(Roughly) Daily

From Clusterflock, via the ever-illuminating Jason Kottke, “Meat Stylus for the iPhone“:

Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales.

As we head directly for the refrigerated section of our grocery stores, we might recall that it was on this date in 1733 that James Oglethorpe founded that 13th of the original American Colonies– Georgia– and a settlement that has grown to become Savannah.  February 12 is still observed as Georgia Day.

Oglethorpe’s idea was that British debtors should be released from prison and sent to the new colony. Ultimately, though, few debtors ended up in Georgia.  Rather, colonists included many Scots and English tradesmen and artisans and religious refugees from Switzerland, France and Germany, as well as a number of Jewish refugees. The colony’s charter guaranteed the acceptance of all religions– except Roman Catholicism, a ban based on fears born of the colony’s proximity to the hostile settlements in Spanish Florida.

Oglethorpe also arranged that slavery should be banned by Georgia’s Royal Charter; and the colony was slavery-free through 1750 (after Oglethorpe’s departure back to England).  At that point, the Crown acceded to land owners’ desire for a larger work force, and lifted the ban.

James Oglethorpe