I don’t even know. “In celebration of selling its millionth Butterbeer inside The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Orlando Resort shared 1,000 complimentary Butterbeers with guests on the streets of Hogsmeade.” Yes, really!

Butterbeer appears as a favorite drink inside the Harry Potter books and films and is only available inside The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It is a nonalcoholic, frothy drink reminiscent of shortbread and butterscotch and is served cold or frozen.

Much has been written about Butterbeer since it made its debut on June 18, 2010, making it one of the most talked about beverages of 2010. There has been much speculation about its secret ingredients — but Universal Orlando will not share the closely guarded recipe. Universal has implemented special security procedures to protect the details.

Butterbeer quickly became a guest favorite. To help meet the strong demand, Universal Orlando added a fourth Butterbeer location within The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

“You can see the excitement on our guests’ faces as they wait in line — and then the smile that comes with their first sip,” said Ric Florell, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Resort Revenue Operations for Universal Orlando. “Butterbeer is not just a beverage. It’s an experience.”

Submitted for your approval: Michael Caine’s impersonation of Michael Caine. Meta! [Related]

Emotional tears shed by women make men less likely to want to do sex to them, says Science.

[R]esearchers measured heart and respiration rates, skin temperature, testosterone levels and brain activity of sexual-arousal-related brain structures, in response to sniffing emotional tears, which are odorless and clear. Saline was used as a control. They recorded an overall reduction in all measures, leading the researchers to a central conclusion: Women’s emotional tears contain a signal that reduces men’s sexual excitement.

“This is the chemical word for ‘No,’” said [Science guy Noam] Sobel. “Or at least for ‘Not now.’”

Further research is expected to reveal that emotional tears in women also triggers the “gotta go” response that makes men suddenly remember an immediate and pressing commitment elsewhere.

Photo by Megyarsh, from Flickr.

CES, now in full swing out in Las Vegas, is a trade show, and as such, occupies a complicated (if totally reasonable) place between “what will people buy each other for Christmas later this year” and “hey, look at the neat thing we can do!” So much of what is displayed there seems openly transitional. Producers of goods just can’t hide it when they know they’re only halfway onto what’s next — and consumers know. (Are you 28 or older? Congratulations, you are older than the compact disc. Bought one recently?) But digging through the oodles of things on display, we can find some inklings of what’s to come down the road that’s actually interesting. (And tomorrow we’ll look at Shiny Brand New Things that you actually would maybe even want to buy).

So this is what people think is happening: “The next big transformation is on us; the marriage between television sets and the Internet. It is clear that consumers are ready for it,” is what Sony honcho Howard Stringer is saying. (A statement oddly reminiscent of a certain infamous Onion News Network video about Sony!) That is not really I think true? We want to use the Internet to speedily access actual good TV content. But nobody wants to watch YouTube videos on their big flat-screen TV. So it’s not so much a marriage as, you know, most effectively utilizing a delivery platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36rm5yS4c4

The fabled Microsoft Surface, in its newest iteration, is a transitional object. It costs $7600; it’s being marketed for business uses. That being said, remember when 50-inch flat TVs cost $15,000? Yeah, that was like a few years ago. This is a thing, a thing we want in our future, only more of it for less, of course, like everything else.

Sony is also going big on 3D, even while it’s busy marrying off television and the Internet. (The Internet: Still Not In 3D.) So they’ve got a ton of stuff like the 3D 1080p camera. Sony actually seems like it’s banking everything on 3D:

Sony also showed off prototypes of a 3D visor you could wear to watch 3D content on a plane, as well as a portable Blu-ray player that would join those cameras in being “glassless.” It’s working on making glassless 3D work on full-sized TVs too.

Plus Sony is going into business with IMAX and Discovery on an all-3D channel?

I do not have small children, so I am never going to purchase a 3D anything, not until there’s like, hologram players for my living room.

But there’s lots of little consumer goods that will impact the way we look and make at things. The body-mounted camera? Oh yes, get ready for a lot of horrifically bouncing video in the near future. Fun though!

You can see a new beginning in medical applications, from the blood pressure iPhone plugin to the liquid crystal bifocals.

And you can see some slight innovation, in a kind of fabulous old-school way, with the forthcoming Casio wristphone (sure you want to take phone calls from your wrist!) and things like molding earbuds.

You can also see throughout the show how innovation is subject to capitalism. We could have a dreamy world without cell towers, or bloated cell company services! Peer-to-peer mesh networks are totally possible. But there’s a series of entrenched financial interests that’ll surely prevent this from happening. (Or perhaps we’ll be surprised. Things are possible!)

What we’re also not seeing at CES is exciting robot innovation. We always assume our future is full of robots, making us cheese sandwiches and talking to us about our problems. But the most forward-looking robots at CES seem to be the latest Roomba and… this.

This CES content is sponsored by BestBuyOn.com. Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor; advertisers do not produce the content.

“In 1982, I visited New York on a 36-hour long school trip to see Broadway plays. I bought an issue of the Village Voice that I *studied* for the next year, because the back pages and apartment rental listings told me everything I needed to know to be able to make my way from my hometown back to the Big Apple. In that issue was an Amy Arbus portrait of John Sex and Katy K that was really striking. I recall thinking ‘Hey it’s the guy in that picture’ the first time I saw John in a nightclub. He was one of those people who was a celebrity, but only in lower Manhattan.”

“Many think my head — or spending — will actually hit this ceiling in the coming months.”
 — MSNBC’s Richard Lui discusses the “debt ceiling” debate in a simple-to-understand format which makes it quite clear that our nation’s cable networks have come to the realization that the vast majority of us are total mouth-breathers.

You! Yes, you! I want you stand up right now. Go take a brief walk at a leisurely pace. Guess what? I just saved your life. Now you owe me one.

The world just keeps getting whatier, doesn’t it? Iran has apparently arrested a 55-year-old American woman, Hall Talayan, on accusations that she attempted to cross into the country near the northwest city of Nordouz with some sort of “spying technology or a microphone” hidden in her teeth.

You can’t make it up: “Gov. Chris Christie has signed a bill advocates say gives New Jersey the toughest anti-bullying law in the nation.”

Apparently the drug dogs that sniff your car and get all excited when they smell your dope are not so good. Or maybe too good? “A Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.” To be fair to the dogs, the Chicago Tribune is working off some fairly lousy data here — the Chicago PD and the Illinois State Police don’t even collect data, apparently, about drug dog alerts. But going through suburban police departments in Illinois, they found things like this: “The McHenry County’s sheriff’s department had the most dog alerts, finding drugs or paraphernalia in 32 percent of 103 searches. In the eight searches on Hispanic drivers, officers reported finding drugs just once…. In Naperville, 47 percent of searches turned up drugs or paraphernalia, though searches on Hispanic drivers turned up drugs in only one of 12 traffic stops, for a rate of 8 percent.” Man, do not bother with the Hispanics, they keep their dope at home, they’re not stupid.