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Rosemarie fiore took some amazing long-exposure photos of ‘80s arcade games. The one above of Tempest is one of my favorites…

Check out this awesome post at ruhlman.com in which guest Blogger Anthony Bourdain goes off on The Food Network and some of its “stars.” Classic.

Billboard.com reports that The Police have scheduled a post-Grammy press conference:

After weeks of speculation, a press conference and “special announcement” featuring rehearsals by the Police is set for Monday (Feb. 12) at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood, Calif., the day after the band will reunite for a show-opening performance at the Grammys.

The 11 a.m. PT press conference and special announcement via live satellite broadcast is widely expected to be regarding a 30th anniversary world tour by the seminal rock trio.

I’ll be watching (and hoping for a concert tour announcement)…

No Fact Zone.Net reports that Ben and Jerry’s is releasing a new ice cream flavor called Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream.

Chris Yates came up with a neat way to visualize the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Wikipedia has a good entry on the Interstate Highway System, including the history of its development and information on numbering schemes.

WikiSky is a very cool online interactive sky map, giving displaying detailed star charts as well as visible imagery from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

In other doomed-to-suck ‘80s movie sequel news, Cinematical alleges that a sequel to Weird Science is in the works. Normally I wouldn’t report on such idle speculation, but a question in the post posed piqued my interest: who will play the “Perfect Woman” embodied by Kelly LeBrock in the ’80s classic? That’s a toughie that I’ll have to mull over, but my first reaction was Jessica Biel. 🙂 Who do you think can follow in LeBrock’s footsteps?

Cinematical reports on some more news about another Ghostbusters sequel:

Dan Aykroyd just popped up on a country music radio station, declaring that in the last year, there’s been movement in the never-ending saga of the third Ghostbusters film. Aykroyd says his script – Hellbent: Ghostbusters Go To Hell – will now be brought to life as some kind of CGI-animated project, with Bill Murray’s blessing and even his involvement.

I’ll believe it when I see it, but I don’t know about a CGI version…

Wired News has an interesting article speculating that the iPod will be the new CD. The impetus behind this assertion is the recent settlement of the “15-year legal spat over the ‘Apple’ trademark” between Apple Computer and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company. The immediate reaction at most media outlets is the prediction that The Beatles’ catalog will finally be available for sale through the iTunes Music Store soon. However, the article reveals that there is a much larger implication:

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40 – the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Apple was prevented from doing this until now by the 15-year-old contract between Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company, and Apple Computer. This contract precluded Jobs’ Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or “physical media delivering prerecorded content … (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones’ music).”

Apple has been selling music as downloads for years, of course, but thanks to this clause, the company couldn’t sell an iPod with music already loaded onto it.

That’s why the U2 special-edition iPod ships with a voucher for downloading the band’s catalog online. The Beatles contract prevents Apple from pre-loading the U2 iPod with U2’s music.

That is undoubtedly going to change. Apple will soon offer a range of iPods pre-loaded with tunes.

First up will likely be the widely rumored Beatles special-edition Yellow Submarine iPod, tipped to be released in just over a week on Valentine’s Day.

This could spawn an entire new paradigm for music distribution, or at the very least result in some cool cross-promotions. We’ll soon see…

Did you know what a “stravenue” is? I didn’t until I read this J-Walk Blog post that linked to the official list of USPS street abbreviations. Apparently, a “stravenue” is “a street that runs diagonally between and intersects a Street and an Avenue.” Makes sense, I guess…