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.

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.