Matte nail polish is back. Nail polish that is completely shine-free, like, well, like when you put Wite-Out on your nails because you’re that bored. I forget when this trend was last “in”, but OPI has a matte nail polish line out. ManGlaze has been marketing unshiny men’s nail polish for a little while. Knock Out Cosmetics has a “flatte” line of polish (the pink version is descriptively called Calamine). And Zoya has a limited edition of MatteVelvet colors. I’ll stick to the shiny and leave the matte for the walls.

The apple folks are happy. No not that Apple. NBC’s “Inside the Obama White House” showed the bowls full of apples that are placed around the executive offices to promote healthy snacking. The program also happens to show bowls of M&Ms; and the gift boxes of official White House M&Ms; (red, white, & blue with the President’s signature, here’s a photo of Bush’s), not to mention the Obama burger run, but, hey, at least there was a shot of the President actually eating one of those apples.

Smooth Owl’s Clover isn’t rare in California, but it hadn’t been seen in San Francisco’s Presidio since 1917. Staffers searching for seeds came across the yellow flowered plant in a remote area. The theory is that a water main break caused dormant seeds to come to life. Other wildflowers thought to be long vanished from the Presidio landscape have also made a surprising comeback.

23 year old Josh Lipsky asked to be on the advance team for President Obama’s visit to Buchenwald hoping to fill in some holes in his family history. Lipsky’s grandfather, Samuel Smulowitz, met his wife-to-be at a labor camp but they were separated when he was sent to Buchenwald. With help from the Buchenwald guides, Lipsky retraced his grandfather’s steps, stood in the cellar under the kitchen where he worked, and held a check-in slip bearing his signature. Lipsky’s grandmother survived to liberation and searched for Smulowitz, eventually finding him in Munich. They married, moved to the United States, and had three children, one of them Lipsky’s mother.

Valeriy Palnchuk, facilities engineer at the Space Needle, says his most difficult task was replacing the airplane-warning light at the top when it went out during the night. In his words: “The beacon is at the very top [605 feet] and sits inside a disk. It’s like a big wok. I hook up at the bottom, go through all the lights, then, at the top of the mast, I have to pull myself up about 8 feet higher to be in the ‘nest’ and change the bulb.” But he enjoys his job, especially walking “the halo,” the ring around the observation deck. Many tourists have taken his photo out there.

Among metal sculptor Don Carlson’s clever creations are working barbecues shaped like toothy monsters and aliens. He also makes benches out of compressor tanks.

18 year old Shehade Shelaldeh has his own violin repair shop in the West Bank where there has been a growing interest in classical music. Ramzi Aburedwan, a violist who runs a music center for Palestinian children, encouraged Shelaldeh, who lived next door to the center, to learn the trade. Shelaldeh spent 3 months apprenticing in Italy and also received lessons from visiting European luthiers. He’s still got plenty to learn and he’s hoping to attend Newark College’s violin-making program, but for now he’s keeping the students’ instruments in shape, for a musical escape from the politics that surround them.

Cranium, the Seattle company that brought us a multi-faceted game of the same name, was purchased by Hasbro in early 2008. The resulting absorption of the company is now complete with only 8 of the 80 employees at time of acquisition staying with Hasbro. The Seattle office closed on Friday. In 2006 The Seattle Times took readers inside the fun-loving company culture, revealing that they knew of 6 men who have proposed using Cranium, some with custom game cards provided by the company. With funky job titles (the two founders went by Grand Poo Bah and Chief Noodler), an understanding of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, and a new approach to sell their product first in Starbucks and bookstores, the company mixed fun and smarts in their quest to create games where “Everyone Can Shine.”

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority maintains nesting boxes for peregrine falcons on area bridge towers and monitors them for activity. Five chicks have hatched in the past few weeks in their temporary homes stop the Verrazano-Narrows, Throgs Neck and Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridges. They’ll fly off before July.

A black bear was spotted in the Shoreline area of Seattle on Sunday night. What’s more remarkable than this bit of wildlife wandering freely in urban Seattle is that residents tracked the bear’s whereabouts using the My Ballard blog and on Twitter with the #bearalert tag. A Google map was created to link together bear sightings. Not to be outdone by the technosavvy humans, the bear began posting updates to Twitter also, except there were two competing, tweeting bears, so they met for a duel. One bear claimed victory, the other reclaimed his humanity.