• Whether you love or hate the Great White Mouthless One, the Hello Kitty Hell website will provide ample fodder for the obsessed. Enjoy everything from shots of a Hello Kittified Armored personnel Carrier, a goopily tarred (but not feathered) Miss Kitty, to the Hello Kitty bong.
• Clean as the Spotless Sun? According to NASA, the Sun is currently spotless. Astronomers will be watching its surface for signs of the next 11-year sunspot cycle's start. [via Neatorama]
• Not just for the 80's retro set any more: Pac-Mania lives on, Two-to-da-James-Bond-(that's 2-007 to you)-style: instructions for making a crocheted PacMan and Ghosts, or, for a mere $29.95, you can own your own full-coverage plush PacMan hat.
• Not sure if this will make China's "one family, one child" policy any sexier, but TokyoMango reports on snazzy condom dresses on display at a fashion show at a recent reproductive health and technology fair. Supermodels of the world, wear your raincoats! Looking at that dress, you can almost hear the squish and smell the latex.
• If using your fingerprints as biometric identification for financial transactions has you worried about knife-wielding digit burglars a la Se7en's John Doe, Hitachi Corporation was devised a clever, creepily-named, but possibly more secure finger-based ID method - finger vein money. Presumably a dead/detached finger would not offer a readable circulatory imprint, so consider your little piggies a bit safer. [via Pink Tentacle, a very cool technology blog I just got wind of]
• When you're at a problem-solving impasse at work or in creative endeavors, give Brian Eno's famed "Oblique Strategies" cards a whirl; there are a number of good online versions, of which this one is my current favorite. My Oblique Strategy for today? Card number 23, "Lost in useless territory."
• Harry Potter maniacs (and fearless spoiler fiends), check out MSNBC's post-Deathly Hallows interview with J.K. Rowling, who lets a few cats (and bats, and owls) out of the bag regarding the series' future.
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut will hit theaters in limited release (NYC and LA only, darn) in early October before its holiday DVD run; in preparartion check out BladeZone, an extensive "Online Blade Runner Fan Club and Museum."
• To use up the remaining half of my old bulk-size raspberry jam jar mouldering in the fridge, I think I'll try making one of these this steamy hot late-July weekend: a Mississippi Delta Jelly Cake.
• Speaking of hot, Chicago's got nothing on the former Yugoslavia, where Jasmina Tesanovic reports on this month's record-breaking heat, drought, and raging fires in Serbia. [via BoingBoing]

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