Hours before they were to accept Webby awards in New York City Monday night, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz hadn’t nailed down their five-word speech.

They planned to wait until just before showtime. (Even though they’d won two awards, best viral video and people’s choice, they only got the one acceptance.)

Some of the early contenders:

“Please consume these ingredients separately” and “This sure beats practicing law.” (Voltz is a lawyer.)

What the guys now famous for Mentos and Diet Coke geysers picked:

“18,000,000 views. Still no dates.”

When they learned only one person could speak, Grobe delivered the line to big laughs.

“An awful lot of people came up to me afterwards,” he said. “There is hope.”

Other notable acceptances at the event:

Comedy short, Office Webisodes: “Accounting is such a riot.”

Branded Content, CLEARIFICATION: “Thanks Mom, whoever you are.”

And for Restaurant, KFC Flavor Station: Choose Your Sauce: “Promised I’d mention the missis.”

See the others at webbyawards.com.

– Kathryn Skelton
What’s the CIA’s number?

Since the story of her curious, handwritten volume hit the Internet, Viviane Dyer of Lisbon has been deluged with callers postulating preposterous possibilities for her leather-bound mystery.

“The phone’s been ringing off the hook. They’re fascinated by the book,” she says. “They’ve guessed everything.”

Dyer’s been contacted by curiosity seekers in Chicago and New York, an attorney in Flagstaff, Ariz. (with family in Auburn), who works with Native American tribes and myriad other lingual backgrounds, as well as many others who wished to receive photocopied pages from the book.

One caller, from nearby Bowdoin, told her the dialect is Abkhaz, the language of Abkhazia, a small autonomous area within the northwestern region of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

A 1989 census by the USSR tallied some 103,000 native Abkhazians living inside the communist republic, of which 93 percent spoke the native Abkhaz, according to abkhazia.org.

The caller also provided Dyer with the number for the public affairs department at the Central Intelligence Agency, hinting that her answer lies within the shadowy spy organization.

In 1968, Dyer bought a suitcase at auction, which contained several religious-themed books and the strange tome she calls a “bible.” Its hundreds of handwritten pages are penned in an indecipherable script, which has befuddled scholars and theologians for decades.

Dyer says she won’t rest until her mystery is solved.

– Anthony Ronzio
The price of stamps in words

There is a warning, in bold red print, on the home page for the Maine State Library’s Books by Mail program that patrons will have to start paying return postage on books they borrow starting July 1.

It’s a budget thing.

The Books by Mail program offers Mainers who don’t have a full-service public library in their hometown to “borrow” books through the Maine State Library and its member libraries. It’s really a pretty simple process: Patrons apply for a library card (which includes a promise to return books in good repair) and can order books and other materials through the library’s online Minerva catalog or, for homebound users, by phone. Then, as soon as the books are available, they are mailed to the requester.

It’s an expense to undertake all that mailing and the budget is tight, so the Maine State Library will mail books to patrons, but will now require patrons to pay the return postage.

The U.S. Postal Service book rate for a one-pound hardcover is $2.13. The rate for 10 pounds of reading material would run $5.19. For families that consume a lot of books, postage on reading pleasure could run close to $50 this summer.

– Judith Meyer
Pat-ent applause

She listened quietly as one Auburn official after another took a turn at the dais to laud her accomplishments over 16 years at the helm of city hall. Pat Finnigan, city manager, blushed, laughed and hugged her way through a small reception held in her honor as she finished her tenure in Auburn to begin a new post in Portland.

The notoriously private woman declined requests for interviews, but surrounded by colleagues and friends at Holly’s Own Deli, took the opportunity to thank everyone. With a voice that quivered slightly, she said she was honored to work with wonderful elected officials and a talented staff that rarely got the recognition it deserved. She joked that when she left the Maine Municipal Association in 1991 to take the assistant city manager job in Auburn, she took a 30-percent cut in pay. But she wanted to be part of something, “to make things happen … it was a deliberate decision.”

“We have accomplished a lot, and the emphasis is on ‘we,'” she said, noting various development projects over the years.

“It probably sounds trite, but it has been an honor and a privilege to serve you,” she said.

– Carol Coultas