Jimmy Wales, illuminated

The NYT has a daft ‘lifestyle’ piece about Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Sample:

His home is not an Italianate villa on a grape-ridden hillside in Napa but a four-bedroom ranch house in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he moved for the simple reason that it was sunny and cheaper than San Diego, his former home. At home, Mr. Wales has honed the good-enough style so well — or rather, not honed it — that the place will not even remotely be featured in House & Garden. He dresses casually, Florida-style, goes by the nickname Jimbo, and although he does drive a foreign car, it’s a Hyundai Accent. “It’s sort of like an appliance as a car,” he said.

He bought his DVD player at Wal-Mart, and his television set has something inside it called a cathode ray tube. Heard of it, kids?

About the only thing he has that aspires to a higher ideal is, of all things, a flashlight. The SureFire M6 blasts the competition, which averages 60 lumens, with a 250-lumen light beam. The company bills it as a “searchlight disguised as a flashlight” and boasts that “SWAT teams use the lights to temporarily blind suspects at night.”