The Mercury News business section includes this article about Cold Stone Creamery and how they’re moving up in Entrepreneur magazine’s list of fastest growing franchises.

Cold Stone attracts customers by offering a twist on conventional ice cream cones and cups: custom-mixing premium ice cream with a choice of edible frills including marshmallows, coconut flakes, Gummi Bears, M&M;’s, pistachios, bananas or bits of Kit Kat and Snickers bars. The ingredients are swirled together atop a refrigerated granite slab — the “cold stone.”

First-timer Ginny Cullen, a real estate agent from Morgan Hill who visited a Cold Stone Creamery last week, opted for chunks of pecans mixed in to a heaping serving of butter pecan ice cream.

“I didn’t know they did all this,” Cullen said between bites one recent afternoon at a Cold Stone outlet at Westfield Shoppingtown Oakridge mall in San Jose. “With the quality and everything they do, I will be a repeat customer.”

Something I didn’t know until today was that Cold Stone was not the first to use the “cold stone” concept – Marble Slab came first. I wonder about the history there.

Nice to see a story about the San Francisco Zoo that doesn’t involve the death of an animal – with two elephants and a gorilla, it’s been a hard couple of months for them. Today, The Chronicle’s Patricia Yollin relates the story of the zoo’s 4 giraffes moving to their new habitat, the 3-acre “African Savanna”.

As the giraffe move began, zoo veterinarian Jacqueline Jencek said any number of things could go wrong. For example, a giraffe could slip and fall, hurting its head or breaking its leg, or a human could be kicked.

“The larger the animal, the more challenging and worrisome the move,” she said. “There’s some adrenaline going on today. It’s quite dangerous what we’re doing.”

The article features a couple of pictures of the giraffes checking out their new home.

You can now declare your opposition to four more years of chimpitude by purchasing a variety of “No-Brainer!” logo products from CafePress. Many thanks to Shawn Crosby for the fantastic design!

I’ve added $2.00 to the base price of each item; that amount will be donated to the Kerry “He’s Not Bush” campaign.

My distinguished former employer has added my personal email addresses to their spam list. This makes things rather difficult since I have unfinished business with them. I guess I can’t be shocked by the impersonal corporate mindset anymore, but this goes beyond that; someone had to add these addresses to the corporate spam list, ensuring that my messages—sent for a legitimate business purpose—will be routed to the recipient’s spam folder.

Unbelievable.

Former (and future?) Giant Andres “Big Cat” Galarraga says he’s overcome a second bout with cancer and is ready to play in the bigs again.

Beaming and looking healthy at a news conference, the 42-year-old Galarraga said wants to get back to the majors so he can reach 400 home runs. In 18 seasons, Galarraga has 398 homers. The first baseman known as “The Big Cat” hit .301 last season with 12 home runs and 42 RBIs for the San Francisco Giants. He also played for Montreal, St. Louis, Colorado, Atlanta and Texas during his career.

“I will play for anyone to get the home runs I need to reach 400,” he said.

Hmm… JT Snow is out for knee surgery, and San Francisco needs a power hitter…