The tomatoes are ripening as fast as I can eat them. This morning it was Tomato and Smoked Gouda Omlette. I need to make another couple batches of mozzarella so I can feast on the many varieties of caprese. I grew 16 square feet of basil, but I don’t think I can use any of it. It looks like basil, but it sure doesn’t taste like it. It doesn’t taste like anything, and that’s the problem. I’ve no idea what the deal is.

You like S’mores? Crunchy graham, sticky marshmallow, gooey chocolate. Mmmmm-mmmm! At my sister’s recent wedding, we all sat around the fire the night before, munching on s’mores. Now, as regular readers know, I’m all for making food from scratch. However, there are limits, and this s’mores recipe may just cross the line. Homemade marshmallow. Homemade chocolate. And, yes, homemade graham cracker. Well, maybe someday I’ll try it.

I can’t think of a better way to prepare for a day at the office than skankin’ in the car during the drive into town. Today’s dance inducers: Johnny Socko.

A whole mess of new undersea species, including many “living fossils”, have recently been discovered on isolated sea mounts south of Tasmania. (Published in this week’s Nature, registration required.) This includes several new species of Crinoids, also called Sea Lillies. Those are the animals that look like flowers you always see drawn in pictures showing ancient ocean bottoms crawling with trilobites. I’ve long liked Crinoids – the modern species are beautiful creatures, and when I took a paleontology class (focusing on simple sea life) crinoid bits were a common sight on our field trips. One trouble with studying fossil crinoids is when they die, they disintegrate into small stoney bits. The stem is made of disks with a hole in the middle and ridges like poker chips. Those are pretty common (known as “indian beads” sometimes, because to the uninformed, they look like that’s what they could be), but you can’t tell what species they came from. The only way to identify one is to find an intact head (“calyx”), and my professor told us we’d never find one of those. The next week, I did find one on one of our field trips. It remains one of my most exciting moments (I’m a nerd, through and through), and I’ve got the fossil in a box in my house.

She said, “You know I don’t feel any romance,
when I look at you I don’t see stars,
but I love the time that we spend together
on the road in all those funky bars”
She may be short on sugar, but you know I think she’s sweet on me.

I miss Apricot Jam.

I staked my tomato plants this weekend. And by “staked”, I mean “trussed like a roasting turkey”. I planted the things (six plants each of four varieties: cherry, roma, yellow, and an heirloom Amish red) backin April along a fence with the plan to later put in supports. I never got around to it, and by now the plants have gotten huge. Full of fruit in varying degrees of ripeness. Sprawling over six feet from the fence in some places. So, I used cotton twine, a lot of twine, to truss up support nets to hold the plants against the fence. It’ll make harvesting much easier and hopefully keep many pests away.

_HelloMiMi tries her BEST to find Special Hello Kitty products that you may not even know existed before coming, I am sure you will be SUPRISE at how many Hello Kitty goods are out there…_ I’ve seen a lot of Hello Kitty stuff in my day, but nothing like what you can apparently find in the motherland. My favorite? The Hello Kitty teeth, hands down. HelloMiMi has got Hello Kitty about covered, I think.

The first space shuttle launch took place on April 12, 1981, and the flight was a huge success. Remember? Well, “the Bolsheviks who now control NASA bent over backwards to paint the image of an abnormally perfect shuttle flight. Meanwhile the actual Shuttle mission, which was carried out in secret, did not go according to plan. " This quote comes from my absolute favorite wacked-out conspiracy rambling of all time: the Dr. Beter AUDIO LETTER #64. I first read this back in college (pre-internet), courtesy of usenet kook Robert E. McElwaine ("UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED… “). If there’s one piece of conspiracy madness you read this weekend, read Dr. Beter.

From South Africa’s Independant Newspapers group comes Strange but True, where your odd questions get answered. For instance: How did Mr. and Mrs. T-Rex get it on? How does phantom limb syndrom affect your sex life? Can humans and chimps cross-breed? They’re not all about sex – but many are.

NASA officials have briefed the White House on a “major” Mars announcement to be made at a press conference next week. Discovery.com reports that NASA may have found water, but we know that really they’re going to announce the Phobos slamming into Earth thing.