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.

How now, mad cow? The end is upon us, states this article, caused by the world-wide spread of prions. Vegan scare tactic or portent of things to come?

At first, the disease seemed kind of fun. Imagine Cruetzfeldt and Jacob coming upon this native, laughing himself to death with kuru, (the Papuan name for it) then embarking for Europe, with the laughing man’s pickled brain in a jar. Seeing no germs in any lens of the period, they threw this spongy cauliflower into their little British garden. A trillion prions abated into the ground, waiting for some low-grazing animal to come munching toward them, and along came the family pet, Wooly the Ram. Bingo! It’s Mega-death starring The Cannibal Bug opening at the Palladium. That might well have been the scenario for, after New Guinea, the disease’s next official appearance involved a big, geographic leap. In the 70’s, it appeared in the sheep herds of Britain. British sheepherders, with Celtic poesy, called the penchant “scrapie” after the sick sheep’s habit of rubbing up against things. As breeders traded sheep like baseball cards, scrapie moved to sheep herds in America which in 1970 had an epizootic amount of laughy, rubbing sheep. For a while farmers wondered if their teen-aged kids had dosed herds with some of those new-fangled, hippie drugs. Rams and ewes who had never met a cannibal started exhibiting an odd, itch to scrape their heads and hides against fences, even if the fences were barbed wire. No one suspected that scrapie was just that old Papuan wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing. It was beyond imagination that a cannibal infection on one, isolated continent could leap to food chain-animals on another continent…

To conclude “make your own hooch” week, CNN brings us the knowledge that “Angels’ trumpet is a hallucinogenic and poisonous herb that can grow up to 5 feet tall. Possession is not illegal, but charges can be filed if it is used to create a drug or if children are endangered. " A father in Florida was charged after a babysitter accidentally gave his young sons some Angel Trumpet Kool-Aid out of the fridge and they started saying things like “see the frogs”.

Euclid’s Elements form one of the most beautiful and influential works of science in the history of humankind, and now it’s entirely online, complete with javascript goodies that let you dynamically change the diegrams to help you understand the concepts. Neat-o!

The New Scientist interviews Stefano Padulosi, head of underutilised food crops for the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute. He travels the world, finding crops that ought to be used for food alongside the more common crops. Over 95% of the planet’s foodstuff comes from only 30 varieties of plant. Sound like putting all your eggs in one basket? I find it fun to grow uncommon plants in my own garden. Two varieties of Amaranth. Quinoa. Native corn. Domesticated lambsquarters (yum!). Unique watermelons. Heirloom tomatoes. And so on. Why grow the same old stuff you can get at the grocery? If you’re going to grow your own brocolli (for example), try to find something besides the ultra-selected Burpee’s variety. Seeds of Change is a nice place to start.

[Bug Eyed Earl sings](http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/fm.cgi?caption=Put your rear on y%27 ear and wiggle your toes&leftpic=crazy1&leftq1=Ain%27t nothing like it%2C you know it%27s true. Doin%27 the the hoodleehoo%21&leftq2=I know that note was wrong.&leftq3=Don%27t tell me I%27m wrong%21&rightpic=crazy2&rightq1=That was wrong.&rightq2=I%27m tellin%27 ya%2C buddy-&rightq3=Well%2C you listen to me when I%27m talkin%27 to you%21) Cartoon Planet’s Hoodleehoo, thanks to Daniel Marks’ Red Meat Generator. Steve Wildey pointed me to this. I’d link to him if he had a website.

Woo hoo! Max Cannon has greatly improved the Red Meat Archives! Now you can pull up your favorite Red Meat strip by title or by favorite character.