It's not enough to have the hottest, hippest piece of killer digital hardware in the form of Apple's instant-classic iPod portable mp3 music player. Noooooooo! You've got to have a case for it, too! (Didn't you know?)

But not any case will do. That's the thinking behind a new iPod accessory designed by Paris-based style priest and German-born fashion legend, Karl Lagerfeld, who designs clothes for, among other labels, Italian fashion house Fendi.

Lagerfeld and Fendi have just put out an iPod case that's more like a suitcase. The bag is designed to carry--get this!--12 iPods!

Why? Well, naturally, because 40 gigabytes of mp3 files is nothing--YOU HEAR ME--NOTHING! Everyone in the know has got to have on their person or nearby at least--AT LEAST!--um ... let's see ... 12 x 40 GB ... um ... at least a whopping 480 GIGABYTES of music! That's an estimated 120,000 tunes.

Why would you need 480 gigs of mp3s? 'Cause, anytime, anywhere, ya' never know when you'll want to listen to more than one Stereolab album or even the band's entire back catalog or even all its output, including those compilations, rare unreleased demos, mash-ups and bootleg live recordings, or when you might also want to retrieve any remotely related groovy-electronic bachelor-pad music ever recorded between, say, 1964 and 2004. Ya' just never know, right?

So who would buy one of these haute-couture iPod cases? Well, for one, people (like us, admittedly) who have shopping pathologies and like to snap up these unique type of things. Hardcore couture collectors, too. And, of course, curators for certain design museums and costume institutes. And some insanely liquid Internet zillionaires, maybe, ya' know, the kind that run their own $400 bilion database technology corporation or are about to do an IPO for their search-engine business. Oh, and, of course, Paris Hilton.

Whoever buys Lagerfeld's iPod case, he or she is going to have to shell out $1,500.00.

Fendi and Lagerfeld aren't the only European fashion icons to have crafted an iPod case. Pucci, Chanel and the ineffably glamorous Gucci beat them to it a few weeks ago with the release of its own iPod case, a compact, elegant and well-designed (though thoroughly logoed in true Gucci style) case dubbed the iPod Sling that holds only one device. Price? A steal at $200.00, darling! :-)

The Kid From Kyoto

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New York University teacher and games designer Frank Lantz has taken the classic 1980's videogame Pac-Man to the streets of Manhattan.

Lantz, who is director of games design at Gamelab, teaches a course at NYU called "Big Games." He teamed up with students in the university's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program to develop a large-scale, live-action version of the digital arcade game on New York's real-life street grid. Instead of Pac-Man, you've got Pac-Manhattan, which is what the big analog version is called.