Daily Bafflements

• Brands will be brands, we suppose . . . Pepsi is opening a “baffling” new Brooklyn restaurant called Kola House, offering guests “a premium experience,” that only vaguely reminds them of the company’s flagship beverage. Such “experiences” are popping up across Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, including a Chobani yogurt cafe and a Nike “fitness studio.” But “brand expert” Allen Adamson is skeptical, warning that “while they can buy Super Bowl spots, they can’t buy edge, they can’t buy panache, they can’t buy sizzle.” Hmmm.

• More nostalgia brand than cover band, The Bayside Tigers are making a mint running “Saved by the ’90s events” in half a dozen cities, trading on the guileless commodification of punk rock and its aftermath that contributing editor Eugenia Williamson chronicled in her Baffler no. 29 salvo.

• Google has opened up about shelling out something in the neighborhood of $12,000 to buy back its domain, google.com, after the mega-corporation somehow let its registration slip last fall. The former employee who snapped up the domain for $12 gave the proceeds of his minute-long ownership of the site to the Art of Living India foundation, which operates schools in poorer regions of that country.