His ex-girlfriend has left him with a baby, Toby, whom he keeps trying to palm off on other people.

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John Bull complains 'Look here, this dark horse you are trying to palm off on me is coming out in his true colours as soon as I begin to rub him down!'

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Star professors palm their pupils off on graduate students and then give them top grades to keep them happy (one survey found that 91% of Harvard graduates get honours compared with just 51% at Yale).

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Then Palm Inc. created PalmSource as a subsidiary, focused on the Palm OS, before spinning it off as a public company.

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Today, when he's not in Los Angeles, Mr. Nitze, 41, lives three hours away on an entirely different type of frontier: on the outer edge of civilization north from Palm Springs, off a 1-mile-long dirt road in the remote, rocky high desert of Southern California.

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The location, out on the man-made Palm Island, may leave you feeling a little cut off from the shopping malls, beaches and indoor ski slopes but if and when the stalled development on the Palm is completed you may never need venture onto the mainland again.

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