A bluefin tuna was auctioned off at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market yesterday for a record price of 56.49 million yen, which is about $736,000. And you think you get sticker shock at Safeway. The $1,238 per pound tuna will be cut into 10,000 pieces and sold by the Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain for $5.45 per nigiri or $27.25 for a lovely tuna sandwich, mayonnaise and lettuce included.

Barbie, the doll who turns 52 years old this year, has held 125 careers over her lifetime, including architect, dentist, and Army officer. When I do that I’m called an underachiever with no career path, for Barbie it means over 1 billion people have bought her.

An online gambling site has bought some of Michael Jackson’s hair for $10,871 and plans to have it made into a roulette ball manufactured “to the highest professional standards, ensuring it will be eligible for use at any licensed casino’s roulette table.” Apparently more appropriate body parts were unavailable.

According to the National Retail Federation (motto: “United we spend, divided we fail to make our projections”), U.S. consumers will spend $6 billion on Christmas decorations this year, the most in at least seven years. That could buy 600 million strings of tree lights, 7,228,915,662 packages of silver tinsel, or pay off .04% of the national debt and have enough left over for an “Occupy the chimney” ornament for the top of your tree.

Ray Bradbury’s classic book Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953 and named after the temperature at which paper burns, is finally available as an e-book.  You can get it for $9.99 from all major e-book retailers though it has been renamed Fahrenheit 302, which is the melting point of an e-book reader’s plastic casing.

Elvis Costello doesn’t want you to buy his record company’s upcoming release, The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, which includes a CD, DVD, 10-inch vinyl record, and 40-page tribute book autographed by him because it’s too expensive. He calls the $202.66 price “either a misprint or a satire.” Instead he recommends you buy Ambassador Of Jazz, a collection of 10 remastered Louis Armstrong albums he says is “vastly superior” and costs less than $150. If that’s still too rich for your blood, there’s always a Billie Joe Armstrong CD, like Green Day’s American Idiot for $10.76 on Amazon.com.

He’s still dead and still weird.

Connecticut State Representative Tim Larson is proposing that the state declare the last Saturday in October as Halloween since it would make life easier for parents and safer for trick-or-treaters to always have it on the weekend. What a dumb idea! Anyone with a lick of sense knows it should be moved to the last Monday of October so we can have another three-day weekend.

It was the last round draw at the World Scrabble Championships in Warsaw, Poland, and the two finalists noticed something odd–there should have been another “G” but it was missin_. The referee looked on the table, under the table, and finally asked both players to turn their pockets inside out to make sure the missin_ tile wasn’t there. Not findin_ it anywhere, and Vanna White not being handy so they could buy a “G”, the referee found another and put it in the ba_. OM_!

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population will hit 7 billion people on October 31, and by August 2013 each of them will have their own reality TV show.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley says too many Britains are overweight and knows how they should take care of it. He says they should eat less and be “more honest” about what they eat and drink. He also suggested that fewer people would drown if they’d quit going swimming, people wouldn’t fall down the stairs if they moved into one-story houses, and scabs heal faster if you don’t pick them.

Like many people this time of the year, a family went on an outing to the corn maze at Connors Farm in Danvers, Massachusetts. Like a lot of families, they got lost in the 7-acre maze. Unlike the rest of those families, they panicked when it started getting dark and called 911. An officer and K-9 unit went out to the farm, found the family, and hopefully escorted them home. While singing A-maze-ing Grace I suspect.

To help celebrate their 40th anniversary, Starbucks asked designer Alexander Wang to create a limited edition T-shirt. The white T-shirt has a large fake coffee stain on it with the Starbucks’ woman hidden in the stain. You can pick one up at Nordstrom’s or Starbucks for only $85. Or you can buy a 2-pack of Hanes T-shirts at Target for $13.99, a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts for $1.49, and make your own.

Arch West, the man who came up with Doritos, died last week at the age of 97. His cremated remains will be put in an urn which will be buried on Saturday. His family and friends plan on tossing Doritos around the burial box in his honor. Hopefully they didn’t get the idea from the families of the inventors of Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, and the KFC Double Down Chicken Sandwich.

There’s a group of people in the U.S. who claim to have EHS, or Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity. In other words, they say they’re allergic to Wi-Fi and cell phones. They claim 5% of Americans suffer from this problem, which causes headaches, muscle spasms, burning skin, chronic pain and public ridicule. Diane Schou says it got so bad she couldn’t think and started having chest pains, so her husband built a “radio-wave resistant” wooden cage lined in wire mesh to sleep in. When that didn’t help, she moved to Green Bank, West Virginia, which is in a Radio Quiet Zone designed for scientific research where other EHS sufferers have moved and the 7-11 stocks plenty of pre-made aluminum foil helmets.

A 42-year-old Dutch woman has  been charged with stalking for allegedly calling a man she says is her boyfriend 65,000 times in the past year. This is 178 calls a day, which is 11 per waking hour or one call or text every 5 minutes. The 63-year-old target of the woman’s affections denies they have a relationship but doesn’t explain why he didn’t just change his damned phone number.

Like most of us, two researchers at Cornell University wondered what would happen if two chatbots – computer programs designed to have conversations like a human – were to have a conversation. Unlike the rest of us though, they could do it. So they set up two Cleverbots – a British man named Alan and an Asian woman named Sruthi – and recorded it. After a pleasant start, they got testy with each other. Sruthi asks Alan if he believes in God, Alan says he’s not a robot but a unicorn, Alan calls Sruthi a meanie, and Sruthi does the chatbot version of hanging up on him. The researchers have apologized, saying that instead of using two Cleverbots that didn’t know each other they mistakenly chose two that were married. [Check out the video here]