Did you see the photos of the baby giraffe at the San Francisco Zoo? ‘Cuz she’s super cute (and I’m not even fond of giraffes since my earliest memory is of being scared by one at the Bronx Zoo).

With people forgoing expensive vacations, the Seattle papers have been giving us travel ideas closer to home. And it turns out the Seattle P.I.’s restaurant reviewer, Leslie Kelly, now has a yearlong Space Needle pass. A yearlong pass? I suppose perhaps if you had frequent visitors to show around town it’d be a savings, but Kelly just enjoys the view. So she bought the $59 “sunset” pass (good only in the evenings) and intends to take the 41-second-long elevator trip every single day in 2009. You can tell she’s serious about that because she’s started a blog to chronicle her vertical travels. She was up on the observation deck when her husband called with the news that Hearst was going to sell (or effectively close) the P.I. She’s gathered so much Space Needle trivia already, I’m not sure she’ll have much more to say in the remaining 11 months, but it’s certainly a personal journey.

The Airbus A380 dwarfs the planes at LAX; its double-decker design even makes the 747 look less jumbo. When Qantas’ flight from Melbourne and Sydney lands in L.A., special procedures are put into place and the airport grinds to a halt as roads and runways are closed so the huge aircraft can safely make its way to one of two gates that together cost $50 million to put in. Airport and Airbus officials disagree on whether larger delays will occur when more A380s are put into service.

Leonards New England specializes in restoring and selling pre-1900s antique beds. As described in their video, beds from that time did not come in standard sizes and ropes were strung across the frame to hold the mattress (tick). Those who wanted to “sleep tight” used a special wooden key tighten up the ropes. Leonards resizes the beds to fit modern mattresses and adds new hardware. The company recently delivered a circa 1820 tiger’s eye maple four-poster bed, king size, to a Maryland warehouse. It was ordered by Michael Smith, hired by the new First Family to redecorate their private rooms, and may already be in the White House.

I’ve been a die-hard Kensington trackball fan for almost 15 years. I owe my lack of RSI to trackball usage. Other than tripping up visitors to my office who can’t figure out which button to click, the only drawback for me has been the lack of a scroll wheel. Kensington has ably attempted to incorporate a scroll wheel or equivalent in several models. They’ve placed an actual scrollwheel at the top of the device, which doesn’t work for me because I have to move my hand to use it (I don’t know if people with bigger hands have the same problem). They then had the brilliant idea of a “Scroll Ring” which encircles the ball, so you can spin the ring and leave your hand in position. I tried the first version of the ring but didn’t like how clicky it was so I bought a different model. I haven’t tried the latest version to see if it’s improved because these darn Kensingtons refuse to wear out and I won’t toss my trusty one aside. But now Kensington has come up with an even cleverer concept: use the ball itself as the scroller. Just turn the ball. Their SlimBlade Trackball launches soon with this innovation plus a sleeker design. I can’t wait to try it.

If I had known there wasn’t already a Guinness World Record set for world’s biggest cheesecake, I would’ve submitted my own a long time ago. But it wouldn’t have been as large as the 2-ton record holder sponsored by Kraft Foods. That’s a lot of cream cheese.

There’s certainly some weird stuff in “classical news of the weird“, a round-up of odd classical music news items of 2008. Composer Richard Thomas is working on an opera about Anna Nicole Smith, saying her story is “very operatic and sad.” Violinist Nicholas Eanet was named the newest member of the Julliard String Quartet and then broke his left wrist while inline skating. And the 639-year-long performance of John Cage’s organ composition “As Slow As Possible” that began in 2001 reached its 6th chord.

Mycologist David Arora used to live in Santa Cruz and travel to Mendocino County for rainy season mushroom hunting, but now he lives where the action is. The Chronicle shares his eclectic and fireplace-filled (he has 5) house with us. Of course there are baskets for collecting mushrooms, a mushroom sculpture, stashes of dried mushrooms, but he also has a wall full of Pu-erh tea cakes he’s collected from his visits to Yunnan, China (“the world’s largest exporter of wild mushrooms”). Arora uses one of his fireplaces to grill his wild mushroom finds.

A scale model of the Hudson River plane crash in Playmobil and Lego. The Seattle Times printed a photo of a similar one on display at the PlayMobil table at the Model Railroad Show in Seattle this past weekend, but they don’t have it online.

There are 75 newspapers from around the world in this gallery of day-after inauguration editions. So colorful in many ways. Newspapers used to be just black and white.