In days long past my family would drive up to Danbury, Connecticut for the big Danbury State Fair. In days more recent, though not as recent as I’d like to think, we would drive up to the Danbury Fair Mall that took its place. Sometimes, if it was a Sunday, I’d see a large gathering of motorcycles, parked under the towering white silo of Marcus Dairy. This informal meeting of motorcyclists has been going on at the Marcus’ Dairy Bar restaurant for as long as anyone there can remember. Hundreds of them stop by before their Sunday rides, most getting a bite at the Dairy Bar (Jane & Michael Stern love the turkey sandwiches). But an era has passed for Marcus Dairy and their distribution business is moving elsewhere. The land will be turned into, no gasps of disbelief here, a strip mall called “The Shops at Marcus Dairy.” The Dairy Bar will re-open there and the 75′ silo will remain, but the motorcycles will be “homeless” during the construction. And the replacement will never be quite like the quaint Marcus Dairy. (sources: NY Times, a participant’s photos, Danbury Planning Commission minutes)

“Systematic Landscapes” at the de Young in San Francisco is an exhibit of new sculptures, drawings, and installations by Maya Lin. It includes an indoor hill called “2 x 4 Landscape” made out of 40,000 board feet of sustainably harvested hemlock.

Seattle’s Historic Restaurants is chock full of photos of places both long gone and still in business, like Ivar’s, Canlis, and El Gaucho.

For hard core Bowie fans only: on YouTube, David Bowie Reality Tour behind the scenes clips: Part One (10 in all, varying lengths).

In the Bay Area (CA) there are U-pick chestnuts at Skyline Chestnuts off Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Johsens family has 119 trees on 20 acres. They’ll provide gloves to protect your hands from the burrs.

This very clever stand umbrella has a tripod at the tip so it can stand on its own. It was harder to engineer than it looks, consider the curved handle adding weight one side.

Three package design blogs: The Dieline, Lovely Package (thx matt), Design Better Packaging (this one has more exposition).

ZooBorns is too much cute all together. It’s almost better than a baby pandacam. (Such websites should really have been banned years ago, thus preventing the eventual proliferation of lolcats.)

In a box somewhere I have a copy of the first-ever Apple Developer CD, titled Phil and Dave’s Excellent CD (other movie-inspired titles followed). I’d been meaning to pull the special bonus “Apple ][ Forever” audio track off the CD to post on the Internet for posterity, but I recently realized that Apple fanatics had certainly shared this 1980’s power ballad with the world already. And, indeed, not just the audio, but the video is up on YouTube, in all its 1984 glory. It was shown at the Apple IIc rollout.

Cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 sailed away from New York for the final time last week, followed by its younger sister the Queen Mary 2. A traditional 39-foot-long paying-off pennant flowed from the mast, a foot for every year of the QE2’s service. After this final transatlantic crossing, the QE2 will cruise Europe one more time and in November come to rest in Dubai where investors have acquired the ship for $100 million and will transform her into a hotel at the Palm Jemeirah. Cunard plans to launch the next Queen Elizabeth in 2010.