Happy birthday, Kris!

Congratulations on your latest in a string of 29th birthdays!

I prefer my safety tips in verse form

It’s true: Apple explicitly tells iPod owners not to eat their iPod Shuffles. (This suggests that, perhaps, other models are delicious candy, but I have not personally tested out this theory.)

To illustrate the inherent dangers of consuming an MP3 player, erasing.org has posted a poem entitled “I Ate iPod Shuffle.”

Yummy.

Hanna and Lucky turn 1

We got them last November, but Hanna and Lucky were born a year ago today.

They’ve grown a lot since they were known as Raven and Bubbles by the family that owns their mother (and Lucky has come out of the closet as a boy cat), although Lucky has grown more than Hanna. Hanna still has a kittenish body (and acts kittenish more often than Lucky) while Lucky is big and strong enough to beat up neighborhood dogs if he wasn’t a big cowardly wuss.

Naturally, someone set them up with new cat toys, although my idea of buying them both a bunch of white mice was overruled.

Dengue Fever, for free

If, for some reason, you don’t get the Today’s Top Tune podcast from KCRW, make sure and sign up quickly, before “1000 Tears of a Tarantula” by Dengue Fever is no longer available for free.

I know, I know, you already have a bunch of surf rock by Cambodian rock bands, but this song is so damn cool …

The new HesperiaStar.com

Well, it’s happened: HesperiaStar.com has made the jump to being much more interactive and now allows comments.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding category information to current and recent stories, so that a reader will be able to click on, say, “Election 2006,” and see all the election coverage in one list. More changes will be coming, including online photo galleries.

And, as you may notice, the page doesn’t simply show this week’s stories, which is a structural change that will allow us to post breaking news online when it happens.

Stay tuned.