The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Since the New York Times obviously missed the important story here, we launched a research project to discover what exactly this magic breast-building ingredient was. With the help of Graham Pappas and other correspondents, we learned that the breast-enhancing ingredient is an herb called fenugreek. You can find numerous Web sites touting its abilities as such.

So this got us thinking. Could it be, we wondered, that Coca-Cola -- which diligently battles rumors that Coke causes osteoporosis and hyperactivity -- is diligently spreading rumors of its own about the reputed effect of Love Body? Where, in fact, is everyone getting the idea that Love Body is supposed to enlarge your breasts? If it isn't Coca-Cola that's hinting this to a New York Times reporter and a TV commercial director and Japanese women, who is? (Oddly enough, the commercial director knew about the buxom angle on Love Body the year before its debut. And she described her clients at Coke as leaving nothing to chance. "They had to have everything incredibly mapped out," she recalled.)

A Coca-Cola spokesman disputes the theory that Coke is pushing the breast-enlargement angle. He says he has no idea where people are getting this idea about the effect of Love Body's fenugreek. Love Body, he says, "is not marketed at all in any fashion like that." Fenugreek happens to be used in many products in Japan, including ice cream, baked goods and chewing gum, he says. "It is a flavor, and you should not read anything more into it than that," he says. (Specifically, fenugreek has "a maple-like flavor and burnt sugar taste," says Coke.)

Coincidentally, we're sure, Japanese women have become a lot more interested in larger breasts over the past decade or so, says Dr. Sandra Buckley, a McGill University professor who edited the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. And following the longstanding tradition of energy drinks marketed at men to "increase sexuality," says Buckley, there's been a recent explosion of female-targeted drinks corresponding to the new ideal of female Japanese beauty: "the well exercised, high energy body," as Buckley puts it.

Yes, no doubt Coke has absolutely nothing to do with driving this breast-enlargement story. But boy, are they hugging this particular curve.

2. Who Put the Dogg In?

Not every Wall Street Journal reader was lucky enough to see this one a week ago Thursday. But we were.

There we were, leafing through to page C3 of our edition, admiring a quarter-page ad from Bear Stearns BSC. "You're divesting a huge equity position," reads the ad, featuring a gymnast executing a difficult maneuver on the still rings. You're looking for a firm with "the ability to execute complex transactions -- flawlessly," continues the ad. That company, apparently, is Bear Stearns.

Yeah, that's what we believed, too -- for about two seconds. Then we looked two columns to the left of that ad and read a fascinating story about an eentsy weentsy mistake someone made at Bear Stearns the day before. Apparently, someone at the firm was supposed to sell $4 million worth of stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, an order went through to sell $4 billion of stock. They caught the problem at $622 million, overshooting that $4 million order by about $618 million.

All the News That's Fitting? Sign me up for that flawless trading

In most later copies of the paper, that story disappeared from the page with the Bear Stearns ad and was integrated into a markets story on another page. The spot previously occupied by Bear Stearns was replaced by a story about the rapper Snoop Dogg and a Muppet movie.

Snoop Dogg and the Bear A quick switch deleted the unfortunate juxtaposition

A Bear Stearns spokesman had no comment. A spokeswoman for Journal parent Dow JonesDJ said that the paper's production staff tries not to place a company's advertisements next to news stories about that company, whether the stories are positive or negative. "We can't always guarantee that," she says.