Since I often forget to charge my cell phone and my Palm Vx, I have decided that what I really need is a dockable purse. I can come home, stick my purse in a dock, and everything inside will magically sync and recharge. If I can’t get a dock, how about a simple plug? Oh, and it can’t make my purse weigh any more than it already does.

SoBe, of the herb-spiked beverages, is launching a line of chocolates. Will this open up the market for “healthy” candy bars? These don’t exactly fit into the PowerBar market; perhaps they fit the “Snickers satisfies you” type of marketing. The web site is targeted for young active types, mentioning surfing (not the web kind), skateboarding, and pulling all-nighters to finish papers. (SoBe is a subsidiary of PepsiCo and headquartered next to my hometown in Norwalk, CT.)

There is a marriage proposal in this week’s The Ethicist from the NY Times Magazine (last item). I am wondering if someone who knows the couple saw it online before the Sunday morning revelation. I read it on Saturday morning, as the online magazine is published early. I’d burst having to keep that secret! This proposal can’t top the one hidden in the NY Times crossword puzzle though. That one was especially well-conceived as it meant something special to two specific people and was still a normal crossword to everyone else.

Would you pay $6 to be able to use instant messaging for the duration of a plane flight? Sounds like a good deal to me if you’ve got a few folks to yak at on the other end. The new service, JetConnect, is priced at a flat fee of $5.99, which seems cheap compared to the GTE Airfone charge of $4 a minute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have “high-speed email” yet, and the service only offers news updated every 15 minutes to a central server. Of course, do you really need to check news more than every 15 minutes? Maybe I need to ask the people who trade stocks. I bet that there will also be “online” shopping. Connexion by Boeing, high-speed Internet access, is being planned for Lufthansa and British Airways. It’ll probably be a while before all airlines offer high-speed surfing, but that day can’t be far off.

I often peruse old cookbooks in used bookstores. It’s an entertaining glimpse into history. The following collections are almost over-the-top, though: 808 English-language Chinese cookbooks at University of California-Davis. And that is surpassed by a 2,600-book collection at Stony Brook University. I just can’t imagine that many people having a book’s worth of material about Chinese cooking, especially since many of these volumes are from decades ago. But it is quite impressive. Stony Brook’s collection was donated by nutrition professor Jacqueline M. Newman who received her first Chinese cookbook as a wedding gift more than 50 years ago. Perusing the titles in the UC Davis catalog reveals a number of specific topics: Chopsticks, Chinese-Kosher cooking, herbs, rice, gruel, and the ever-popular dim sum.

Extreme marketing-speak
It’s a well-known fact that statements made in advertisements usually boil down to not much of anything. If it came down to a lawsuit, there would be nothing to prove because, well, there is nothing there to prove. Nothing was actually said. I ran across a superb example while shopping for shampoo. Sauve says their shampoos “cost less than more expensive brands.” Once I parsed what this really meant I couldn’t stop laughing. By definition, the more expensive brands cost more. And thus their shampoo costs less. What is it really saying? Not much. It’s true that their shampoos are cheaper than other brands, but they declined to actually say that and instead made a typically fluffy statement of little worth. It’s an art, I tell ya.

Mom always told me to take eye breaks
While researching remedies for nearsightedness, I ran across an article with a reference to an intriguing study. Dr. Paul Harris an optometrist at the Baltimore Academy for Behavioral Optometry did a study on orchestral musicians and “found that the shape of the eyes of musicians changed to accommodate the instruments they played.” The text of the resulting paper is actually online; it was published in the Journal of the American Optometric Association in 1988. Dr. Harris studied the posture and eye positions of musicians in the Baltimore Symphony and discovered strong correlations with how their eyes adapted to their asymmetrical postures. Musicians spend many hours in one position, heads tilted this way or that to better hold their instruments, read their music and watch the conductor all at once. It’s not surprising that they end up with astigmatism as their eyes adjust to the asymmetry.

The abstract of the paper also hints that “good sight readers in music use a fundamentally different eye scan pattern to read music from the pattern that they use to read written language.” I know I don’t read music the same way as I read a book. There are many layers of information in music, not just the notes but all the annotations regarding dynamics, speed, accents, fingerings, accidentals, exhortations to watch the conductor. I scan multiple points, back and forth, and often much further ahead than what I am actually playing. And I know a number of musicians with glasses prescribed especially for the middle-distance of an orchestra stand. I hope I can avoid that for a few more years.

Alton Brown is back in town. Books Inc., Palo Alto, Saturday, October 26, 11:30 am.

Caltrain’s “baby bullet” railcars were put into service this week, running passengers up to the World Series game. The locomotives aren’t in yet and high speed service is still a long ways off, but this is a nice sign of progress.

The phrase “do-it-yourself” first appeared in an October 1912 article in Suburban Life encouraging men to do their own interior painting instead of hiring professionals. So says the site accompanying the National Building Museum’s exhibit “Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America.” How did home improvement become a hobby? Did the lure of power tools drive us to consider house makeovers as a leisure activity? In the 1870s and 1880s the treadle-driven scroll saw, “America’s original leisure power tool”, kicked off an interest in home improvement skills amongst the middle class which continues today. Men started taking over basements and garages for workshops. The Sears catalog catered to their tool and material needs. Eventually the entire building industry was designing products and packaging materials for do it yourselfers. Black & Decker introduced the trigger grip power drill in 1917. As American homes aged there were more improvements to be made and also historical details to preserve. Modernization co-existed with renovation. Working on the house is now an accepted hobby, and one to take pride in.