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By LISA CORNWELL Associated Press

CINCINNATI (AP) - A man who says he was charged with disorderly conduct after using the word "crippled" to promote a comedian with muscular dystrophy claims Cincinnati police violated his free speech rights, and the comedian agrees.

Forest Thomer, of Cold Spring, Ky., is to appear in a Cincinnati courtroom on the charge Wednesday. He was cited by Cincinnati police last month at a park after he and comedian Ally Bruener say he asked people if they wanted to "laugh at the crippled girl."

The question was not intended to demean his friend Bruener, but to promote her next comedy show and her allybruener.com website, the two said Monday. Bruener, who is in a wheelchair because of the degenerative muscle disorder, said she would approach people after Thomer asked them the question, tell a joke and talk about her next performance. Thomer also would record some of the public's responses for use on Bruener's website, showing people saying: "I laughed at the crippled girl."

Thomer, 25, was cited May 23 on a disorderly conduct charge alleging that he walked into people and shouted obscenities at them, according to court records. Thomer was asked to stop his behavior but "persisted in yelling and shouting, causing annoyance and alarm to others," according to the complaint in Hamilton County Municipal Court. Thomer could face up to 30 days in jail if convicted of the fourth degree misdemeanor charge, a court official said.

"We were just going up to people and asking the question, said Thomer, who denies all of the allegations.

"You can't just arrest people or have them arrested just because you don't like what they are saying," Thomer said.

Lt. Anthony Carter, a Cincinnati police spokesman, declined to comment. The city prosecutor did not immediately return calls for comment.

Bruener, 23, of Alexandria, Ky., said "people are trying to be too politically correct and force us to be as well."

The idea was to get people's attention and help them "let down their guard a bit," said Bruener, who says she uses her humor to try to remove any stigma from the word "crippled."

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Ohio comedy promoter: Cited for 'crippled' quip

June 19, 2012, 8:48 AM PDT

Takeaway: You can delete a problematic AutoCorrect entry or you can try this case shuffling trick to have your cake and eat it too.

Words AutoCorrect feature is helpful, most of the time. When users run into a problem, they usually delete the AutoCorrect item. For instance, if you routinely enter TEH, you could delete the AutoCorrect item that corrects TEH to THE-eliminating the problem altogether.

Deleting the item wont always be the right choice, however. The copyright symbol is a good example of an item thats useful, but that can create an unusual problem. Lets suppose you enter the phrase 501(c) a lot. Words AutoCorrect feature automatically replaces (c) with the copyright symbol (). You can press [Ctrl]+Z, but that gets old after awhile. You could delete the AutoCorrect item, but then you cant use it to enter a copyright symbol.

You dont have to choose, but the solution isnt intuitive. The AutoCorrect item will replace the (c) combo whether the c is lower or upper case. By adjusting the existing item to replace only (C), you can keep the AutoCorrect entry and also still enter the literal string (c). To make this change, do the following:

Now you have a reasonable compromise. You can type (c) without triggering the AutoCorrect change, and to enter the copyright symbol, you type (C). You can use the upper/lower case shuffle in most cases where you need to enter an AutoCorrect replace value without triggering AutoCorrect.

If you accidentally delete the actual symbol from the AutoCorrect list, you can re-enter it by holding down the [Alt] key while pressing 0169 on your numeric keyboard. (Press [NumLock] first.)

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Tweak an annoying AutoCorrect entry instead of deleting it outright

The speculation has been growing all weekend about what Microsoft will be announcing today. Last Thursday the company sent an email to press members requesting their presence in Los Angeles today. There was no word about what sort of product would be announced, or even what division would be making the announcement. This will be a major Microsoft announcement you will not want to miss it, was the only hint.

The most reliable rumors so far seem to pin the topic of the event to a tablet launch. That doesnt answer the question, though, of why Microsoft is choosing Los Angeles as a venue rather than something closer to its Redmond, Washington headquarters.

Now, TechCrunch is repeating the tablet rumor, but theyve added some details. Citing folks with knowledge of the situation, they state that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble will be announcing a Kindle Fire-style tablet/e-reader. They also cite a different anonymous source as saying that the tablet will have Xbox LIVE streaming capabilities.

Both of these things are certainly a possibility, of course. Back in April it was announced that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble were coming together to form a company called NewCo, which would develop a NOOK app for Windows 8. Speculation about a NOOK device running Windows 8 has been making the rounds since then. As for the Xbox LIVE rumor, its clear from Microsofts E3 press conference that the company is hoping to make the Xbox brand the center of its Windows 8 gaming strategy.

If a Windows 8 Nook tablet streaming Xbox LIVE content is really todays announcement, why didnt the company debut it at E3 along with their SmartGlass technology? My guess is that the announcement will involve movie studios or record labels in some way. Perhaps the Zune brand will finally be put to rest with the debut of Xbox Music. Whatever the truth may be, we will all find out today when the Microsoft event starts at 6:30 EDT.

(via TechCrunch)

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Microsoft to Announce a Nook Tablet?

Today, Microsoft executives are making a major announcement at a press event so secretive they waited until the day of just to reveal the location (Milk Studios in L.A.). Here's the best and rest of the event.

Late last week, Microsoft invited a handful of tech reporters to Los Angeles today for an event that boasts all the shrouded mystique of an Apple keynote. (At press time, reporters hadn't yet received word of the location.) Apple, of course, has mastered the art of hyping press events that stir the vat of consumer desire like little else in the tech world. The similarly frenetic rumor mill is churning out all kinds of speculation on today's pending Microsoft announcement. We'll be following the best of the day's news here, both live from the event and from around the web.

Check back here throughout the day for the latest Microsoft news. For live dispatches from the 3:30 p.m. PST/6:30 p.m. EST event, follow Austin Carr on Twitter.

[Image: Flickr user Lesley Middlemass]

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The Best Of Today's Mysterious Microsoft Announcement

NEW YORK The White House messed up its history. That's the contention of critics who pointed to references recently appended to the biography pages of past presidents on the White House website.

Scholars of Calvin Coolidge, the president who is our focus, found an error. The Coolidge "Did You Know?" item says that "On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people."

Alas, Coolidge was not the first, as a retired archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, Jerry L. Wallace, noted in an email to us. The first chief executive to deliver a radio address was Warren G. Harding, whose dedication of the Lincoln Memorial was carried over the airwaves on May 30, 1922.

What the Barack Obama White House did was introduce its own comments and facts to the extant biographies of the presidents on the White House pages. Some commentators such as Seth Mandel at Contentions, the Commentary magazine blog, interpret the effort to draw such parallels as an intrusion on past presidents.

Mandel sees the Obama administration comments as evidence that the president, like many of his young devotees, doesn't "have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One." You can agree or disagree with this criticism.

The real story here is not the specific Coolidge error or whether you like the new White House comments. It is that accurate history is becoming much harder to deliver than it used to be.

The Internet and databases have raised the bar for all writing on history. Your authors, both students of Coolidge, discovered this firsthand in researching an iconic quote long attributed to Silent Cal.

Coolidge endured severe setbacks in life. Yet he persevered. The Coolidge quotation that captures that perseverance best was printed in a pamphlet in the 1930s by New York Life Insurance Co., where the 30th president served as a director:

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and will always solve the problem of the human race."

To say this quotation is loved is an understatement. Historians have routinely slammed anyone who dared suggest it was not uttered by Coolidge.

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Calvin Coolidge persisted in deed, if not in word