50 million Costco hot dogs and 31.7 million IKEA Swedish meatballs are consumed a year by shoppers or folks just stopping by for a fast, cheap meal. Priced the same since 1985, Costco’s kosher beef hot dog and 20 ounce soda will set you back a mere $1.50. IKEA cooks up a 65 cent hot dog. The SF Chronicle covers the solutions to the inevitable growling tummies that result from a shopping trip that can cover two football fields. In an accompanying piece, two brave reporters ventured into Costco, IKEA, Target, KMart, Walmart, and Sam’s Club to test out the cheap eats and wrote mini-reviews.

Driving through downtown Seattle on a recent evening we passed by a distinctive building tagged prominently on its windows with the IBM logo. Curious, I searched the web when we arrived home and found some interesting trivia. The IBM Building, named after its primary lessee, was designed in the 1960’s by Minoru Yamasaki, better known as lead architect of New York City’s World Trade Center. Soon after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Puget Sound Business Journal ran an article noting that the IBM Building was a precursor in design to the WTC towers. Yamasaki used “long exterior columns running from base to top” for both. At a mere 20 stories, the IBM Building seems a minute reminder of its taller siblings, but its a legacy that stands tall enough, particularly as a tribute to the architect.

The latest on a potential Firefly feature film doesn’t bear much hope. Joss Whedon was interviewed for TV Guide and stated that there was not much to say at the moment. I wonder if Universal Studios will fund the film if enough people buy the Firefly series DVDs that were released this week. Go buy one now!

There’s fun reading in Romenesko’s Letters section as reporters write in with accounts of unusual and/or awful story assignments. From the San Jose Mercury news “One Christmas … the then features editor strolled over to a colleague and assigned her to go 34th Street in San Jose and ‘find a miracle.'” From the Rocky Mountain News: “Another lame story assignment. Hey! The new phone books are here!” One editor assigned a reporter to cover the vandalism of six garden hoses. Turned out the editor was one of the victims.

I now have a companion sentence to go along with my well-remembered-in-paraphase quote from the Boston Globe’s circa 1990 feature on the sights of New England. The Globe’s description of Connecticut amounted to one sentence: “It’s a nice state to drive through.” (This was before the Indian casinos turned Connecticut into a nice state to drive through and lose your shirt in.) My new companion sentence comes from The Late Show With Conan O’Brien,. They listed potential state quarter slogans and for my home state they settled on “Connecticut: The state the Red Sox have to drive through after losing to the Yankees”. Don’t forget, that’s a nice drive.

The Maunder Minimum, a period of very little sunspot activity, occured, probably not coincidentally, during the middle of “The Little Ice Age” a time of very cold winters. Those years, 1645 to 1715 A.D., overlap perhaps also not coincidentally with Stradivarius’ “golden years” of 1700-1720, the time during which he produced his most prized instruments. A tree-ring dating expert and a climatologist have joined forces to propose the theory that Stradivarius’ violins owe their superiority not only to the Cremona craftmanship but also the density of the wood that was available at the time. The slow tree growth during those cold years resulted in “uncommonly dense Alpine spruce.” The researchers’ findings were published in Dendrochronologia, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Tree-Ring Science this past July.

Japanese glassware maker Hario created a violin out of a very thin, heat-resistant glass. Photos of Japanese violinist Ikuko Kawai holding and playing the instrument are available from Getty Images archive. I couldn’t find any details on the glass violin other than these photos (perhaps because I can’t read Japanese). It appears that the bridge is wood, and the pegs and chinrest are either dark glass or the usual dark wood. The tailpiece, however, is clear glass.

The annual Kennedy Center Honors were bestowed upon their artistic recipients this past weekend. The 2003 honorees are James Brown, Carol Burnett, Loretta Lynn, Mike Nichols, and Itzhak Perlman. Sadly. one fixture of the yearly event, host Walter Cronkite, had to call in sick with laryngitis. Caroline Kennedy filled in. The show will be broadcast on CBS on December 26th. (Sci-fi TV fans take note that Scott Bakula, your favorite time traveling song and dance man, makes an appearance. And by time traveling I mean Quantum Leap, not that recycled Star Trek Enterprise plot fodder.)

The teapot is considered to be one of the first complex objects rendered in computer graphics and can sometimes be found as an Easter egg of sorts placed by 3-D graphic artists. Martin Newell created the first teapot rendering in 1974 or 1975 (accounts disagree). The teapot became a benchmark for graphics rendering. The actual teapot which Newell used as a model was on display at the Boston Computer Museum, which closed in 1999. Seth reports from his recent visit to the new Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, that the teapot is alive and well, residing in the Ephemera collection.

LEDs are cool. Literally. And I’ve been eagerly watching their adoption from traffic lights to car tail lights to flashlights and light lights. This holiday season, LEDs are gaining in popularity as bulbs for Christmas lights. Although they cost much more than your regular string of incandescent bulbs, the LEDs use less electricity and can last for 200,000 hours. One drawback I can think of is the lack of the melting effect that creates little holes in the snow when you turn your hot lights on under a blanket of freshly landed white flakes.