Random linkage and commercial mavening

Man, I can beat most of the people I meet at Boggle and Scrabble and such, but not the folks who play WEBoggle. I'm consistently wasting time scoring in the lowest third. (Also, SSCrabble, which I haven't played yet but which looks great.)

I haff Christmas lights up! *bliss* I took a picture but am too lazy to get it off the camera and into the computer and onto the web, so you'll have to take my word for it. My father put them up for me, and they make me smile every time I look at them. We also haff ants, which is less blissful. The Thanksgiving celebrations brought them out of the cracks and into the holiday cookies, grrr.

Since there are some of you who are not yet done with your holiday shopping, I thought I'd post links to a few places I love to peruse for gift ideas, and some weird stuff I've found over the years that's fun to give. No, this is not an excuse to bounce around the web looking at neato things, why would you think that?! NB: This is not a wish list.

• Uncommon Goods is the home of the ettiquette napkin, a great many funky recycled products, the disappearing civil liberties mug, and Freudian slippers.
  
• Infectious Awareables does scarves, ties, tees, cards, and more with actual scientific images of diseases, including ebola, breast cancer, anthrax, HIV, flu, and more. They donate a lot of their proceeds to medical charities.
  
• Similarly, Giant Microbes will sell you a cuddly plush toy Influenza or Smallpox; in my house, we own the stuffed Ebola and Black Death. Also available through ThinkGeek, which sells other awesome geek gadgets like a ring that is also a bottle opener, which I would have coveted like nobody's business in my heavy beer-drinking days.
  
• Urban Outfitters is very hit or miss, but when they're good, they're good - my past hauls there have included a set of bowls that exhort the diner to "suck it up", a sexual-position-of-the-day shower curtain, and obscene cookie cutters.
  
• Neat things I don't have particularly neat sources for: Scrabble tile jewelry, if you know an enthusiast. And another disappearing mug - this time, it's Henry VIII's wives. Taylor and Ng sell mugs with understated images of various copulating animals, v. klassy.
  
• For books, there's always the pop-up Kama Sutra, Lego™ Biblical stories, and a million more. Nick Bantock did a lovely pop-up Kubla Khan at one point. Those are all available through Amazon. I'm also a big advocate of giving stationery for gifts - more useful for many people than candles or soap, and a good impersonal-but-nice thing for people you don't know well. Pomegranate does nice sets, or there's always Fold and Mail stationery in a variety of themes.
  
• I love to do charitable donations through Just Give; they track your giving for tax purposes and will send email to your recipient, for electronic giving. If you want to leave the choice of charity up to your giftee, they do a gift certificate that the recipient can use with any of the thousands of charities in their database.
  
• Or, of course, for the Person Who Has Everything, there's always the Octodog. You can buy it through Stupid.com, a site with a godawful interface but that nonetheless sells a good variety of, um, the kind of "unique" products I am far too liable to give people as gifts.

Yes, I am totally swamped with work, hence the linkspam. I can't help it.