Cool Stuff to Do

1. Call 1-800-578-7453. This you can do right away, and it will prove to you that the tobacco companies — Brown & Williamson particularly — truly love you.

2. Go see THE INSIDERS, a $70 million Disney effort starring Al Pacino. This you can’t do until November 5, but make a note to. It’s dynamite. It will prove to you that the tobacco companies — Brown & Williamson particularly — may actually deserve the lawsuits raining down on them. (I know, I know — but see it before you tell me I’m wrong about this.)

3. Click here to find the price your neighbor paid for her home. I checked my own home first . . . for which I thought I had paid $120,000 . . . and found that — yes! that’s right! — I had actually paid $105,000. Can you believe that? The Internet could find in seconds something that I — whose life it is after all — couldn’t quite remember. (The asking price was $120,000. I thought I had just decided to pay full price because I liked it so much. With this memory jog, I now remember I offered $100,000 and they came back at $105,000 and then I decided I’d better not haggle.)

Then I tried an apartment on Central Park West in New York and came up with nothing until I reentered it as “West Central Park.” And then I tried a lot of other places and came up with nothing. The service is spotty, to say the least. But it’s still pretty cool.