Sure, you’ve heard of hedgerow mazes. How about a corn field maze? (The Indians call it “maize” . . .) Now that’s agritainment!

More on the Sorority racial story. The local radio claimed the sister who lodged the complaint against her own group has withdrawn not just from her sorority but also from the university. Her breaking ranks has surprised everyone. Ah – she did leave school, because the sorority refused to void her housing contract when she left the organization. “The women treated me like a pariah. Many of my sisters made insulting faces at me and made insensitive comments to me. No one offered to help me as I removed my belongings from the house. "

I didn’t watch Monday Night Football this week, but it appears Ironminds was pretty close to the mark when they previewed what Dennis Miller’s commentary might be like. I reached this conclusion by reading Britannica.com’s annotated Dennis Miller, a guide to Miller’s MNF cultural and historical references. This is fantastic, especially since their commentary is just as snaky as Miller’s. (Spotted at The Other Side)

On: A flurry of delay-of-game penalty flags on the Broncos, who were unable to get a play off due to the roar of the St. Louis crowd:
Miller said: “I think the reason you’re seeing so many flags is that everybody’s having to communicate in semaphore.”
The reference: Semaphore was a method of signaling with flags developed in France in 1794 by Claude Chappe and his brother Ignace in order to get messages to the war front during the revolutionaries’ battle with royalists. Despite its land-bound origins, semaphore was later used at sea, spawning the common image of a sailor on a ship deck madly waving colored flags.
What Miller might have meant: Perhaps the referees were not really penalizing Denver for delay of game, but in fact were trying to let Paris know that Condé-sur-l’Escaut had been captured from the Austrians.

Tonight I go listen to James Howard Kunstler speak on urban sprawl, and how we can stop it here in Athens. Tomorrow, it’s the Tour de Sprawl, which has been well covered by the local press.

Explore Castle Arcana. Now this is pretty neat. Hand drawn illustrations with clickable hot spots let you walk around the castle and its grounds using first-person perspective. Bits of humor make exploring a treat.

Segregation is alive and well in the University of Georgia’s fraternity/sorority system. I find it odd how the greeks are defending themselves from the charges. Things here are very clearly segregated, both in admission and geography. The press has long used the euphamism “historically black” when referring to the groups whose homes are clumped together and whose members are mostly black. The very affluent white homes align Milledge Avenue (the photo in the story is representative of most). My office is nestled among them, and I see the members every day waiting for the buses. There’s no racial mixing at all. This will certainly shake things up a bit. Good for the sorority sister who complained about this.

weblogs: a history and perspective: a most wonderful piece of writing by Rebecca Blood, of What’s in Rebecca’s Pocket? What’s a weblog, how’d they develop, why do we write them, why are they important – it’s all in there.

Busy day today, so I’ll only leave you with two “better living” links lifted from other weblogs.

From the always excellent Lark Farm comes the Ecological Footprint Household Evaluation, where you can anwser a few questions and discover how many acres it takes to sustain you. You’ll see the world average and the US average (one guess as two which one is much, much higher). My own footprint was slightly higher than the US average (gasp!), but only because for the moment I live alone in a house that’s far too big for just me. Adding a housemate would drop me down to about 60% of the US average. If you prefer specifics, there’s a spreadsheet you can download. Using it, you can track yourself for a month and get a much more specific, more detailed report.

From the venerable Robot Wisdom comes the complete on-line book (including pictures) Microlivestock: Little-Known Small Animals with a Promising Economic Future. This book, available free of charge, covers everything from miniature cattle to all types of poultry to exotic rodents (or lizards, if you want to follow Wall of Voodoo’s advice about barbequed iguana). Maybe there’s a miniature dairy cow in my future…

Yesterday I did something I’d wanted to for a long time but was too afraid to actually do. I ate wild mushrooms that I collected myself. I’d been scared away (rightly so) by years of being told you should never eat wild mushrooms unless they were collected by an expert. I’d never been formally trained, so despite my love of mushrooms, I stayed away. The last week has been both warm and wet, and my yard has exploded with mushrooms. White puffballs about the size of a marble blanket my front and back yard. Puffballs are about the easiest of the edible mushrooms to identify, and by all accounts they’re mighty tasty (not to mention mighty healthy), so I collected a handful, made sure I had a proper identification, and cooked ’em up for dinner. I cooked them simply – dipped them in egg, rolled them in seasoned bread crumbs, and then lightly fried them in canola oil. And yes, they were very, very good. I’ll be eating more of them. Next thing to do is get some formal training so I can confidently go collecting morels and other tasty morsels that inhabit the woods by my house. For an excellent article on migrant wild mushroom hunters, visit here.

What do you do when you have a wonderful garden at your rental house and you get evicted? Move the garden, right down to the topsoil. Fighting landlords with scorched earth… scary.