Lemonade

Before we begin, Buzz would like to take a moment to say something we never thought we'd say to any woman: Paris Hilton, please keep your damn shirt on. Seriously, woman, thanks to the Internet, we've seen those two prostheses you call breasts more often in the past weeks than we've seen our wife's. It's boring. Wear a sweater.

Whew! That feels better. Hilton is on our mind today thanks to a hacker or hackers who broke into T-Mobile computers last week and stole information stored on her T-Mobile Sidekick II wireless cell phone/computer. A long list of celebrities' phone numbers and e-mail addresses from Hilton's address book was quickly posted on the Internet. Among them was a number for Dallas' very own Mark Cuban.

Now, Buzz would love to know why Hilton had Cuban's phone number, but he didn't respond to our e-mail (smart man). Even smarter was what Cuban did when he started getting unexpected calls: He added a voice message directing callers to www.icerocket.com, his new Internet search site.

"That was Mark's phone number," Blake Rhodes, who owns the site with Cuban, wrote us in an e-mail message. "When he got the unexpected calls he turned lemons into lemonade."

IceRocket, based in Dallas, launched in August, entering a field dominated by big players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Is it crazy to launch a new search engine in that environment? Rhodes doesn't think so.

"Why not start a search engine in a crowded field?" Rhodes wrote. "Competition is good for everyone, and it is going to be a lot of fun to take on the big boys in the upcoming years...We are also looking to separate ourselves by doing some things like blog search, which is currently being done only by IceRocket."

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Great minds: Note to the Viewpoints page staff at The Dallas Morning News: loved the illustration of a giant Mayor Laura Miller being tied down, Gulliver-like, by tiny people in your February 27 edition. Very clever. In fact, we like it so much, we ran the exact same illustration on our cover on February 28, 2002. (Illustrator Michael Hogue created the drawing for a Jim Schutze story when Hogue was freelancing. He now works for the Morning News and owns the rights to the illustration.) By the way, Viewpoints guys, if you want to recycle any of Buzz's old jokes, feel free. We do it all the time.