Cooking with Amy: A Food Blog: Favorite Things: Breath Palette

Oddball Japanese toothpaste, in 31 flavours. Curry toothpaste? Very Red Dwarf.

Whatever: Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing

Tips for better writing, from a professional: short, funny, and accurate. “If you actually want to be a better writer, you have to be a better writer every time you write.”

Russell Beattie Notebook: WTF 2.0

Russ compares the “make cool toy; give it away free; …?” Web 2.0 bubble to the mobile market: “I deal with companies every day who have no qualms about charging 25 cents to send 160 characters of data from one person to another, or who have no problems charging $3.00 for a 10kb .gif image or a bad .midi version of a popular song, or even up to $10.00 for a small Java clone of Tetris— a 20 year old game. Unlike the web world, the mobile world is accustomed to charging for every thing that has the slightest bit of value.”

i was just really very hungry.: Restaurant Blinde Kuh

Dining in total darkness. Sounds a little impractical—how do you locate your food—but fascinating.

The Amateur Gourmet: The Polenta Post

“Foodies are often polenta bullies. ‘You should have polenta in your pantry,’ they’ll tell you. ‘I make polenta all the time,’ they’ll brag. ’I named my first born child Polenta.’” Nonetheless, this makes me want to take another try at polenta; despite the bland, mushy results of my first attempt.

101 Cookbooks: Valentine's Chocolate Fondue

I like the sound of this…

maps.huge.info: Zip Code Boundary Map

Nice use of Google Maps: where's the boundary of my zip code? my town? my county? I particularly like the click-on-the-map-to-explore nature of this one. (See also MelissaData’s comprehensive set of lookups, although I don’t like their we’d-rather-you-registered daily limit; and Ben Fry’s lovely zipdecode applet.)

MSN Autos: Gas Prices for 94596

Pretty much tells me what I already know: the cluster of stations around Ygnacio and Main consistently have the cheapest gas (often as cheap as, and a lot closer than, Costco); Rotten Robbie in Alamo, an old favourite of the in-laws, doesn’t measure up; and it’s cheaper to fill up near home than near work. (via Scobleizer)

The Fishbowl: A Slice of Life

Charles Miller: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a nerd than I did in that moment.” But surely that fades into insignificance alongide the sheer Comic Book Guy übernerdiness of this proposal to ISO/IEC; “enjoys both scholarly and popular use” indeed.

Refund Please

Amazon refunds you the difference if they reduce a price within 30 days of purchase? News to me, and I can’t find any mention of this policy on Amazon’s help pages. Is this for real? (via Rod Begbie at Groovy Mother, who says it is)

Dan’s Data: Peculiar pens

I particularly like the Rainbow Titanium Bullet: ooh, shiny.

Cool Tool: Tick Twister

Where were these when I needed them? (via BoingBoing; see also the manufacturers’ engagingly French website)

Whatever: Early Oscar Thoughts, 2006 Edition

Hollywood makes great movies, but nobody sees them: “At this moment, the three highest-grossing Best Picture nominees (Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Munich) have done less business in aggregate than the single Adam Sandler film The Longest Yard. […] The film industry is failing at the task of marrying art and commerce—or, at the very least, failing at the task of convincing moviegoers that art is worth seeing.”

Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography

Damn; I'll never watch Sandra Lee the same way again. Pinging Armchair Cook. (also an interview with the author at On The Media; via The Old New Thing)