Do they feed the cows beer and massage them with sake? Only the farmers know for sure. The Observer Magazine from the UK features this article that attempts to get to the bottom of the Kobe Beef legend and hype.

You can buy a $41 burger in New York these days, at the Old Homestead Steakhouse on Ninth Avenue. The owner, Greg Sherry, calls it the Kobe-burger, because though the cows come from Oregon, they are raised according to the methods of cattle farmers in Kobe, Japan.

I am a big Tim Burton fan and an even bigger Danny Elfman fan. Elfman is known for his dark scores, but this writer has posted the difference in one of the Oompah Loompahs songs from the original version. Evidently too dark for even those two.

In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, [The Oompah Loompahs] sing their stern judgments with extensive and gleeful details about the fates of the bad children.

For example, Augustus Gloop.

A hundred knives go slice, slice, slice;
We add some sugar, cream, and spice;
We boil him for a minute more,
Until we’re absolutely sure….

For Tim Burton’s movie, Danny Elfman changed that lyric to “We boil it for a minute more…”

Elfman sang, produced, and wrote music for all the songs. But Dahl’s lyrics were apparently so vicious, that Elfman had to trim out most of them.

I am in Los Angeles this week. I am writing to report to you a new fad that I’ve seen out here. They have been saying for many years now that the sun is bad for you. This is not new news across the country where the summer suntan is now less popular. There are other solutions to tanning, but there are drawbacks to those.

The “mystic spray tan” washes out over the course of a week to 10 days. There are “self tanning” lotions but many of those are beta-carotene based and make you look orange.

Here in LA its just not acceptable to not have a tan. The girls have dealt with this by going with the tanning lotions. Since they all do it, they all look orange, but it’s socially acceptable - kind of like frivolous plastic surgery. I do not know if they will start to refer to them as California Carrots, but I will keep you posted.

Under $1000? For a Sun workstation?

After practically writing these guys off for dead I am eating crow. If they market this thing right they could have a win. Personally I would want to play around with the new Solaris 10 OS before buying into it but wow, very good specs on that box, and you can always run Gentoo or even windows.

Wired has a great editorial outlining the legislative points that Congress could undertake to help the problem of identity theft. Its a good list. I would hope they would also add a provision that makes creditors liable for incorrect or bad information that they submit to the credit reporting agencies. (via Schneier)