• Vermont's first IHOP gets permission to go beyond standard franchise menu and offer Vermont maple syrup – “You can’t open up a Vermont pancake shop without Vermont maple syrup,” said Sam Handy Jr., who is the restaurant’s general manager and whose family owns the franchis
• Symbols of pot-subculture on the threshold of the mainstream – The significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”) and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network’s prime-time double bill Monday of “Super High Me” and “Half Baked”). Events tied to April 20 have “reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time,” said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. “And I think that’s symptomatic of the fact that people’s perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point.”
• Chinese government database doesn't recognize all the language's characters, creating 60 million edge cases – New Chinese government computers are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters. At least 60 million Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new ID cards — unless they change their names to something more common. Since 2003 China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children. A government linguistics said the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.

Here’s a package design where form deceptively implies function. The deliberateness of it all is just a little bit evil.

Here’s a jug of maple syrup. It’s made of plastic, but the color might make you think of a ceramic jug. It’s got a jaunty handle, and for your pouring convenience, a spout.

Whoops. That’s not a spout. That’s just a jutting piece of the form below the opening but that is definitely separated from the hole. It’s the shape of a spout.

And look what happens when you use it. A big freaking mess. Every time.

The evil irony is that the jug form makes it even harder to pour (given the small finger handle and the wide heavy base) without dripping.

A spout – an important function in a pouring package – is an aesthetic detail, the suggestion of spout-ness, without the inclusion of any actual spout. So they had the presence to consider the value of a spout, but made that decision while at the same time choosing a non-spout form factor.

This is a bad thing.

Upate: Dan Reich writes (that’s hard to say out loud): Here (pic1 pic2) is a product that managed to get it right. Despite its obvious similarities to your example, note that Trader Joe’s syrup does not feature a bogus spout bulge, but when the top is opened, a reasonably useful spout is thoughtfully provided.