When I was a young fella, I remember my aunt keeping a saucer of butter on her counter. It was great having room-temperature butter to spread on your breakfast toast, but I was unaccustomed to this and unsure about contamination issues. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a prissy kid, but I was an adventurous enough eater to have encountered my share of poorly chosen meals and the unpleasant after-effects thereof.

My roommate recently brought home a butter keeper from T.J. Max for six bones that’s improved my breakfast experience well in excess of that cost. It’s a little two-piece ceramic device, one piece a crock and the other a lid with a dish extending down into the crock. You stuff some butter into the lid, fill the crock 1/3 with clean water, and when you drop the lid down into the crock, the water seals the butter off from the air. Brilliant.

Looking forward to summertime when I don’t keep the nightly home temperature at 54 degrees and room temperature at 6am is a little more toasty.

If you read this page last year, which would’ve been something like fifteen posts ago, it would seem, you’d know that I find the whole idea of the government banning smoking tobacco in bars to be about as sensible as banning organ music at baseball games: some people may find it old-fashioned (but so is the game of baseball and drinking in public, I’m sad to say on both counts), but it’s an integral part of the deal to the purists. Busch stadium isn’t Busch stadium without Ernie Hays, and more glaringly, a bar without a bit of a smoky haze is just a noisy room with a chicken-fryer stinking up the joint.

Illinois passed a state-wide smoking ban last year after perhaps the greatest three months of perfection ever experienced: the city of Champaign repealed their own local ban until the state-side ban took place. Some bars allowed smoking, some didn’t: everyone was happy—every business profited by catering to the two different sorts of bar customers as demarcated by the Line of the Tavernacle Purity.

It’s not bad in the summertime—good conversations are had outside. It’s pretty awful in the winter. I’m am not surprised that no statistics are being made public about the incidence of GHB-related assaults from women leaving drinks unattended while going outside for a breath of fresh air, but my guess is they’re up.

I got a Christmas present that’s a nice stopgap between now and the return of civility (ha.). I got a Pee-Wee nicotine vaporizer from PureSmoker.com. The device looks like a large batty (one-hitter, whatever the kids are calling it nowadays). The front half (that which looks like the white paper of a cigarette) is a battery pack; the back half (that which looks like the brown paper warpping the filter of a cigarette) is a plastic case that houses the vaporizer coil—they call it an “atomizer” so I will, too. The device is used by putting a drop of “juice” on the atomizer; when you replace the case and inhale on it, the atomizer boils the juice into a mist which you can inhale and blow out like smoke. The vapor definitely contains some nicotine: I’ve used the 11mg/ml and the 24mg/ml juices and find the latter to be adequate for maintaining desired nicotine levels. The devices are kinda cute, too: the tip glows red when you’re inhaling, which draws stink-eye from time to time. A friend who has one enjoys “putting it out” in her palm or on her forehead when she’s attracting undesired attention. The vapor’s satisfyingly thick, too. I can blow smoke rings with it as well as I can with tobacco smoke.

The key is that there’s no smoke, no tobacco, no incineration at all involved with the device’s operation, which means it’s not regulated by the smoking ban at all. It also means that it doesn’t deal with the whole hyperventilation symptom of smoking withdrawal—that CO binds with hemoglobin more tightly than CO2 or O2, so that after it’s been a while without a smoke, your body’s cells are being delivered more O2 than they’re intended to. That’s kind of a good thing if you want to use one of these things as a smoking-cessation aid. No tar, too, eh?

A bottle of juice costs $10 at the website listed above. A friend who’s replaced his cigarette usage with these tools estimates a bottle lasts two months, which is a silly discount compared to cartons. I’m recruiting friends to do some analysis on the compounds emitted from the atomizer under controlled conditions, but I can’t report any adverse effects from the intermittent direct exposure I’ve had with it.

Update: The student newspaper wrote a story about some of my friends using these. I chose not to attend that night since I can’t stand reporters (outside of sports and business news), the useless, ignorant self-important little wretches.

Over the weekend, I used my Wii’s encrypted wireless connection to my home network to download a bunch of old school games {Y’s Book I & II; Mega Man 2; Metroid) for the Virtual Console and also one new-school game that had been rated highly for the WiiWare doo-hickey.

And what an excellent game it is: World of Goo, by the two-man development team at 2D Boy. It’s a physics-based game, something like Fantastic Contraption, except where all the building blocks are gooballs of varying structural properties used to create structures needed to solve tasks. (So far, none of the gooballs have any kinetic powers aside from undulating like the wheels in FC.) The motion-sensitive controls with the Wiimote work admirably well. The music’s excellent and the quirky visuals definitely grow on you. Reminds me quite a bit of a Tim Burton cartoon.

Some of the puzzles are pretty tough to figure out. I’m stuck on one at the moment that’s challenging enough to take around with you. Kindly, the game lets you skip puzzles so you don’t get too frustrated.

Great game, for fifteen bucks, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.