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Do you remember the old Andy Griffith episode where the two tough-guy characters opened up an illegal vegetable stand on the outskirts of Mayberry and Barney was sent out to deal with them?

It took some back-door help from Andy, but eventually the rogue vegetable stand was shut down and Mayberry’s lone grocery store was saved from the competition.

Well, the vegetable-selling rogues are at it again.  This time it’s in Clayton, Calif., where two sisters —  ages 11 and 3  —  have been shut down by the city for opening up a Saturday morning produce stand on a street corner in their neighborhood.

The city sent police officers out to shut down the illegal stand, and when the parents of 11-year-old Katie and 3-year-old Sabrina Lewis protested the mayor got involved.

“They may start out with a little card-table and selling a couple of things, but then who is to say what else they have,” said Clayton Mayor Gregg Manning. “Is all the produce made there, do they make it themselves? Are they going to have eggs and chickens for sale next.”

All we can say is that come Girl Scout cookie-selling season, the girls in Clayton, Calif., better tread carefully. Barney will be waiting.

Jim Stafford

Business Reporter

In the United States, we rank countries by total medals won. It turns out that the rest of the world ranks teams by gold medals won, with total medals used only as a tie-breaker.

But Los Angeles Times writer Chuck Culpepper has devised a better way of ranking countries: by per-capita medals won. The Bahamas is the reining champ, and is facing formidable competition from Australia. Neither the U.S. nor China have a ghost of a chance of topping this ranking; in 2004, the U.S. was 40th and China was 73rd.

The New York Times has the best view of the medals count.

Of course, the Olympic movement isn’t about keeping track. It’s about the spirit of getting together to compete. But we’re still putting Michael Phelps’ mug on the Wheaties box.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

One of the Web’s most popular games — an online version of Scrabble — has been removed from Facebook. The social network site was under pressure from Hasbro to take down the Scrabulous game. More than 1 million Facebook users played the word game.

However, some business experts believe Hasbro’s attempt to protect its intellectual property is an example of a marketing opportunity lost.

From Wharton College:

Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, believes Hasbro’s action is an “incredibly bad business decision.” There is no evidence the Agarwalla brothers were doing “something absolutely disparaging” to the Scrabble brand, he says. In fact, Scrabulous “has been such a fabulously good thing for the Scrabble franchise [that] Hasbro should have been celebrating.”

A Business Week debate on the topic is here. 

Hasbro has launched its own version of Scrabble as a Facebook application, but it hasn’t yet caught on with users. Meanwhile, the Scrabulous creators have devised a game called Wordscraper, which is so flexible that users are able to recreate the Scrabble online experience.

Scrabulous fans also can find the game at Scrabulous.com. 

If you’re just looking for some tips about how to improve your Scrabble skills, there’s a great discussion at Ask Metafilter.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Here’s a quick exercise to get your brain working. You probably can do better than I did at guessing the 100 most commonly used English words in five minutes. I got 45 of 100.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer
 

Remember that old Saturday Night Live skit where Buck Henry is the hapless talk radio show host who gets no one to call?  He starts trying to scare the audience with wild, breathless announcements that are increasingly outlandish and funny.  Henry ended up screaming that people were going to “break into your homes and kill your puppies!” Or something close to that. 

Anyway, with every Internet scare story I read I can’t help but think of that old Buck Henry SNL skit.  

A story yesterday said that hackers have figured out a way to hijack just about any Web site and user, directing us to fake sites even when we type in the right address.  Scary.

Then today I saw that the hackers have taken it a step further. Now they apparently can intercept e-mail at will.  Here’s an excerpt from the Associated Press story: 

A newly discovered flaw in the Internet’s core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force people to visit Web sites they didn’t want to, it also allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

One of those (flaws) was the susceptibility of many e-mail servers to the DNS vulnerability, an opening that gives criminals a way to plant themselves in the middle of the transmission from the sender to the recipient and redirect messages to their own servers, Kaminsky said.

The result: criminals have a way not only to comb through the contents of those messages, but also to gain access to other password-protected Web sites the victims belong to.

Scary stuff.

Jim Stafford

Business Reporter 

I’ve been following the Brett Favre standoff with the Green Bay Packers with bemusement for more than a month now. 

 You can’t read a sports section in the newspaper without a Favre story. It has dominated SportsCenter and the radio talk shows.  Entire shows are dedicated to rumor and speculation on the future of the now un-retired Packer quarterback.

Seems to me that the all-Favre, all-the-time situation surrounding the quarterback has some real similarities with the iPhone. In fact, Brett Favre is the NFL’s iPhone.

Stay with me here.

In the three months before the debut of the 3G iPhone, it dominated the technology media. Every tech blogger and mainstream media columnist devoted blog posts and stories to the device.You couldn’t avoid iPhone news and speculation unless you tuned out every possible news source, this one included.

 Would the 3G iPhone  have a video conferencing capabilities?  Would it offer GPS wayfinding? Would it synch with Outlook and provide “push” e-mail?

The iPhone is technology’s Brett Favre.  

Well, the iPhone finally debuted in early July, and there are still lines at the Apple retail stores to buy it.  Brett Favre made his first appearance at the Packers’ training camp on Monday.  Guess what?  We’ve got a whole season of Brett Favre stories ahead of us.

Jim Stafford

Business Reporter

This is your captain speaking:  There will be no complementary water for coach passengers on this flight. Or coffee. Or tea.

 Yes, it’s come to this: According to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. Airways has begun charging $2 for bottled water for coach passengers on its flights.  It charges $1 for tea or coffee.

So, that Southwest Airlines television ad where the smug flight attendant announces to passengers that there will be a charge for virtually anything and everything aboard the flight — including requesting help from flight attendants — no longer seems so ludicrous. 

 In fact, it looks visionary now!

The good news:  most other airlines, including Southwest Airlines still serve complementary water to thirsty passengers.

 Jim Stafford

Business Reporter

It’s remarkable to be old enough to be nostalgic about video games. Blogger Mark Bottrell has been keeping track of all the active professional athletes who are active in the major leagues and the NFL since they appeared in the 8-bit Nintendo video games RBI Baseball, Tecmo Bowl and Techmo Super Bowl.

Sadly, only one remains: Punter Jeff Feagles.

Madden ‘08 is fantastic, but it’s hard to explain how exciting it was to play the first decent video football or baseball game with actual pro players.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer 

We knew the Google was everywhere, but now we know just how big everywhere is — 1 trillion unique URLs.

From the official Google blog:

This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

However, if you weed out pages reserved by domain squatters, pornography and personal blogs that contain less than a dozen posts, the number drops significantly.

If your earnest and funny but unread blog is not among the 1 trillion indexed pages, you can enter it here.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Six Flags used to be based in Oklahoma City, but then Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder bought the company and moved it out. Consequently, we don’t write about the amusement park business much anymore.

But last week, Six Flags had a roller coaster ride of a week. The stock plummeted 44 percent one day and then recovered nearly all of the loss on the following day. So if you want the thrills and chills of an amusement park ride, but don’t like standing in line, buy a couple of thousand shares of Six Flags. And then hang on!

Don Mecoy
Business Writer