Hot off the Press: Groundhog Day edition

The FCC sent a letter to major cell phone providers, including Google, inquiring about the necessity for termination fees: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphones27-2010jan27,0,6628363.story. Mainly it's just to fuck customers over when we're not satisfied.

Apparently, growlers are all the rage right now in the hippest beer drinking circles: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/dining/27growl.html?8dpc. I've never used a growler before, but have often thought about getting one from the Huntington Beach Beer Company. What I'd never thought about, though, was this straightforward fact:

That much-vaunted freshness, however, depends on how the bottle is filled.

“There’s always the possibility that someone may not fill the growler properly,” said Shane Welch, founder of Sixpoint Craft Ales brewery in Brooklyn, which sells its products in stores in growler form. Most stores and bars run the beer straight from the tap to the bottle. “If you don’t fill it to the top, if you don’t purge the air out of there, when you close the container it will be stale beer,” Mr. Welch said. “You probably have to drink it that night.”

Flat beer is hella uncool. I still prefer six-packs.

Apple's new iPad (which unnecessarily dominated the news last Wednesday) may place the company in another trademark and patent battle. Meet the iPad, released by Fujitsu in 2002: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/technology/companies/29name.html?hp. How can Apple be so stupid?

RIP Greg Shanley, who hosted my favorite show on Iowa Public Radio: http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2010/01/28/iprs-talk-host-greg-shanley-died-tuesday/.

The official historical commission of California has designated artifacts of the Apollo program left on the moon, including bags of urine and puke, as historical landmarks for protection against would-be scavengers: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/science/space/30moon.html?hp. I like this graph:

And while some of the garbage might seem like, well, garbage, California is just one of several states seeking protection for the items in the face of possible lunar missions by other nations as well as a budding space tourism industry.

"[B]udding space tourism industry"? Yeah. There are so many tourists visiting space and the moon.

The Moscow neighborhood at the center of Russia's ambiguous land laws is being demolished one house at a time, with police throwing residents out in the cold and even beating old ladies. Russians aren't too happy about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/europe/02moscow.html.