Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na... Once upon a time, I went out and bought a PlayStation 2 just to play a single game. That game's successor is now available on the iPhone: I Love Katamari (iTunes) has arrived. Sadly, the initial reviews are mixed. And don't forget your official Katamari Damacy Wear from the fine folks at Panic.

Who knew that chess has drug testing? The Great Chess Doping Scandal. (via MeFi.)

The Seattle Municipal Archives posted some great photos of Luna Park, Seattle's long-gone amusement park. I'm surprised at how few pictures there seem to be of the place. During Henry's roller coaster phase, I bought him a framed copy of that first picture for his room.

Speaking of great pictures on Flickr, the Library of Congress has released a report on its Flickr pilot project. In short, it's a success!

I've been intrigued by the minimalist video cameras from Flip. Beau Colburn has a comparison of the Ultra and Mino HD. Also in the race: the Kodak Zi6. (via somewhere I can't remember.)

I mentioned the LIFE photo archives a couple weeks ago. The Best of LIFE blog lives up to its name. Elsewhere, Typophile has a challenge: "create a book cover, using a fictitious title and an image from the LIFE photo archive." The results (all 7 pages, so far) are impressive.

In other archival news, Google Book Search now has a selection of old magazines, including Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, New York, and Ebony. And for geeks of a certain age, there's always the Radio Shack Catalog Archive. (via Make and Boing Boing Gadgets.)

The Woodland Park Zoo's new penguin exhibit will "use the earth's thermal reserves to maintain the penguin pool at the birds' ideal water temperature of 50-60 degrees—heating it in winter and cooling it in summer." Geothermal penguins! (via Make.)

A 16-year study by German astronomers has confirmed that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way: "The stellar orbits in the galactic center show that the central mass concentration of four million solar masses must be a black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt."

45s were kind of a pain in the butt, but man were those adapters cool. (via BB Gadgets.)

Whoa. Hot on the heels of adding Seattle, Google has doubled the coverage of Street View. Lots of new cities (including Portland, Maine) and, for the first time, lots of inter-city coverage, too. (via Lat Long Blog.) I should also mention that the Google Maps updates that rolled out in the latest iPhone software update (Street View, walking directions, transit directions) just serve to make the iPhone seem all the more like something from the future. I'm still waiting on the flying car, though.

It's hard to believe now, but there was once a time when I didn't know the wonders of frozen custard. I'd probably had it at some point (Carvel is pretty close to frozen custard), but didn't differentiate it from regular ice cream. For folks from the midwest (especially, say, Wisconsin), this is a little like saying I didn't know what bread was. So be it.

One time when we were back home from college, Kathy's mom took us to a new place down in Rockville called Wally's. They served frozen custard and made wonderful treats called concretes (think DQ Blizzard). My eyes were opened. As most of you probably know, frozen custard is smoother, creamier, and richer than regular ice cream. Better yet, it has an absolutely unmatched texture: a sort of firmness at first, followed by creamy, smooth meltiness. Yum. Sadly, Wally's didn't last long. Sadder still, neither Portland nor Seattle were Frozen Custard towns.

Flash forward to 2003. Kathy and Henry and I took a month-long driving vacation across the USA. Armed with a copy of Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, we made sure to sample the finest burger joints, diners, and ice cream places across the nation. In St. Louis, Roadfood led us to Ted Drewes, right on old Route 66.

The place is a St. Louis institution, dating back to 1930. Yum. This was the gold standard of frozen custard. Our love of the stuff was reawakened. On the remainder of that trip, we had custard many a time, including some Kohr Brothers in Maryland and several stops at Culver's on our way back through the midwest. Kohr Bros. was a pale imitation of Ted Drewes, but Culver's was almost up to the Drewes Standard.

But then we were back in custardless Seattle, making do with regular ice cream. On one of our many visits to Portland (Oregon, this time), we discovered Sheridan's across the river in Vancouver. Good Stuff—on par with Culver's. The custard was getting closer, but was still 180 miles from Seattle. Then last summer, we found out about Old School Frozen Custard, down in Bonney Lake, just 45 miles away! Their custard is better than Sheridan's... and they're planning a store in Seattle! Woot!

This long pathetic tale of culinary addiction brings us to yesterday, when Seattlest posted an article about the arrival of frozen custard here in the Emerald City. It's not Old School, but a newcomer: Peaks Frozen Custard. Peaks was started by someone who really knows his custard: a Wisconsin native named Tim Wolfe. Sounds promising. The author of the Seattlest article is a Wisconsin native, too. How does Peaks compare to his beloved Kopp's?

... Kopp's is Chuck Barry and Ray Charles rolled into one, while Culver's and Sheridan's are Pat Boone.

So we were both delighted and wary when we heard about the coming of Peaks. But we needn't have worried. Peaks is Elvis. Their custard has soul.

Excellent. I'll be sure to report back after we've tried it.

Bowl o' custard
Originally uploaded by James Callan

There's only one problem. Peaks is too close to home. It's less than two miles from here and sits just around the corner from our favorite grocery store. Must... resist... pull of frozen custard too strong... willpower weakening...

Those of you who are particularly observant may have noticed a bunch of Hawaii pictures in our flickr photostream (or maybe over there in the sidebar). No, we didn't go to Hawaii again. The pictures are from our trip back in January 2005. The other day, I realized that when I transferred all our older pictures from the gallery here on bradandkathy.com to flickr, I somehow overlooked that batch.

So the pictures are now on flickr. With that, I plan to take down the old gallery in the near future. It served me well, but its time is up. I'm not sure I ever wrote about how the old gallery was made, or why. Back in 1998 or so, I wanted to put up a gallery of pictures I'd taken with my nifty new Kodak DC210 digital camera ("A million pixels plus superb color." Woo-hoo!). There weren't too many applications that could help with such a project, and the few there were produced mostly hideous results. I came across an early version of iView that got me most of the way there, but the pages it produced still weren't quite what I wanted (and there was very little customizability).

I eventually wrote a little perl script that took a text file listing filenames, dates, and captions and spit out the html for a gallery. I still generated the scaled-down images and thumbnails using iView, but everything else was done by my script. By the time I switched to flickr in 2005, my perl script had grown its own template system, support for adding to an existing gallery, and image-resizing support. I revamped the template somewhere in there, too, so that my pages used style sheets instead of tables for layout. The result was a set of very compact, fast-loading pages.

I still like the look of the gallery pages. But flickr does most the work for me, and does so much more, too. Comments, sets, annotations, searching... there's no way my gallery could ever support all that stuff without a lot of work on my part. These days, uploading to flickr is little more than a click away, thanks to Jeffrey Friedl's "Export to Flickr" plug-in for Lightroom. Ah, progress.

Goodbye gallery. It's been fun.

Minnesota Harvest has a fascinating history of the Honeycrisp apple. Honeycrisp seemed to come out of nowhere a couple years ago, but like all overnight successes, the real story is long and complicated. If you've never had a Honeycrisp, by all means, go out and try one. Whether you prefer your apples sweet or tart, chances are, you'll love Honeycrisp. Huge sweet-tart apple flavor and a wonderful crispy texture. Honeycrisp has managed to unseat Northern Spy and Winter Banana as my favorite apple. I'm happy to say it's much easier to find, too. (via mathowie.)

Ooo! This is a good one. Thanks to Google, you can now browse millions of photos from the archive of LIFE magazine.

TweakerSoft's CoffeeBreak for iPhone looks like a useful way to track down a caffeine fix when traveling. (Though I don't know why they'd be looking for a Tully's near Moscone Center when Blue Bottle is just a couple blocks away.)

I remember watching a documentary several years ago about the development of Boeing's 777. One of the most memorable scenes was of the Wing Break Test. They gradually added additional force until the wing snaps. Now, you can watch the same test for the new 787 Dreamliner. (via Boing Boing Gadgets.)

Gizmodo visits the observatory on the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center. I'll have to remember to show this one to Henry. I love the SWFC bookmark he made for me.

Disney has broken ground on a new Resort in Hawaii. There won't be a new theme park, just a 21-acre Hawaiian resort with a Disney touch. It's on the western side of Oahu at the Ko Olina Resort & Marina development.

Serial Consign takes a look at the evolution of the front page of the Los Angeles Times. It's interesting to see how much of the front page was taken up with advertising back in the day.

I'm surprised I don't have any Lego links this time. How about a combination coffee/Star Wars one instead? Maybe a TIE Fighter made entirely of stuff from Starbucks? That'll do. (via Giz.)

Make has a great map of New York City that compares the populations of the boroughs to various states. Staten Island = Wyoming. Presumably the sheep population is not included.

Sound Transit, the agency that's building Seattle's new Link Light Rail system, offers occasional tours of the construction progress. These "Lunch Bus" tours start with a bus ride along the light rail route (with running commentary) and end with a stop at a local eatery for lunch. Back in September, I took the tour and was pretty disappointed. For someone reasonably well informed about the light rail system, it offered very little you couldn't get from a short in the car.

The lunch was pretty good, though. We ate at a place called the Rainier Restaurant down on MLK Way. They weren't exactly ready for a busload of people, but the food was delicious. Well, today I heard that Public Health shut 'em down last week:

Nice. As Kathy put it, "Yikes! Was the tour secretly being run by Tim Eyman?" I wonder. Maybe Kemper Freeman was involved.

Gizmodo reports on the latest Lego world-record. A group of clearly insane Lego addicts people in Vienna constructed a Lego tower nearly 100 feet tall made of nearly 460,000 bricks.

Also from Gizmodo comes news of a gigantic 80,000-brick Lego Ferrari. Rather than reproducing an actual Ferrari in Lego scale, they've reproduced a minifig-scale Lego model in Ferrari scale. Speaking of minifigs, Giz also has an exhaustive minifig timeline. 2008 is the 30th anniversary of the minifig.

This story from the BBC is a nice counterpoint to the mysterious severed-foot stories from a few months ago. A 6-foot-tall Lego minifig (maxifig?) washed up on a beach in Brighton. A similar figure was found on a beach in the Netherlands in 2007. There seems to be some disagreement on the figure's height.

Finally, we have Brick Fetish, a "narrative timeline of the history of Lego" and "repository of set images, catalogs, ads and promotional literature, idea books, patents, and photographs." Lots of good stuff for clearly insane Lego addicts casual Lego fans like me. I had no idea that US Lego sets were made by Samsonite until 1972. Of course, I was an American Bricks kid myself. (It's only in hindsight that the name "American Bricks" takes on a certain disturbing Freedom Fries quality. "Don't buy Lego from those stinky Europeans, buy American Bricks!")