Take a visual trip through 50 years of bizarre and kitschy children’s television from H.R. Pufnstuf to Sigmund and the Sea Monsters through to today’s bizarre Boohbah.

Last week we visited the San Francisco area and felt like tourists for the first time. I can’t recall riding a cable car during the long time I lived there, though I figure I must’ve taken a visitor or two on a ride. But with a four-year-old boy in tow, it was an imperative. We took the Powell-Mason line to the Cable Car Museum, which is the working powerhouse for the cable car system. There we saw the giant winding wheels that run the cables and lots of memorabilia and old cars. The Obama girls took a similar ride on Monday, but they traveled on brand new car No. 15, built from scratch and fresh from the paint shop. The car cost $823,000 and took 15 years to build with custom parts made from bronze, steel, and four kinds of wood.

In an impressive achievement, the staff at Woodland Park Zoo’s rose garden has gone organic. The 280 types of roses on 2.5 acres are fed compost tea and kept free of black spot and powdery mildew. The showcase garden is still flourishing and the zoo management retains its message of conservation.

In Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood a group of Jews in their 20s and 30s are living communally in three houses. It’s modern urban kibbutzim, a movement that is keeping these adults together in a common culture before marriage and kids. Shabbat dinners and events attract plenty of guests eager to share in the unique living environment. The Ravenna Kibbutz hopes to expand into a few other houses and eventually purchase some of the current rental property.

Adding to the lengthy list of things you can now buy out of vending machines, a German company is building a vending machine that dispenses gold. Put in enough money and it will spit out 1, 5, and 10-gram gold pieces. It also sells Canadian Maple Leafs and South African Krugerrands coins. The machines will of course be armored for security and they’ll even be tested with explosives.

Scribblenauts for the Nintendo DS has become a highly anticipated release after its E3 demos. The puzzle + action game is open-ended with a huge vocabulary of words that you can write in to incorporate within each scene. To build the game dictionary of objects, game developer developer 5th Cell had five people spend six months plowing thru reference materials including dictionaries, Wikipedia, and encyclopedias. But will we be able to kill a dragon with our bare hands? I must be patient until the “early fall” release date.

I’ve unintentionally ended up in several Virgin Megastores in different states and Vancouver, Canada. I didn’t find much difference between them and Tower Records. At peak there were 23 in the U.S. but they have all closed down, with the Union Square location in New York ceasing operations a few days ago. Tower Records has been out of the storefront business since 2006. Borders and Barnes & Noble still sell CDs but the bookstore model is looking just as grim. Best Buy and mainstream stores like Target and Walmart will hold out for a while. But you’re likely sitting in front of the best remaining place to browse and buy from a full catalog of music: the Internet. And if you need the social aspect, you’ll need to recreate that yourself or with the help of a cafe, club, your living room, or favorite online haunt.

La Poste, France’s postal service, commemorated the 400th anniversary of the introduction of chocolate to France with a set of special stamps. The sheet looks like a chocolate bar, foil included, with a chocolate scent too. Each stamp depicts a scene from chocolate history. Chocolate arrived in Bayonne, France (also birthplace of the bayonet) in 1609 with Jewish immigrants. In 2001 Switzerland issued a similar stamp set.

Opera is actually popular, in San Francisco anyway. 27,000 people attended the free simulcast of “Tosca” at AT&T; Park (home of the S.F. Giants). The audience watched the San Francisco Opera performance on the scoreboard screen, setting the appropriate tone first by singing the national anthem.

Japan’s pearl industry faces several difficulties on top of the recession. China is turning out pearls of similar size for much less money and has 50 times the production capacity. South Sea and Tahitian pearls are still in competition, often with bigger sizes and similar quality. And pearl necklaces are no longer mandatory purchases for sweet sixteen, weddings, and graduations. Pearl growers in Wagu, Japan are starting to leave the business, unable to maintain profits with prices dropping by half.