A new Apple retail store opens in nearby Palo Alto this weekend. I like their hours: until 11 on Fridays and Saturdays (midnight this Saturday). There should be more retail open on that street for post movie or post late-dinner browsing. At Apple headquarters they are displaying a giant American flag in place of their usual rotation of “Think Different” portraits.

Zap2it has some video clips of interviews with Buffy cast members and Joss Whedon. There are also scenes from the season premiere, in case you wanted to hear Spike’s “cup o’ tea, cup o’ tea, …” line again.

Here’s a very cool site, created in Norway: whonamedit.com. It is a collection of medical eponyms. Each medical condition includes biographical information for the associated person(s). And, a big plus in my book, it has a link that lists all the female entries. Alice (in Wonderland) and Cinderella make an appearance there too. (via Yahoo’s Daily Picks).

Chelsea Clinton is settling in at Oxford. Her father accompanied her and, it appears, stayed away from the cameras during her photo ops.

In an interesting sidenote from the World Trade Center rescue operations, New York City officials requested that Metricom turn their Ricochet wireless service back on so that rescue workers have access to email and other online services. Metricom had turned off their service in August. A Metricom employee is monitoring the network from San Jose, and volunteers, including former employees, are helping to keep the network up and running. If Ricochet never does go operational again, I’d say this is a noble way for them to go out.

Oh the terrible food pun. We’re making buffalo meatloaf for dinner today and since it’s also the season premiere of Buffy, we’re calling it a “buffyloaf”. OK, I shouldn’t say “we”. I got a kind of eye-rolling reaction when I made the leap from “buffaloaf” to “buffyloaf”. Buffalo meat is lower in cholesterol and fat than chicken, fish, or turkey.

Search requests for “marshal” have supplanted “girl” as referrers to this website. In fact, my page views have just about tripled, as far as I can tell, only because of my discussions of the air marshals (unless my referral log is missing something — are you all coming for some other reason?). And here I go sticking even more of those words on this page.

This history of Braille begins not with Louis Braille but with an earlier Louis, King Louis the Ninth of France. He founded the first institution for the blind which still exists today as an ophthalmologic hospital and residence for the blind. The city named after him, St. Louis, is the home of the Missouri School for the Blind, the first American institution to adopt Braille. (via xBlog)

How we lost our sense of smell is an essay by A.S. Byatt. She does not shirk from discussing the more vulgar odors but also calls up warm memories of baby scents. As she discusses our artificially scented environment, she calls up literary references to strengthen her argument that we are losing our ability to make truthful use of our sense of smell.

Pete Townshend’s website has a message from him (click on “latest news”) confirming that The Who will be performing at the October 20th benefit at Madison Square Garden and giving his thoughts on New York (“my second home”) and on standing a little more to the right than he usually does “I don’t want to see unjust vengeance, but today I am a hawk rather than a dove.”