We dithered for a while on what to get, and settled on a shiny Mini Cooper Clubman.

I’ve put a picture or two here.

I gave in and pre-ordered Fallout 3 and Rock Band 2, after ordering some random kitchen equipment.

I already had five different book and video game pre-orders outstanding.

It’s entirely possible that I have a problem.

Okay, fine, cute enough.

So the first question is “Where do penguins live?”

Sure, that makes sense, the team mascot’s a huge freakish cartoon penguin.

But then EVERY SINGLE KID says “up north where it’s cold!” or “the north pole!”

Not one knows the answer.

So I ask you: is our children learning?

So far I’m about as happy as I expected to be, which is very.

Second: I picked up a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur gin, which is a newish gin distilled with Rangpur limes, ginger, and bay leaves. It’s stunningly good in a simple gin and tonic, and it also made the best martini I’ve ever had:

• six parts tanqueray rangpur gin
• one part dry vermouth
• one-half part orange bitters

I tend to like my martinis on the wet side (as my friend Peter would say, otherwise it’s just a big glass of gin), and I’ve recently fallen in love with the old-style addition of orange bitters. The slight lime flavor of the Rangpur mixed incredibly well with the orange, and the whole thing is just wonderfully smooth and tasty.

Definitely pick some up if you can.

From A Man Without A Country:

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

Fair enough.

Kurt is up in heaven now.

That is all.

Unsurprisingly, the best prices were online, but Best Buy’s website showed a fairly close price and wouldn’t need a week or so to ship it to us. So after a bit of dithering, we traipsed down to the local Best Buy to pick one up, since their site claimed that store had the thing in stock.

When we got there, the price wasn’t what we expected — suddenly it was $200 higher than it’d been the previous night online. We complained to a salesman, who assured us that their sales end Sunday morning. That seemed a bit odd, but we had no reason not to trust him, especially since he showed us the online price, and it matched what the store offered. We resisted his pressure to buy the thing and wandered off, hunting around through different stores and finally finding the right price at Circuit City. Things happen, we thought, and we should have been quicker about buying the TV when we saw the online price.

Turns out I shouldn’t have been so trusting about the “see, it’s the same price online” maneuver:

Best Buy Confirms It Has Secret Website

March 2, 2007

Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming my reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.

After reading that article, I looked at Best Buy’s site, and surprisingly enough the sale hadn’t ended. They’re still showing the price I originally expected, $200 less than what the store tried to charge us.

Suddenly it’s feeling a lot less innocent — Laura pointed out that in the store, we didn’t actually see the salesman navigate to ‘www.bestbuy.com’, but just click on a bookmark in a browser with a hidden address bar. Gosh, I wonder why they might be hiding the address bar. Certainly couldn’t be because their bookmark leads to the internal clone site, right?

The article’s right — the clone site looks exactly like Best Buy’s external site, flashy graphics and ads and all. It’s not even remotely like an inventory list like their spokesman tried to claim.

At this point I’m pretty convinced they were trying to rip me off with the internal site, and I don’t plan to ever buy anything from them again. I suggest you don’t either.

It’s essentially a double-walled ceramic shaving mug, with a nicely sized inner compartment for working up lather and an outer compartment for hot water to keep everything warm. On its own it’s a very pretty piece of handmade pottery, but when it’s filled with hot water and a good shaving cream it magically transforms into the best thing ever. I’d read people raving about hot lather shaves and had sort of dismissed it as the usual shavegeek hyperbole, but it turns out that it’s all true.

Specifically, this bit from Shaveblog turns out to be absolutely 100% accurate:

What you do need is hot lather. Oh man do you need hot lather! Hot lather is why men fight wars, son. Not for democracy. Not for oil. We fight wars to decide who gets to shave with hot lather and who doesn’t. If you’ve never shaved with hot lather you won’t understand, and if you have, you do.

If you have any sort of facial hair, do yourself a favor and buy a shaving scuttle immediately.

If you don’t, consider buying one for your closest acquaintance who does.

It’s basically heaven.