Shop until trampled by an angry mob.

Another day, another tech journalist bemoaning his inability to get a Wii. Daniel Terdiman writes " By now, it had become abundantly clear that last Sunday was the last, best chance to get a Wii anywhere in the civilized world." Yeah, duh. An item that has been so hot as to be pretty much unavailable for the past several months is nowhere to be found on December 19th, with a mere 6 shopping days left until Christmas.

Terdiman does mention the possibility of getting the widely available PS3 to "ward off the anger of disappointed kids on Christmas Day." Oi vey! If your children are will sit an sulk all Christmas day because you didn't get them the exact present they were hoping for, they are so greedy, selfish, and spoiled, you should consider re-evaluating your parenting skills.

But since everyone is so hung up on having a Wii for a completely arbitrary date, maybe you should pick March 30th. Once the Christmas rush is over, demand should soften to the point were Nintendo can dig itself out of the hole, maybe combined with another production increase.

Because, yeah, it's cool, but like most such things, as we say on the east coast, it ain't the end of the world. A sign of the downfall of western civilization, yes, but we can argue about the effects of a decadent culture later.

In a totally unrelated story, the US Senate has given its stamp of approval to a bill amendment calling on the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals before allowing for commercial sale, reports the wags at Wired. I can pretty much predict the result of this study now. Since cloned animals are identical to the animals they were cloned from, the meat and milk will likewise be identical and perfectly safe. Unless there is some artifact from the cloning process, which does not result in obvious deformity (not that that is totally unheard of), eating what is essentially a copy of something is not likely to hurt you. You have a much better chance of getting food poisoning. While I can see the FDA wanting to perform its due diligence, the fact that this is coming out the the Senate smacks of the lobbying work of various activist groups that have for years been spreading fear of genetically modified foods. Which, if you ask me, is born from baseless speculation and general fear of the new.

Another Wired story doles out this year's Vaporware awards, (mostly) tech items that have been spinning around the rumor mill for a long time but have yet to get an official release date. The perennial winner, the game Duke Nukem Forever, is back after, what, 10 years in development? I would just like to note that the short name for the game is DNF, which in racing jargon means did not finish. I find a satisfying symmetry in that.