There went 27,000 marijuana plants down the drain in Sonoma. Woops.

How can we bear to eat Ethiopian cuisine these days without feeling the cutting irony that the Ethiopians themselves are barely staying alive on one meal a day?

I'd love to go for a walk among the treetops -- literally -- on the Kew tree top walkway. What a brilliant idea.

The UK has sent $10 million to Myanmar for relief after the cyclone, and the US has thus far appropriated only $3 million.

cake lyrics come true

Did someone take Cake's lyrics about fuzzy dice too far?

windoze

Internal IBM documents show that some Macs are now being used internally. "One advantage cited: less reliance on Windows."

La Galerie de Pierre Bergé & Associés

Look what's appearing on the Sablon in Brussels not far from Pierre Marcolini.

MRE, one of the funniest Wikipedia articles I've ever read.

Living at home

Not just a Belgian phenomenon?

Yet another project from the Beijing sandbox: Architect Steven Holl is building a small version of the city I've envisioned twice my fiction: a forest of highrises connected by aerial throughways.

"Lantos had assumed his committee chairmanship [of the House Foreign Affairs Committee] just a year [ago], when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job." A sad time for our representative Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, to pass away of cancer.

Am I just too old-fashioned or hippie? Some of these "money-saving" suggestions from NYT are great; others make me sad. Desert local retailers? Is this how globalization has trickled down to the average American?

We had a fine powder in the evening, but later after my clavichord jury it began to drizzle. The resulting slightly solidified surface of the powdery snow gave it the fascinating consistency of old cake frosting. It was the right color too.

leaf crunchers unite!

This is what makes video gamers relish wrecking and pedestrians crunch leaves underfoot in the fall. I could hardly put it better: "W.H. Auden once warned that poets make lousy politicians, because they're way too entranced by apocalyptic spectacle. I think he was right, but the truth is this poetic hunger exists in almost everyone. After a 40-hour week of sitting in a cubicle, shuffling Word documents and being robotically polite, any reasonable human needs some catharsis -- some full-body shock of the illicit. Full-bore destruction in video games serves the need admirably."

The TSA needs a copyeditor if it's started its own blog and can't figure out the difference between Everyday and Every Day.

Postaplast is clearly what our house needs to stop missing deliveries. The design, built to last the harshest Norwegian winters, wouldn't be out of line for Rochester either.

A whopping 5% of electricity in the US now goes to phantom power -- the power sucked by your plugged in gadgets and even power strips even when you're not using the energy. The only solution currently is to unplug your power strip every night. Perhaps in the long run some inventor will come up with a solution that more people can deal with. But for the moment please unplug before you sleep and don't leave your gadgets on sleep mode.

From dad -- The scary side of fog: 100-car pileups.

If you're looking for a harrowing real-life scare this Halloween, look no further than the moving experience of four firefighters who narrowly escaped death in the SoCal inferno.

The most original way I've ever encountered to talk about education.

Why do I crave chocolate? It's the bacteria living in my stomach. I have to feed them what they want. Seriously. Although I wonder why they get hungrier when I'm stressed.

After reading this NYT article on a visit to Darjeeling, I really want to go on a tea vacation. Like wine tasting but in the Indian mountains with prayer flags flying and more modest accommodations.

A horrible tunnel fire occurred in LA. One of my biggest road nightmares since watching What Dreams May Come.

Alix Bryan has completed her journey around the US in the shape of a peace sign, after riding 11,000 miles (almost the distance from the North to the South pole) on a little scooter. Read about her message at her blog.