Manage Money Like a Star

MAINSTREET.COM’S slogan is “where life and money intersect.” Judging by its content, the site equates “life” with “celebrity gossip.”

Just about every article takes a bit of celebrity news and strains — often well past the breaking point — to turn it into a lesson in personal finance. “Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher are creating a new television show,” the home page summary of a recent article tells us. “What should men and women know before they team up at work?”

Here’s another example: “Deceased actor John Ritter’s family is suing his doctors for millions. Learn more about professional liability insurance coverage.”

MainStreet.com, a companion to the business site TheStreet.com, is “the most unintentionally hilarious personal-finance Web site of all time,” according to Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com, reacting to MainStreet.com’s debut in February.

He noted then that MainStreet.com used the memorial service for the actor Heath Ledger as a jumping-off point for an article about the wisdom of prearranged funerals. “An unexpected tragedy is difficult to recover from emotionally, but some advance planning can make it easier to pay for,” it advised.

The site has stayed on death watch ever since. Its Endings section is filled with articles about handling funeral arrangements, making wills and dealing financially with the deaths of loved ones. It also takes on other kinds of endings, like divorce and the loss of a job. “England’s Prince Harry just lost his job,” one article began last week, referring to the prince who was recently withdrawn from Afghanistan. “But you don’t have to be a soldier to have a job where your life could be threatened.” The article then quotes career experts on the subject of dangerous work.

“There’s no reason MainStreet.com shouldn’t be bigger than TheStreet.com,” Steve Elkes, an executive vice president of TheStreet.com, told The New York Post last month (nypost.com). “The world it appeals to is much larger than the financial audience.”

ALL HAT, NO CATTLE? A majority of global executives — 60 percent — surveyed by The McKinsey Quarterly believe climate change to be “strategically important.” Most “consider it important to product development, investment planning and brand management,” according to the management journal (mckinseyquarterly.com). And most expressed “optimism about the business prospects of addressing climate change,” with 61 percent saying they believed that doing so could “boost profits — if managed well.”

But more than one-third said their companies “seldom or never consider climate change when developing overall strategy.”

BLOCKED IN DENVER At the Denver International Airport, you can pick up Hustler and Penthouse magazines at the newsstands. But try to look at the Web sites for those magazines over the airport’s free Wi-Fi service and you’ll be out of luck. The same is true for Vanity Fair magazine’s site, because the airport’s Internet filter has deemed it “provocative.”

“Give people some credit,” urges David Byrne, former leader of the Talking Heads rock group, who was recently blocked from obtaining access to boingboing.net, a popular technology-oriented blog. Allowing unfettered access, he told The Denver Post, is a matter of “trusting people’s discretion.”

For its part, the airport would rather deal with the occasional complaint from a thwarted Web surfer than complaints from parents whose children happened to see something possibly objectionable on another passenger’s computer screen, a spokesman told The Post (denverpost.com).

The filter, though, also blocks many perfectly innocent sites. The blog at ISP Planet (blog.isp-planet.com) complains that “software designed for the prudery and rigidity of Sudan is determining user experiences in the United States.” DAN MITCHELL

Complete links are at nytimes.com/business. E-mail: whatsonline@nytimes.com.