Sesto Senso has lots of super-luxury personal products, including the best selection of Demeter fragrances I’ve seen! Anyone want to smell like waffles?

An entertaining archive of detective novel covers— almost seems like the sort of thing I may already have posted about. A little extra content in case I have: I visited a little bookshop near Powell’s City of Books that had a display of 50s and 60s naughty book covers that were strangely similar to any other pulp of the time! Quite worth a visit!

So there was this article in the Stranger about how if only the county had less stringent food safety rules and if downtown merchants were only less cranky about people using the sidewalk in front of their stores, Seattle could have a vibrant street food scene. Which may or may not be true, what with the general disposition of Seattlites being what it is, we rarely get real vibrant around here. But it got me to wondering: do counties with less stringent food safety rules have noticably higher rates of food poisoning? I haven’t yet found a county-by-county comparison, but I did find a states-level map of food poisoning, and whee-doggies, Washington state has a problem! Let’s hope it’s due to food-safety laggards outside of King County, or all the inspections are for naught!

Despite my misgivings, David Tennant will be the new Doctor. I’m loving the Eccleston series (even the darkness) enough that I’m optimistic about Tennant.

A story on NPR this morning about synesthesia and synesthetes got me to wondering whether sun sneezing is simply a more common form of synæsthesia (I’m varying the spelling to attract more search engine traffic). So, if you’re a synesthete, please drop me a line and let me know whether you also sneeze in bright (or dim) sunlight. I won’t do anything with your email address except possibly ask a follow-up question. Nothing personally identifiable will be published in my summary of results.

A neat exhibit of Soviet architecture of the 30s through the 50s that never made it off the drawing board. Watch that space, as was just boingboinged and may be overwhelmed for a while.

TheBarqsMan (see also here) has given me the bad news regarding my earlier quest for a local source of caffeine-free Barq’s. He says

the only distributor of Caffeine-Free Barqs [is] Swire Coca-Cola in Salt Lake City, Utah. They distribute to all of Utah, Northern AZ and a few places in Idaho and Washington.

And checking their territory map leads me to the sad conclusion that they don’t bring the stuff any closer than the Tri-Cities.
Thanks, TheBarqsMan!

As you can verify using YaGoohoogle, for high-hit topics such as finger waves and Saint Sarah, Yahoo thinks much more highly of our Collective efforts than Google. If I hadn’t stubbed out rds.yahoo.com in my hosts file (to kill a bunch of Yahoo ads), I’d probably switch to Yahoo search myself.

I finally tried out podcasting, mostly because Le Show is now available in this format (but without the music! Dang!). Here’s a list of more public radio podcasts. Now the torture that is Weekend America can last all week. Ugh.

I’m back from vacation, semi-refreshed, with more chores to catch up on than ever. As a part of cleaning out my old magazines (I was able to part with Might, Giant Robot, Saveur, and ReadyMade but not Fortean Times. How I love thee, FT), here are some links that seem to still be live, taken from ReadyMade which, like Budget Living, seems to be a rich source of interesting web links. I don’t totally get this.

Lindsay’s Technical Books has lots of old-school do-it-yourself stuff like smelting or making charcoal.
Kikkerland keeps popping up in my peripheral vision.
I still want an Indian scooter or autorickshaw from Bajaj.

and one dead link: MimiBunny