Between blotch and blok

From the Register: Mattel Juice Box kid's portable media player. Interestingly if you follow the link to The Mattel Site and go to Our Toys, it's listed in the category headed Boys.

WARNING: don't click on the Juicebox link if your ears show signs of taste and discrimination.

As reported in the NYTimes (registration required for article): ( this )

And only mentioned here so we can claim to be...

but the coop's cool.

Home-laid eggs--it's almost tempting.

We could hear the note of slight disdain in the customer services man's voice when he said, "well, you have had that handset for quite some time", a tone echoed by the nice sales lady when we transferred to her. She may have even said "a long time" with even more disdain when she mentioned the words August and 2002. (This fact means our LJ has outlasted our 'phone.) Admittedly the on/off switch has been dodgy for several months, probably due to our sitting on the thing far too often. But, it's less than two years old and folk seem to imply we've kept it far too long. (Perhaps we should have told them that our previous 'phone lasted from late 1997 or early 1998 until August 2002. Or would we be treated like telecommunication lepers?) So, we're getting a new one (Nokia 3100) and another lower tariff. (And probably a replacement Delilah off eBay anyway. The Nokia's free, so we can keep it as a back up and use, if we can get it for around a tenner, the substitute Delilah until it too succumbs to squashing.)

We don't really want a new 'phone at all. We don't particularly want colour. It doesn't, fortunately, come with a camera (we carry a "proper" one of those around with us--but that's probably obsolete too!--and a digital one sometimes--definitely stone age technology) that we don't want. We like DD and have no real desire to replace her. Any novelty inherent in a new handset is far outweighed by the familiarity and sheer cuteness of DD. We're also slightly horrified by the speed at which these, nominally (we got DD free and the Nokia's free), expensive items are made obsolete by, what? fashion, marketing, technological advance? It's worse than upgrades to Windows but we suppose we'll cave in on that one too (these croakings are composed on 98SE).

or, Small objects of desire auf Deutsch

We ought to be posting in German but we're tired. Der Spiegel online had this (we were actually looking for more about H-H Frentzen's little sister being caught joy riding): Dynamo fürs Handy (more details here in pdf). It's blue. It looks like a device for peeling apples (or maybe a large pencil sharpener, of the kind you'd finbd clamped to edge of teacher's desk) and it's a great ice-breaker, apparently. As the man says:

Und feststelle, dass Lowtech in ist. Jedenfalls lächelt alles um mich herum ganz freundlich.

[This was Tuesday! Post, dammit, post!]