Apple

It won't go down as one of the great moments in rock history. The band had just finished playing a selection of standards - "Mustang Sally," "Under the Boardwalk," "Twist and Shout" - and the mystery guest was about to appear. The lights dimmed and he bounded on stage, guitar in hand, and ripped into a searing version of "Wild Thing. " Playing the strings with his tongue, dropping to his knees and screaming, "Sock it to me," Ron Howard electrified the crowd. OK, so what if his voice was a little thin and his moves a little clumsy?

If you are traveling through Colorado, watch what you say about the food. Cast no aspersions on the asparagus. Slander not the celery. Don't libel the lettuce. The folks who live in the Rocky Mountain State have become unfriendly to the sort of people who might ruin the reputation of a rutabaga. They have a bill, about to face its last legislative hurdle, that would make it possible to take legal action against someone who knowingly and falsely trashed the turnips. People could be sued, in the words of the bill, for disseminating "any false information which is not based on reliable scientific facts and scientific data, which the disseminator knows or should have known to be false and which casts doubt on the safety of any perishable agricultural food product to the consuming public.

Is your new baseball bat prone to falling apart? Is that lasagna pan a laceration hazard? Product safety, whether we're talking about toys or automobiles, can be tough to judge. Use these smartphone applications to identify safer choices and get word of product recalls. SaferCar , free for iPhone and iPod Touch, gives safety ratings on late-model cars and trucks, including the agency's tougher "five-star" ratings for vehicles from 2011 and newer. The SaferCar app is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which says an Android version is on the way. The app provides vehicle recall information going back to the 2000 model year.

A clever assortment of smartphone applications can augment your experience of the U.S. Open Golf Championship, which runs from June 10 to 16 at Merion Golf Club on the Main Line. Follow the high-profile event and get into golf with these apps. Golf Channel is free from the NBCUniversal-owned cable outlet. The app features a home screen of news feeds, with items tiled in rows. Tap the sprocket icon to reach settings, where you can reorder items on the home screen to your liking.

On the northern coast of Spain in Basque country and Asturias, a taste for hard cider instead of wine reaches its height in April, when cider houses called sagardotegi celebrate with calls for "Txotx!" (say: "choach!") and casks are tapped, sending newly fermented fall sidra streaming from holes in the barrel straight into revelers' glasses. Tinto is having its own Txotx party Thursday, and it's an ideal moment to taste how fascinatingly different these ciders are - low in carbonation and vivid with earthy apple essence.

Tyler Gettmann (right) beat Brian Dunlap yesterday at coming up with an apple in Barclay Elementary's sixth-grade apple-bobbing contest.

In the era of serial Washington budget crises, you don't have to be a wonk to find the real numbers behind politicians' walls of words (like sequester ). Just use these smartphone applications about the state of the economy. FRED Economic Data , free from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is available for Apple and Android devices. "Take the economy with you wherever you go," suggests the Fed. Want to see the bank's latest data on inflation, gross domestic product, unemployment, or any of the myriad of statistics kept by the Fed?

Longer. Thinner. Lighter. Faster. Larger screen. Better camera. Same price and colors - black or white, that is. No product stirs more buzz nowadays than a new Apple iPhone, and Wednesday's unveiling of the iPhone 5 punctuates the point. Yes, I plead guilty to participating, though I'm plainly torn in two directions - eager to get my hands on one and also a wee bit embarrassed to care. At one pole are analysts such as the Yankee Group's Carl Howe and Tim Bajarin, president of California's Creative Strategies Inc. After trying out the new iPhone at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens, each volunteered a strikingly similar analogy for the new glass-and-aluminum smartphone.