4 p.m.

• Now who didn't see THIS coming?

John McCain emphatically denied a romantic relationship with a female telecommunications lobbyist on Thursday and said a report by The New York Times suggesting favoritism for her clients is "not true."

I guess it's a good thing for McCain's said he got the nomination locked up so early. If the GOP race had been several months longer, the Slimes would probably have waitied until closer to Election Day to publish this. Did he or didn't he? I don't know, and I don't care.

• Interesting. Well, not really, but it did give me something to type about below.

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your college exams.

 

More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting confused by the apostrophe. It's a problem familiar to O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagnans across America.

 

When Niall O'Dowd tried to book a flight to Atlanta earlier this year, the computer system refused to recognize his name. The editor of the Irish Voice newspaper could book the flight only by giving up his national identity.

 

"I dropped the apostrophe and ran my name as `ODowd,'" he said.

At my former place of employment, they had a system that accepted the ' -- however, if a name ended in, say, "LaMonde," it would appear as "La Monde" with the extra space. However, there were names in which the "M" would be lower-cased instead, and there were other instances in which it would look like "Lamonde." Oh it made editing names a real joy.