Off-Kilter

Giga Pets Unplugged: We don’t want to say this whole virtual reality thing has gone too far, but a woman from Palmdale is now selling caskets and tombstones for the battery-powered pets. Earline Reeves, the daughter of a mortician, has opened what might well be the world’s first funeral home for deceased Tamagotchis and other virtual pets. (The first cemetery for the toys is in Hungary.)

At https://www.petcomputer.com/mortuary.htm, she offers 5-inch-long caskets lined with puffy white satin for $10.95 and tiny headstones customized with the electronic animal’s name for $8.95. Both come with a funeral booklet that urges survivors not to dwell on their toy’s demise but to “get on with your life.” There’s also a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy that says, in part: “We know (blank) has gone on to a better virtual place where there is no hunger, no boredom and no maintenance required. There is no reason to ‘beep.’ ”

We’re afraid to predict what’s next. Maybe Giga Pet animal-rights activists?

Actually, Reeves reports that many of the callers to her toll-free number, (888) 777-4944, wonder if the caskets would work for real animals, including a dead mouse named Pedro and a 10-pound poodle.

Ministry of Weird Laws: In Afghanistan, flying a kite is punishable by beatings and imprisonment, according to Psychology Today magazine.

Useless Statistics Department: If “Phantom of the Opera” continues playing on Broadway uninterrupted, it will use its 1,000th ton of dry ice during the first week of the new millennium, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Bonus useless fact, also from the Sun-Times: The second-most-common reason that people call Tulsa, Okla., City Hall is to ask questions about the annoying teeny-pop group Hanson, whose members are from the city. The most common reason folks call is potholes.

A Non-El Nin~o Water Problem: Life is hard enough just trying to program VCRs and figure out which armrest in a movie theater is yours. Now water is getting complicated, too. According to syndicated food columnist Carolyn Wyman, supermarket shelves will soon be cluttered with “fortified water,” bottles of dihydrogen oxide that feature such additives as vitamins, Chinese herbs or caffeine. It’s the 1990s version of vitamin-fortified cereals, Wyman says. Other designer brews include fish-flavored water for cats, beef-flavored water for dogs and a new blend of water for babies that Gerber plans to sell.

More Weird Polls: The nationwide glut of strange surveys continues with a Details magazine article that says one-third of movie-industry insiders would have sex with someone to advance their career. And 86% would “flirt like a demon” to get ahead, the survey says.

But our favorite wacky survey of the day, courtesy of Wireless Flash News Service, is an old Anheuser-Busch presidential poll in which kids said that Socks the White House cat would make a better president than “Melrose Place” star Andrew Shue.

Best Supermarket Tabloid Story: “Comets Are Really Intergalactic Golf Balls!” (Weekly World News)

It seems the universe is nothing more than a giant fairway for a golf game played by space aliens. Fore!

* Roy Rivenburg can be reached by e-mail at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Contributors: Wireless Flash, Chicago Sun-Times, Associated Press