Leave it to the folks at Shiny Shiny to seek out all the pink gadgets at CES. Like this pink Taser gun. Yes, a pink Taser.

China from the Inside, a new miniseries, starts today on many PBS stations. It’s a joint production from KQED (San Francisco’s PBS station) and Granada Television (Britain) and consists of four one-hour episodes. Reviews are glowing and emphasize that this is not a run-of-the-mill documentary on the Great Wall, Forbidden City, name any other Chinese tourist destination. The series doesn’t shy away from the tough issues facing China today: the environment, government corruption, religious freedom, suicide among women (China is unfortunately unique in being the only country where the female suicide rate is higher than that of males). British director Jonathan Lewis was up front with the Chinese government about the subject matter he filmed but was given surprisingly free access to sites and citizens. The crew was assigned minders who sometimes made themselves conveniently scarce. We know China can’t be ignored and perhaps China is realizing it can’t ignore itself either. (SF Chronicle review, Seattle Times review)

Seattle jewelry designer Jody Warwick makes beautiful little purses with jeweled handles that convert into bracelets and necklaces. It’s a clever gift idea for bridal parties. Warwick uses 14 carat gold, genuine stones and cultured pearls for her handles so this is real jewelry with prices to match.

They deemed The Last Supper menu “a little too sacred to touch,” but Rev. Rayner Hesse Jr. and Anthony Chiffolo, authors of “Cooking with the Bible: Biblical Food, Feasts, and Lore,” found plenty of material in the Scriptures to recreate recipes for modern times. There’s stewed ox meat, dried fig cake, barley-apricot salad, baked sardines with sesame sauce, cheese and honey pie, even a version of manna from heaven. The manna, with ingredients of matzo flour, coriander leaves and sesame oil, “tastes like cardboard” but the authors point out it’s not supposed to taste very good and let’s you “see why they were complaining.”

It’s the oddest cordless phone I’ve ever seen. This vintage-style phone from Pottery Barn slaps new-fangled cordless technology into a retro handset (with visible antenna poking out) and base. (Its 900 mhz analog technology is also rather retro.)

The rumor mill is churning out the latest about Hayao Miyazaki’s possible next film. It may be an adaptation of the Chinese novella I Lost my Little Boy, a book that may have actually been inspired by Miyazaki and reportedly contains a reference to Totoro. And it may be done in 2008. To sum up the facts: Studio Ghibli plans to release a Miyazaki film in 2008 but they have not yet announced the title.

Favorite music headline of the day: Vatican priest composes rockin’, religious Dante opera. Also in the running: “Hell the musical comes to Vatican“, “Vatican plans punk version of Divine Comedy“, and “Pope invited to musical hell“. Not surprisingly, one section of hell is a rave dance party.

Steuben Glass is featuring a selection of pre-1933 art glass and tableware for sale. Currently offered online is a selection of Green Jade glass and Rosaline glass. This lovely rose quartz glass vase is a favorite of mine.

Personalize a set of spatulas at Williams-Sonoma or just have fun creating images online with their personalization tool. You can customize a message of up to 24 characters on the regular sized spatulas and 17 on the minis.

Bill Amend is scaling FoxTrot back to Sundays only (leaving more time for World of Warcraft, though he claims he’ll be doing stuff outside of the house) and will be greatly missed. I was going to do an exhaustive round-up of comics page changes from various newspapers (most publish an explanation picked up by Google news search). Editor & Publisher already did the legwork though (which is nice since I’d rather someone got paid to do this sort of thing). Several papers are testing out new strips before giving them a permanent home. “Lio” by Mark Tatulli of Universal (surreally good) and “Pearls Before Swine” by Stephan Pastis of United Media (also good!) are two of the big winners. The Seattle Times is making numerous changes and keeping “Lio” on permanently is one of them.