A new handful of YouTube videos supposedly show cell phones popping popcorn. The method: Surround kernels with a few cell phones and call the phones. When they ring, the kernels pop. The videos have gotten a couple million combined views, and they've seemingly convinced many commenters to fear phones, despite the several obvious signs that they're fake.

WARNING: The Associated Press would like to call your attention to the fact that your teenage son, daughter, friend, or relative is, right this very moment, in all likelihood, engaging in an explicit sex act that they are planning to distribute to the world via cell phone. It's true! In a fact-based story titled "Teen Dating '08: Nude Pix On Cell Phones," the news service urges you to "Forget about passing notes in study hall." Why? Because "some teens are now using their cell phones to flirt and send nude pictures of themselves." Nooooooo! Don't you kids know that dirty cops will be looking at those picture in no time?

Here is a prime candidate for immediate cloning: John Clifford, a 6'4, quick-tempered former police officer and a lawyer whose greatest pleasure in life seems to be riding the Long Island Rail Road and aggressively screaming at jerks who are talking too loud on their cell phones. Clifford was just found not guilty of charges stemming from his latest enforcement action, when he cussed out an obnoxious cell phone user he described as "a 19-year-old nitwit waking up one girlfriend after another." But this isn't even close to being the first time he's had to regulate on some yapping nitwits on the train:

Those damn kids with their damn cellphone computers, always making noise during class with their text IMs and the picture mail. Wouldn't it be nice if we could find a practical use for all that techno-garbage and have the added bonus of not having to hear those pimply faced idiots' squeaky little voices? Well, it looks like we're there! At Yale they've implemented a brand new technology called zuku, that allows students in large lecture classes to text message questions to some sort of computer server interface RAM that will answer their questions straight away (or at least make the professor aware of them so she can answer them later.) Apparently it's become too hard to address children who raise their hands and ask questions verbally. The technology also allows students to text an answer to a class-wide multiple choice question, thereby immediately giving the teacher an indication of how many kids are keeping up with the material. In my opinion it's new-fangled and awful. But no one will listen to me until the campus green is littered with the corpses of students lost to hoverboard accidents. [Yale Daily News]

Apparently every cab in New York will eventually be home to a celebrity iPhone; just a week after the NY Daily News reported on the guy who copied Annie Leibovitz's assistant's contact list after he found it in a cab, a Facebook user says he found the iPhone of Richard Cohen, the NYC real estate developer who recently divorced newscaster Paula Zahn, in a cab. The celeb contact list is below, so you can argue whether the list (which includes Kissinger, Kerry, and Deniro) trumps Leibovitz's.

Actually no. Reuters' story today, "Porn to spice up cell phones," is just a rehash of a trend story that was never fulfilled, despite plenty of publicists planting the story to promote clients' phone-porn ventures. Take, for instance, the 2004 Cox News story, "Can you see me now? Porn coming to U.S. cell phones," a result of Playboy expanding into mobile phones. Of course Playboy was late, as there was already a story about the struggling phone-porn industry in 1992, when cell phones were actually larger than a naked woman. Click through for the full-size screencap from the Lexis Nexis archives &mdash and the real reason Reuters ran this story.

Kiddie porn! Twelve-year-olds photographed against their will by mustachioed 40-year-old perverts and passed around to other perverts! Except it's also photos of high schoolers, taken by high schoolers, and passed around to other high schoolers, like the photos and video of two girls (one showing her breasts, the other having sex with a boy) that spread throughout an Allentown, PA high school for six weeks before the cops started to investigate. Students say everyone at the 3200-student Parkland High School got a copy, usually on their cell phones. So did students at another high school and at Temple and Harvard. So who goes to jail when underage teens possess underage teen porn?

Think back, if you will, to October 2004. It was an innocent time, a time when to have a cell phone typically meant one of those Nokia bullets or a Motorola V60 (hey, remember those?), or if you were all fancy, a big-ass Blackberry. We bring this up for one important reason: to trace just how you, and we, got suckered—yes, suckered—into buying possibly the worst phone on the market today, the Motorola RAZR.

Well, okay, we made that up. But we couldn't help but think that something nasty is going to start going around NYC public schools after we read the following in the Daily News:

Does anyone have Cell Phone Plague (known to historians as "the Yak Death") worse than Silicon Valley? (Okay, probably Seoul, but the Koreans will always beat us.) The VCs and sales guys chatting it up on the street — as well as the ad kids calling Mom — should take a hint when "portable phone booth" art projects start popping up.