Xiao Xiong

He seems to think his B-list celebrity status entitles him to engage in international diplomacy with dictators such as Hugo Chavez and now Raul Castro. How can we make him go away?

I'd like to teach my Western Culture class about the Magna Carta, but they have short attention spans and although this is an important bit of Western history it's kind of boring. I'd like to have them do a skit or short play about it but I can't find a script online. Anyone know where I might get one? Any ideas?

The above was in the headlines this morning, as though anyone still cares about these geriatric former musicians. Why do celebrities think we give a rip about their opinion on the presidency? Or about any political issue, for that matter?

I recently bought a USB flash drive, and when I plugged it in my computer I found that it has a virtual CD ROM drive on it. That is, the computer interprets the F: Drive as a CD ROM. There are some utilities on there but they are useless; the virtual CD just takes up space I could use for something else.

I'm running Windows Vista, by the way.

-- I've tried deleting the files but they can't be deleted.

-- Using the command prompt, I've tried removing the attributes and deleting them, but it always says, "access denied"

-- I've tried using a disk-wipe utility that will wipe the USB on startup (so the files aren't in use) but no joy there either.

-- I can't even reformat the thing because it appears as a CD ROM and of course you can't format a CD -- at least not with Vista.

I've spent hours on Google trying to find a solution, but nothing works. Please don't tell me to get a new flash drive; I could buy one but that's not the point. I want to win this struggle and learn something besides.