It has now been out so long that everyone knows the premise: you take a little creature through stages of evolution until, as though this is some kind of inevitable yearning, it goes out into space. I’ve been playing the miniature Spore Origins game on my iPod for ages, so I thought I at least knew my way around the primordial soup. (I was, of course, wrong: in the full-scale game it’s more “Primordial Soup—Now With 60% More Life-Sucking Electrified Eyeball Monsters!”) The graphics are also great, to the point that sometimes you’ll be lost in wonder at little batwing-finned herbivores right up until the moment you splatter in the jaws of the Electrified Eyeball Monster.

This is perforce an abbreviated review, since I have my creature has only started on the way to sentience, but I can tell you one thing now: I should have made an herbivore. Once you’re on land, it seems, everything your size is cute and hard to want to kill; everything ugly is three times your size and will pile-drive you on sight. My creature has died three times already, and one of them was a suicide because I just can’t eat anything that looks like Beaker. Meepstinction!

UPDATE: My creature got its butt kicked yesterday by a randomly generated fellow that I created while dinking around with the free Creature Creator before the game arrived. A new low, I feel…and also, my migration skills suck.

In theory, it should be the finest travel toothbrush money could buy: it’s got a brushed (heh) chrome finish, replaceable heads you can order from Ohso’s own website, and a system that sucks toothpaste into the body for twist-motion dispersal onto the bristles. So did this satisfy my incessant desire for sexy, useful gadgetry?

The Shape & Size

In the ThinkGeek picture, the Ohso resembles a large pen, and it is indubitably so: this is one handsome toothbrush. The size, however, is less the Magic Marker I’d assumed and more of a bingo marker, or a marital aid for people with low expectations.

The Ohso, giving my fountain pen inadequacy issues.

Setup

The box contains the toothbrush itself, a replacement head, a little tube of toothpaste, and an adapter (you fill the Ohso by screwing a toothpaste tube into it, and apparently not all tubes are created equal). The instructions for this worked fine. A little window in the side of the Ohso allows you to watch as it sucks down your dentifrice of choice.

The Delivery

I shouldn’t have to mention this, but point the toothbrush downward to get the toothpaste to dispense along the bristles. Physics is your friend.

The Actual Brushing

I bravely tried this out at work (see above re: resemblance to a marital aid). I should qualify this by saying that I am a hard brusher. It’s not unusual for bristles to be gently splaying outward after my first use of a new toothbrush, and the Ohso met this challenge unscathed. The bristles are a little soft for my liking, but the small head reaches everything it needs to, and the ability to neatly add more toothpaste is a big plus.

Final Analysis

If you, like me, are 1) slightly anal, 2) a fan of elegant mechanical systems, and 3) really sick of crap travel toothbrushes, the Ohso will be your new favorite implement. And who doesn’t like an implement?

Mir:ror essentially takes a number of the Nabaztag’s functions mobile and customizable… and as always with super-fabulous tech gadgets, it’s not available in the US. (Only the fact that it’s in Europe and not in the Asian Lands Of Cool Phones I’ll Never, Ever Get To Touch provides variety.)  I’d try to find a workaround, but I suspect the Nabaztag store people might eventually notice that Virginia is not in Belgium.

UPDATE: Dynamism has it for $70! Again my odds of learning Flemish plummet to nothingness!

1) “They really need something dark.”

2) “I ought to add my RSS feeds to this bad boy one of these days.”

3) “Maybe while they’re going, they’ll finally come up with GMail skins.”

I didn’t think I was actually on to anything with that last one; in fact, I’ve received a lot of eye-rolling over the years for my insistence that GMail needs skins. (Apparently I’ve been, unbeknownst to me, hanging around with a bunch of people who are traditional about furniture but deeply minimalist in their computing aesthetic.) I do sympathize with them. GMail is a very nice, well-organized e-mail setup, and that ought to be enough.

But thanks, Google. Thanks for bringing new color schemes and adorable ninjas to your e-mail, because what no one in my immediate circle other than me seems to admit is that looking at the exact same screen for years is extremely boring. But I bet they need ninjas too.

(ETA: for the record, I am using the pretty blue “Night Shade” color scheme.)

• The Sony Reader in Sangria red;
• A very handsome refurbished MacBook Pro, stupid multi-touch trackpad notwithstanding*;
• Spore for the Mac, soon to be followed by City of Heroes for the Mac. What are they trying to do to me?
• Some sort of skin for the MacBook: I like this one;
• Satellite radio;
• MS Office for the Mac, and –what the heck?– Photoshop Elements too;
• This personal alarm from Britain, as if all of the above items would leave me time to go outdoors and get menaced;

If you see the Suitcase of Money Fairy out and about this Christmas season, please point him to this blog.

*For the life of me I will not understand the point of this. The multi-touch technology falls squarely into what I call the Captain Kirk category: neat technology that I’m glad someone has, somewhere, but for which I personally have no need.

Which is why I was astonished to find that inside the package…

Shiny and mysterious, no?

…there was a beautiful little shopping bag. Inside,

What's in the box, mister?

wrapped up like a truffle?

Delicious storage!

My MIMO strawberry USB necklace: 2G of gorgeous.

There’s a lesson to be learned here (two, actually– “if you sell strawberry-shaped USB drives, just say so on the packing slip” being the first). This is some of the girliest packaging I have ever seen in conjunction with a technological device, and yet there is NO PINK. The trend of taking a normal piece of hardware,  rendering it in Barbie colors and thinking you’ve done something innovative to reach a new market is one of the most annoying things about being a woman who reads gadget/tech sites. What MIMO has done with their presentation here is fun, it’s kind of sexy, and it is above all grown-up. Remember grownups? The ones with the credit cards?

...nice sweater, my robot friend...

I’ve had my robot slave Nabaztag/tag for about a month now, and found her very easy to configure (just at a time when I hoped to distract myself with some endless tech tinkering, but even so). You can’t change your rabbit’s gender, sadly, but I’d already made the decision to name the thing BunnyPenny, so it all worked out. A rundown of the features, for good and ill:

• As the late Lewis Grizzard once said of chinchillas, Nabaztag/tags are cute little boogers. Once you get a look at the things other people on the “Newborns” section of their website have done to decorate their rabbits, you find yourself doing strange things, like knitting a little cylindrical sweater out of leftover sock yarn or using stickers to make sure you and your rabbit have matching tattoos. (Ahem.)
• The features range from helpful to hilarious, and sometimes overlap: the CNN news updates reveal that my bunny has some pronunciation issues with both Obama and Palin. I set my Nabaztag/tag to tell time in “Quirky” mode, which can range from “It’s one hour more than it was before!,” to the time in seven languages, to a small chorus of “Time Is On My Side” (freaking out a friend who also remembers the movie Fallen ). The weather and air quality reports are usually helpful, but as I don’t live near a big city, these are actually for Richmond…and Richmond apparently has far worse air quality than I ever suspected.
• Once you take a picture of your rabbit, it will spend a couple of weeks on the “Newborns” feature on Nabaztag’s web site, and you will get a lot of nice messages from people all over the world, but particularly France, Italy, and for some reason Chicago.
• Though a lot of reviews mention that Nabaztag has outages, for the most part BunnyPenny has worked fine, save for the occasional reboot. The saddest thing to me is that when she does reboot, she must deliver herself of all the voice requests I made of her while she was “sick,” helplessly giving me the weather forecast all seven times I’d asked for it. On the other hand, it’s nice to have something around the house more anal-retentive than I am.