Live from Austin!

Nintendo have officially announced the name of their next generation console: Wii. Pronounced ‘wee’. I kid you not.

Congratulations, Nintendo. You’re up against stiff competition, and we weren’t sure you could pull it off; but with a branding decision like this, urine the running for sure. The guy who came up with this name must be a real whiz. How did you think of it? It’s a bit of a riddle, for sure.

No doubt there will be a shower of solid gold hit software—a veritable golden shower of games. You’ll be flush with cash in no time. I can see you being number one in the industry, oh yeah.

I hope you keep the multiple color options, I’m sure kids will love asking each other “What color is your Wii?”. I think the porcelain white looks good myself.

Dole seem to be the major supplier of bananas to the supermarkets of Texas. Each hand of bananas has a Dole sticker on.

But whenever I see the name, I think of Bob Dole, Republican senator and advertiser of Viagra.

So, not entirely what I want to be thinking about when choosing bananas.

Sentiment: sorrow
SF savant Stanisław
so sadly silent

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is trying to ban the sale of various chemicals to people who don’t have an explosives manufacturing license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

Fair enough, you might think—unless you know enough chemistry to recognize some of the substances on the list.

Aluminium powder, for example. Am I wrong to think that a terrorist will be smart enough to work out that given the softness of aluminium, you can use a bar of aluminium metal and a grinding wheel?

Sodium benzoate requiring an explosives license might be a bit of a problem for the food industry, where it’s used as a preservative.

And best of all, they want to make salicylate compounds outright illegal. That would presumably include acetyl salicylic acid, better known as aspirin.

Of course, I’m assuming you can’t cook up explosives using a box of aspirin, a bottle of sparking wine and a ground up aluminium ruler. If I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll be corrected.

On May 13 last year, we got a fairly hefty packet of junk mail inviting us to apply for Discover cards. Inside was a plastic replica card.

We got another one on May 18. And two more on May 25. And another on May 27, followed by one more on May 28.

After that, things settled down a bit. Another offer on June 15, then a final one on August 8.

So, 8 copies of the junk mail, all to the same address. It’s worse than AOL CDs. I wonder how much money Discover must be wasting?

Which contains more bacteria: the ice in your soda at a fast food restaurant, or the water in the toilet at the same restaurant?

A schoolgirl in Florida decided to investigate. You can probably guess the outcome: on average, you’d be safer to drink from the toilet.

I just discovered something interesting. Under US law, buildings constructed after 1990 are copyrighted. That means our house is subject to copyright, and as legal owner I can demand licensing fees from anyone who wants to take pictures of the street that happen to include our house.

The more corporate interests force ever-stronger copyright laws on us, the more I find myself questioning copyright. For example, the RIAA lawsuits against MP3 downloaders have made me wonder: why should artists continue to get money every time someone plays a recording of their music? I don’t get extra money every time someone looks at a web site I created; the very idea is laughable. Yet web sites are copyrighted too.

Strange but true: in 1957, the Lionel company (the US equivalent of Hornby) tried to make model trains that would appeal to girls.

The solution: make them pink. Once you had laid out the oval track, you could then watch the pink locomotive entering the tunnel again and again.

Rosa Parks is dead
No need to sit at the back
of Charon’s grim boat

You never hear about castanets any more, do you? It’s all maracas these days. Maracas are the castanets of the 21st Century.