• ‘Law & Order’ canceled by NBC after 20 seasons: The culprit behind NY show’s demise? Low ratings [NY Daily News] – "Law & Order" is going the way of egg creams. After two decades and 451 shows, NBC pulled the plug on the New York-based series to make room for new shows. The series will end May 24. Once a top-10 show, "Law & Order" had struggled in recent years – along with the rest of NBC's prime-time lineup. This season the show is No. 56 overall.
• ‘Little Orphan Annie’ comic strip skips off into the sunset [Washington Post] – Daddy Warbucks's favorite pupil-less redhead had enough Depression-tested pluck to survive 86 years in daily newspapers, but now the orphan's outta luck. Come June 13, her clear-eyed comic strip will end as her syndicate, Tribune Media Services, sends her off into the sunset. Canceled. "Believe me, this wasn't a decision we took lightly," said Steve Tippie, TMS's vice president of licensing. "But we also felt that 'Annie,' unlike many strips, has such wide, almost iconic presence in our culture that it would serve the character and our business best if we focused on other channels more appropriate to the 'kids' nature of the property." The strip's current artist, Ted Slampyak, said: "It's almost like mourning the loss of a friend."
• In Search of Adorable, as Hello Kitty Starts to Fade [NYTimes.com] – Hello Kitty has been licensed to products like dolls, clothes, lunch boxes, stationery, kitchenware, a Macy’s parade balloon and even an Airbus. But amid signs that Hello Kitty’s pop-culture appeal is waning, especially at home, where sales have shrunk for a decade, the company has struggled to find its next-generation version of adorable. Recent flops include Spottie Dottie, a pink-frocked Dalmatian, and Pandapple, a baby panda. Even the moderately successful My Melody (a rabbit) and TuxedoSam (penguin) show no signs of achieving global Kitty-ness. “We badly need something else,” said Yuko Yamaguchi, Sanrio’s top Hello Kitty designer for most of its 36 years. “Characters take a long time to develop and introduce to different markets,” Ms. Yamaguchi said. “But Kitty has been so popular it’s overshadowed all our other efforts.” …In a ranking of Japan’s most popular characters, compiled Character Databank, Hello Kitty lost her spot as Japan’s top-grossing character in 2002.

Here’s one of those store locator interfaces that maybe you’ve seen before. You can type a city into that field at the bottom and pull down a state, or you can click directly on the map. Those little pink/red dots are so target-like, and it’s easier to click than type, so my instinct was to just click on my area. Here’s what I get:

It’s extremely precise; I somehow clicked 38 miles north of San Francisco, though I was just thinking “in and around San Francisco” when I aimed (and there are indeed so many little dots that it’s pretty hard to aim for a really tight region). But the results are assuming you meant to click EXACTLY where you clicked. Try again and you might end up 11 miles south of San Francisco and a totally different list of stores.

Clicking ends up being useless. The map is too small and expects more-than-human precision, at least given the enormous density of stores in many regions. Entering the city name is the only way to go for my situation.

It’s further hampered by the ridiculous results – it seems that any store that has any type of product from the Sanrio people anywhere on their shelves qualifies for this list. They sell a lot of stuff, but not all of these stores are going to carry similar ranges of inventory, so you’re going to have to do some more legwork – either visit many, or phone (yuck) many and ask, or simply give up.