A famous actor died over the weekend. You might remember him from a role in Star Trek:

No, not Shatner. The guy who's not there. Answer at the end.

RETAIL Went to the new store on Sunday. It's immense. My favorite part is an escalator that lets you take your cart up to the second level. Here's a 45 second tour, with the unfortunate visuals you get after you've been told to PREPARE TO UNLOAD.

Rather inauspicious tableau.

HEALTH I'd be suspicious of this, but there's a name for it. In French, even.

Wikipedia says:

Sounds horrible. People will say "another reason not to get on a cruise besides the people and the disease," of course; it is very important for people who don't like cruise ships to let us know they are superior to the fools who do, and also that David Foster book. If someone that smart and talented didn't enjoy it, well, res loquis avatar, or whatever the Latin is.

In 2010 14,300,000 people took cruises. Let's say that's remained constant: 45 million people on cruise ships in the last three years. One hundred cases. Don't worry.

FINE DINING This had better be at the State Fair this year. I'm serious.

The Bacon-shell Taco. The BACO. Behold.

WEB Ooops. China's state-controlled TV channel did an expose on Apple. This lead to many posts on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, yelling at Apple for being evil. A Taiwanese-American movie star posted:

As in, "be sure to issue this spontaneous protest at the opportune moment." Bonus: he's a spokesman for Samsung's rival phone. His response: his phone was stolen and hacked and they weren't his comments. Sounds likely. Most people who end up in possession of a celebrity's open phone do things like post mild messages, instead of telling a juicy lie millions of fans will instantly believe.

As TeaLeafNation reports, this led to a hashtag - #PostAround820 - which the government censored.

Here's a story on the expose about Apple. It seems to center around Apple's refusal to reset the start of your warranty after you've swapped a defective phone for a refurbished one, which apparently they do in the US market.

Note: the translation of the tweet was from this site, which covers the Chinese Internet.

GAMES Forbes says this is an admission from Maxis' general manager that SimCity could have run offline. Not really. It's not an admission that the game was crippled so it couldn't run, it's a bright proud statement that they decided not to run offline early in the design of the game. Why? Because everyone wants the social experience in everything! Social makes everything better. Share your cities, peons. Share them, lest I demolish them with the sweep of my hand! Oh, right, I'm going to do that anyway, and you have no local saves. Anyway, she said, with a happy face:

Excuse me. It's a game. It's not going to capture the dynamism of the world we live in, or even simulate it well. Because it's a game. Also: if the wizards who design things could forcing "Social" on people, that would be great. I have a program that cleans unneeded data from from HD and frees up space. When it's done it asks if I'd like to tweet my result. I live in fear I will hit YES by mistake and lose 5,000 followers.

OBIT That chair was once occupied by the illusion of . . . Malachi Throne.