For $25 Peter Gabriel fans can purchase a two CD set recording of one of his summer tour performances, recorded off the soundboard. There are 15 shows available, and the extremely devoted can purchase all of the recordings for $325. Touted as “authorized bootleg CDs” this system of recording live performances and selling them to concertgoers has also been used by The Who and Duran Duran.

Fifty years later, the NY Times visits with eight of the twenty college women who were selected as guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine in the summer of 1953. That one month experience opens Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel, “The Bell Jar.” A few students present at the reunion were the inspiration for characters in the book, and some recounted events that were captured in its pages. These women faced the challenges of balancing their artistic dreams with family life, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was published. Plath, coincidentally, committed suicide the year of its publication.

The summer of 1989 a friend and I were walking up Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge from Central Square to M.I.T. when I stopped and inhaled deeply. “Mmmmmm. Buttermint!” I said. “Buttermint?” he responded skeptically. “There’s no such thing as buttermint. You just made that up.” I was indignant. “That’s what it smells like. Buttermint!”

Situated just off the M.I.T. campus is the yummy smelling factory of the New England Confectionary Company, makers of NECCO wafers and Valentine’s Day hearts. A set of old train tracks wends into the loading docks, and only the often present smell of sweetness divulges the activity that takes place inside the covered windows. But after almost 75 years, Necco is consolidating its operations in Revere, MA. Biotech is moving in. Novartis has taken a 45 year lease on the building and is investing hundreds of millions on renovations. The smell of buttery, minty goodness will rise no more.

And, by the way, I did not make up the term buttermint.

I thought I was excited about the new Ikea opening in East Palo Alto this summer, but my enthusiasm deadens in comparison to the five eager shoppers who camped outside of the new Ikea store in College Park, Maryland. The first five to enter the store were given $2,000 Ikea gift cards, so there was more enticement than to be the first in the door. These “Ikea Dreamers” were provided with a large tent, and bedroom furniture to spend their waiting time on. The furniture was not preassembled.

The Computer History Museum has “gone alpha” in its snazzy new home located in the former flagship building of Silicon Graphics in Mountain View. 500 items are on display in their “visible storage section” starting from old wooden calculators and ending with a still-life painting, designed and painted on canvas by a computer.

Lychee season is almost over, and the moist winter has made it a good one. You can often find them fresh during May and June in Asian markets, but they can also be ordered online for overnight shipping from Florida: LycheesNow.com and LycheesOnline.com. Some farmers planted lychees after the devastation of Hurricane Andrew.

Along with celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her first flight in space, America’s first woman in space, Sally Ride, is inaugurating her own science camp for girls. Run by Galileo Educational Services, the one-week of “overnight camp” has one session at Agnes Scott College in
Decatur, Georgia and three sessions at Stanford University in California. The Stanford program offers concentrations in Astronomy, Structural Engineering, and Bio-Engineering. Oh, and the Stanford sessions are completely full. Hooray!

The teaser poster for Matrix: Revolutions is out. Slick.

British illustrator William Heath Robinson is part of the British vernacular, defined in a British : American online dictionary simply as “Rube Goldberg.” Born in 1872, he aspired to become a landscape painter, but realized that a career in book illustrations would be more lucrative. Although he had success with book publishers, it was his magazine illustrations that brought him widespread fame. His depictions of fancifully practical inventions forever associated his name, in the British language anyway, with overly complicated and clever contraptions. Often his work imagined the absurdity of the human capacity for problem solving. Always his work was grounded in real world physics. According to his BBC biography, he died in 1944 after disconnecting himself from a contraption that was keeping him alive.

Last night we caught part of the rebroadcast of the Antiques Roadshow episode featuring the most valuable item ever appraised on the program. In 2002 a man brought a Navajo blanket to the Tucson visit of the popular PBS program. He wiped his eyes over and over as he learned that the blanket, which was in spectacular condition, was worth $350,000 to $500,000. In the followup article on the PBS website, the appraiser Don Ellis planned to put the blanket up for sale at the New York City Winter Antiques Show the following January. But there was no further follow-up. I found a mention of the fate of the blanket in the Maine Antique Digest. Don Ellis was unable to find a buyer at the show, and said it was the first time he had been unable to sell the feature object of his display. The fate of the blanket: “soon it will be presented to the trustees of an institution for consideration.” Where is it now???