I mean, serious stupid.

...firefighters learned the woman’s boyfriend had given the children a jar of mercury as a gift about a month ago.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that mercury is fun to play with, and I can state from personal experience that it doesn’t taste like any other metal, but we were teenagers at the time, not little kids, and they managed to clean up the classroom without involving a hazmat team.

Jodie Foster romances the stone? It could work.

[Update: just received an apology for the mistake, an updated license key, and a partial refund to bring my price down to the current $39 promotion.]

[Update: I can’t currently recommend this application, for the simple reason that I made the mistake of buying it four days before the release of 9.0, and they charge $29 for the upgrade. Until March, it’s only $39 for a brand-new license, but if I want 9.0, my total cost ends up being $88, which is more than the app is worth. Worse, the updater offered me the new version without mentioning the fact that it would revert to a trial license and require new payment. Fortunately, I was able to revert to 8.5.4.]

Your file-transfer app, Interarchy, is very nice. I particularly appreciate its solid support for Amazon S3. In the latest version, the thing I like most is the fact that permissions settings for uploads are now an honest-to-gosh preference, rather than being buried in some pulldown menu.

I question your decision to make the new version look like the unholy love-child of Finder and Safari, however, especially since your Bookmarks Bar and Side Bar are only cosmetically related to their inspiration, and share none of their GUI behaviors. It looks like a duck, and it sort of quacks like a duck, but it’s really just a cartoon duck, and not worth eating.

And I haven’t the slightest idea why you thought it would be a good idea to have the first item on the Bookmarks Bar be a menu containing every URL in the user’s personal Address Book. Considering that the user can’t rearrange or remove items on the Bookmarks Bar, you’re wasting an awful lot of valuable real estate on a very marginal feature.

Oowakudani is the source of the sulfurous waters piped down to the Hakone hot springs resorts. It’s also a popular destination in its own right, due to the terrific views (1, 2, 3, 4 ) and novel cuisine.

The current name for the place translates as “great boiling valley” (大湧谷). This was an early example of tourist marketing, since until they heard that the Shogun was going to come up and take a look, the locals just called it “the big hell”.

Based on the complete lack of results on Yahoo, Google, and MSN search engines, I hereby claim credit for coining the term “glompire” to describe the aggressively affectionate blood-sucking fiend who is the heroine of Rosario+Vampire.

Not that I expect there to be very many of them, but you never know. It could catch on.

[Update: screenshot]

[Q: does Moon Phase’s Hazuki ever glomp Kouhei? I don’t remember.]

For the past few weeks, my mother has been calling to say, “we sent you a monkey for Christmas, has it arrived yet?”. Each time, she seemed disappointed that I didn’t have my monkey.

Last night, it arrived. The Powertraveller Powermonkey-explorer universal charger. It’s an external battery for extending the charge on your gadgets, and it comes with a bunch of adapter tips for different phones and toys, a charger with a set of international plugs, and a small solar panel for charging off-grid.

The only additional adapter tip I’ll need to buy is for the DS-lite, which isn’t quite a standard mini-USB. Can’t have my kanji practice tool dying on me!

I finally got around to making a proper noise profile of my little Canon camera, so here’s a quick sample of how well Noise Ninja cleans up an ISO 1600 image. Note that this is just using the default settings; it’s capable of more aggressive noise reduction, but that can eliminate too much detail in some images.

Before:

After: