I'm sure you'll all be safely ensconsed at home this Friday, protesting the materialist, commercialized nature of the holidays, self-righteously snickering at all the fools who woke up at the crack of dawn to drive their gas-guzzling SUVs to the local big box retailer to take advantage of a measly 10% discount on the brightly colored made-with-petroleum painted-with-lead crap made by slave labor in China.

But if around noontime you get tired of re-reading your well-thumbed copies of Tom Frank or Lizabeth Cohen or Kalle Lasn, you may want to pick up the copy of the Restoration Hardware gift catalog that most likely landed in your mailbox this week. It's the best catalog of the year (it's obviously less expensive than what Neiman's pitching, and it's less pretentious then the one from Design Within Reach), and it's chock full of great toys, games and stocking stuffers like a wooden box Clue, or a Jokes on You Prank Kit or a pair of Marshmallow Roasters. (And even though this is all online, the paper catalog (relax, you can recycle it!) is worth getting your hands on. It's really a thing of beauty.)

Don't worry -- after you drool over the nice Scrabble set and possibly order a few prank kits for your nieces or nephews, you can pick up your Frank or Cohen or Lasn again and step back into your usual Black Friday spirit before your friends come over for a few games of Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis.  No one will have to know.

I'm seriously considering dropping $350 on a box of 1000 Kapla blocks for the, um, "kids" this Christmas.

I'm spending the week in Tokyo (hosted by the charming and brilliant team at Six Apart Japan), and will have an opportunity to visit Kiddy Land this afternoon. Really looking forward to it. "KIDDY LAND helps keep your mind, body and soul youthful, now & forever."

Dear Lazyweb. Please produce a detailed comparison (with screenshots, please!) of Mint and Wesabe. It's about time I channel my (former) inner-Quicken-user to the web, and I don't have the time / patience to try both of them. (Well, actually, I did have time to attempt Mint yesterday afternoon, but their Yodlee connector must have been overwhelmed with new users because connections to my external accounts timed out and they told me to try again later.)

(See also: Fred Wilson on Who Owns Your Financial Data.)

What, no games announced today for the jesus phone? Cue the outrage and indignation, please.

Since Mattel is recalling all those toys with lead, Radar Online does the public a service by recycling their "10 most dangerous playthings of all time" story. Number one on the list? Lawn darts, of course.

The $24,000 add on to your Prius converts the batteries to lithium ion, lets you plug it in at night and ups your mileage to 100mpg.

Yep, bought one.  The headphone jack thing is very, very annoying.  Other than that, I'm pleased as punch.  Or at least I will be once my number finishes porting.

Via Kathryn, of course, I listen to bands that don't even exist yet.

Alex "The Rest is Noise" Ross has the most compelling iPhone review endorsement around.  Forget the feature lists and AT&T shortcomings; it's stories like this that will sell the thing. (As if they're having trouble with that; a quick flip through populous states at apple.com/retail/iphone last night showed all red.)

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(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.