Slumberland

OpenCola Soft Drink is the first food product to be distributed with an Open Source license. Here’s the recipe, publicly available, so you can try your hand at making your own cola. I want to try this.

Music Star Orbison Launches Action Against Napster, a headline that attracted my attention. Why? Because Roy Orbison isn’t doing anything of the sort. He’s dead! His wife is doing it, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Some headline writer at Yahoo or Reuters or whereever needs to do a little research.

Apple announced new iMacs today, and they are really weird-looking. I’m not sure yet whether I like them or not. They make the fruit-flavored iMacs look tame! I’m happy with my strawberry iMac for now.

Salon has an interview with Los Bros Hernandez, along with an article about female characters in Love and Rockets. I didn’t realize that L&R was back; I’ve got to get a copy of the latest. If you’ve never read L&R, start with the collected reprints — there’s a lot of back story to catch up on, all of it worth reading.

It looks like it’s been online for a while, but I just stumbled on it — a nice practical joke involving packing peanuts.

We got snow in Seattle last night. Oh, yes, we got snow. The most snow since December 26, 1996, in fact: a snowstorm I will never be able to forget for obvious reasons.

Anyway, we got a whole foot of the stuff here on Beacon Hill. I tried to take some photos but I’m not sure if they came out. I’ll post them later if any are worth posting.

Weird Al’s Wishbox is a list of things you can buy Weird Al (and wife-to-be Suzanne) as a wedding gift. They want a microwave and a TiVo, among other things. Their other wedding registries are listed online, too, including an Amazon wish list. At least three items on that wish list are ones I own as well. The interesting thing is that almost everything on the Amazon list has been purchased already. Do you think that random fans buy him wish list items all the time? Must be nice! (My wish list is online, too. It’s interesting, anyway, to get a glimpse into celebrities’ lives via wish lists. Found at the always wonderful Pop Culture Junk Mail, which I really should read more often.

It’s phone day on Slumberland, I guess. This phone is what I would call a misguided attempt to target female purchasers. But, what the heck, maybe some women would think it’s cool. I think it’s patronizing, myself.

A 20-year-old Taiwanese woman had to have a mobile phone surgically removed from her back passage after a sex game went horribly wrong. There is nothing I can add to this.

I’m still browsing around tvparty.com (what an amazing site this is), and now I’m on Saturday Morning Shows of the 60s & 70s. If you are around my age, this will really suck you in. 1972 — Fat Albert! Lidsville! Saturday Superstar Movie! And even one of the most obscure cartoons ever — Kid Power! (The review says “not very entertaining,” but as a seven year-old, I loved it. I still remember the theme song clearly.

ZOOM was one of my favorite shows as a kid. When I was about nine years old, I actually called our local PBS station and told them I wanted to start a local show kind of like Zoom. They actually seemed to take me seriously and my mom and I spoke with some folks down there several times about it. It didn’t happen, though, partly because I was a kid and went on to new ideas fairly quickly, and partly (I think) because my mom didn’t want to be a stage mother so she didn’t push it through.

Disney’s California Adventure opens today. I wish I could be there.

Canadian engineering students hang an old, red VW Beetle from the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently it’s a traditional prank they do in Vancouver every year; this time, they took it on the road. Very cool.

Sore loser or crusader for game-show honesty? One of last season’s Survivors, Stacey, is suing, claiming that the show was rigged.

Someone turned their Cube into the Macintosh Color Classic G4! Craziness. But very cool in a weird way.