me, and since you didn’t, I’m going to make you feel terrible for the rest of the day.”

The problem is, my brain is much louder than my gut, and tends to overpower it. Sometimes I’ve got to listen really hard to what it’s trying to say, and when I do, I almost always realize it’s right. It’s truly subconscious – almost an instinct – and my instincts are normally pretty spot-on.

From now on, if I’m ever caught in a situation where my gut is telling me something that my brain disagrees with, I’m taking a moment to listen closely. It’s always worked for me in the past, it’s just taken me a while to realize where my loyalties should lie.

Blog It would be very cool if it allowed you display all of your information on one page as well as update it all from one page, which would in essence “eliminate the middle man” of the various social media sites and make it extremely convenient and less time consuming for users to update and display their info. I can’t imagine the Twitters, YouTubes and Wordpresses of the world would be too pleased with this service, but really, it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?

In a perfect world, I’d like to see most people paying for routine health expenses out-of-pocket from a health savings account, while keeping a catastrophic high-deductible insurance policy to cover accidents and major health crises. Consumers do have this option, but in the U.S., where most people get their health insurance through their employers, the traditional system isn’t going anywhere soon. Anything that gets people talking about possible solutions to our health care problems, however, is a good thing.

(The article comes via the WSJ Health Blog, which is one of my favorite reads on the Web. Not only are the posts themselves gold, but the comments sections bring in remarkably insightful comments from very intelligent people. It’s truly the blog that keeps on giving.)