Haunted House and Virtual Wienermobile!

Now there’s a combination you don’t see every day. And you’ll find it only at the Second Life home of the Supermarket Guru, Phil Lempert.

Phil has a whole business built around supermarket shopping and is someone I knew in an earlier life as a food writer. You might have seen him on TV talk shows, talking about new food products, grocery shopping, American eating habits and on and on. Phil opened Phil’s Supermarket in Second Life on Food Island earlier this year to help shoppers shop better, knowing more about the products they’re buying, offering recipes and cooking advice and generally trying to merge the worlds of real and virtual eating. It’s a work in progress, I think: one of the central features is a new-product showcase where you can view the package front and nutrition label, then click buttons for product info, recipes and more information, but that feature doesn’t work, at least not for me.

The whole sim also is a showcase for the monumental food manufacturer Kraft Foods, which has just about every label that General Mills doesn’t already own (OK, a bit of an exaggeration but if you were to pull just one of every product Kraft and its subsidiaries makes, you’d need several carts to carry your haul). I don’t know if Kraft is the sim’s only sponsor but it’s certainly the biggest, with a Maxwell House Cafe, Kraft Kitchens demonstration area and a parking lot for the Wienermobile, the big goofy-looking hot dog on wheels that promotes its Oscar Mayer processed-meats label.

You can’t drive the Wienermobile, which is a darn shame for those of us who grew up seeing this giant red and yellow phallic symbol cruising down the street or parked at public events. But if you click it, it will give you a Web page where you can take a virtual tour.

Oh, yeah, the Haunted House! It was designed by SL’ers CrystalShard Foo and Keith Extraordinaire, two veterans at building. It’s a lot of fun to tour, without being gratuitously bloody, and has a shot of dark humor to leaven the creepiness. Make sure your world is turned to midnight and turn up your sound, otherwise you miss some of the finer touches. Oh yeah, and watch out for falling plates, the pursuing teacup and treacherous logs!

How to find the house: Click this SLURL. When you land on Food Island, the house should be behind you and to your left. But just fly up a little and spin around and you’ll find it. Even if you don’t get into haunted houses, you might like examining the builders’ work. My partner is still trying to figure out how they were able to build a door that lets you out on one side but won’t open from the other.