The Brunch Table

Introducing the Maytag Skybox, a home vending machine. “A backlight illuminates the front panel for that exciting vending-machine glow…”? Someone call the Onion, they’re going to be out of a job soon if our culture keeps this up.

A law enforcement guide to breakfast cereal.

Precious Commodities

• Cookie Crisp - heist attempts are so common that many larger cities have a special Cookie Crime unit
• Lucky Charms - many reported attacks on leprechauns by youth gangs in search of these

Controlled Substances

• Frosted Flakes - performance enhancer, banned by the Olympic Committee
• Cocoa Pops - stimulant
• Corn Pops - addictive, users experience withdrawal pangs and rage
• Trix - sold over the counter in most states with proper child ID

What did I miss?

Back in 1991, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew came up with Johnny Longtorso, “the man who comes in pieces“, an action figure that was sold one limb at a time. Well, it’s taken almost a decade, but someone has actually brought the idea to market. Disappointingly, the Stikfas pieces are rather nondescript; no Super Sideburn Add-Ons here, alas. Now Radio Shack is bringing this idea to the perfect market with their new line of everything-sold-separately remote-controlled cars. Me? I’ll stick with the ultimate in customizable toys, old-skool Legos.

Radio Shack is closing out some of its DigiTraveler GPS core devices for a ridiculously low price of $30. They’re serial peripherals for computers and PDAs, not stand-alone devices, but if you have any interest in geo-hacking, you can’t beat the price. They’re hockey-puck-sized devices that are powered by 3xAAA or a 6V adaptor, and they spit out standard NMEA serial GPS messages at 4800 bps. There are two models: the 20-1601, which comes with software and cabling for iPAQ 3670/3685 & Palm m125/m130/m500/m505/m515/i705, and the 20-1602, which has a standard DB-9 serial cable and Windows software (the GPS unit is the same for both models). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single 1602 unit in the Boston area, but the 1601s were easier to track down (I know for a fact that there are still a couple at the Meadow Glen Mall Radio Shack.) Given how freakin’ many Radio Shack stores there are, you’re bound to find a few units in your area if you act quickly. If you can only find the PDA version, you can get a PC cable shipped to you for $18, or you can roll your own using standard serial and phone connectors.

More technical details on the device here, here, and here.

Remember the part in Alice in Wonderland where she hears the story of the sisters who live at the bottom of a treacle well? Well, I realized today that I still don’t know exactly what treacle is. When I first read the book as a kid, I think I concluded that it was something purple and sticky, with a slightly medicinal artificial-fruit taste, kind of like Sweet-Tarts.

Thanks to google, I now know that treacle is the British word for molasses. What an anticlimax.

“There’s this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you’d really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually. Also, it’s not interesting.”

–Ira Glass, on postmodernism.

Here’s the most interesting statistic I’ve heard all week. (Never mind the wildfire stats, which the LA-area local news kept cheerfully plopping up onscreen–people killed, acreage burned, firefighters on duty, cost of firefighting, property damage, you name it–while being very stingy with the actual maps that told viewers like you how far they were from those up-to-two-hundred-foot-high, up-to-one-hundred-mile-wide, up-to-forty-five-mile-an-hour-travelling walls of fiery death. One came within a half-mile of our school at one point; at night it looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.)

Anyway, this article from the Economist tries to tally up the expense of American oil dependency, and comes up with this remarkable figure:

According to one American government estimate, OPEC has managed to transfer a staggering $7 trillion in wealth from American consumers to producers over the past three decades by keeping the oil price above its true market-clearing level.

Now, I’m not so sure that OPEC is actually able to act independently of the big Euro-American oil companies these days (I gather that the political independence of the OPEC countries is very restricted, compared to the 1970s, when Nasser’s Arab-Nationalist movement had real teeth.) But it’s the figure that fascinates me…

…it might go a long way towards explaining how the U.S. can pull in so much cash every year, but as a nation remain so (relatively) damn poor.