News to me: there is actually a major league baseball player of Chinese descent (I’d say “finally!”, but I haven’t researched if he’s the first one). Bruce Chen, born in Panama, is a new addition to the NY Mets and just threw seven shutout innings for them. Excellent.

Will the lights on my cable modem and router ever cease their incessant blinking? The Code Red worm has been merrily requesting away for days and days. Perhaps if it goes through the holidays, I’ll hook up my Christmas lights to blink the traffic outside my firewall.

Someone is actually taking on radio giant Clear Channel in court. Not surprisingly, the big gorilla has been throwing its weight around. They own concert promotion companies who would, of course, prefer to have their acts featured on their radio stations. And the radio stations give preferential treatment to their sister promotion companies. It’s nothing earth shattering in the dirty world of the entertainment industry (or many other industries). But the small promotions firm Nobody in Particular Presents is fighting back with a lawsuit charging anticompetitive business practices. It unfortunately takes a lot of law to create a free market.

Home of the Underdogs is a site devoted to underrated PC games. The listings by year are fun. I completely forgot that IBM, as the original PC manufacturer, used to publish games to help entice people away from the Apple ][. They also list old operating systems. DR DOS anyone? (thanks brig!!)

Japan realizes they are behind in the scientific world, so one of their few Nobel Laureates is devising a plan to get them back on track. In a NY Times article, Dr. Hideki Shirakawa offers an explanation for a cultural lack of individual initiative: “Fundamentally, Japanese culture is based on rice farming. Rice cultivation requires a lot of water, and water must be shared evenly by everyone. Planting rice also required teams of people walking from row to row, at the same speed. And all of this has meant that uniqueness had to be suppressed.” Peer reviews don’t work well because colleagues don’t wish to openly criticize each other’s work. The ministry is trying to create a more competitive atmosphere and upward mobility, but they are fighting a strong culture. Perhaps there’s a way to work within the current system? There’s some irony in the reality that Japan as a country feels competitive enough to want to keep up with the U.S. and other countries in scientific advancement, and yet that lack of competitiveness within their scientific community is what they believe is holding them back.

I used to rave about the spray gel (for styling hair) that you could get at a certain salon in the Boston area, and I just never found anything similar out here. The key ingredient was gelatin, and it wasn’t until I did a web search that I realized I could make my own spray gel by dissolving plain gelatin in water. “Duh”, said I.

I’ve been enjoying the Not Martha weblog. It’s been charming (and I don’t mean “charming” in a real estate-speak “this house is so charming none of your furniture will fit in it” kind of way). The author “trolls Martha Stewart so you don’t have to” (a very Good Thing(tm) in my book), actually accomplishes the crafts she relates (try making your own lip balm!) and gets the projects down to their basics — especially by not paying Martha prices for kits of repackaged goods you can get elsewhere much more economically. Parts of our wedding planning are like one big long crafts project, so this has been a comforting place to visit.

The John Hughes Files includes some interesting trivia on those classic ’80s teen films. The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink trivia is especially interesting. John Cusack and Judd Nelson were both up for the role of Bender in TBC, but Cusack didn’t look “threatening” enough. I’d agree. Parts of Pretty in Pink were filmed in the same high school as Grease. (via Yahoo’s Weekly Picks)

McWhorter’s is being partially rescued from extinction! Yippee! It was unfortunate that their stores, reportedly profitable, had to suffer from their parent company’s bankruptcy. It has been very inconvenient lately trying to find nice things at the office superstores or hoping a Hallmark store had what we needed.

I’m a sucker for books marked “annotated edition”, “critical edition”, and sometimes “definitive edition”. Here’s an article on a new edition of Huckleberry Finn. U.C. Berkeley researchers studied the original manuscript and Twain’s letters to try to undo the work of well-meaning proofreaders and typists’ errors. Other critical works I’ve made note of are The Annotated Alice, which is wonderfully done by Martin Gardner, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, which I haven’t taken a close look at yet, and The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, which I’m waiting for a cheaper copy of; in the meantime I’ve got The Definitive Edition.