"We Heart Cute Cats!"

"We Heart Cute Cats!"
CRITTERISTIC (April 3, 2009)

"'I want to hold your tail!'

"How precious and innocent kitten love can be!..."

That's just about all there is to the text. The charm and interest is in the photo, shown at 1/5 size in that thumbnail.

As far as I can tell, "Cat Heart" is the result of someone with two cats and a camera taking advantage of a wonderfully serendipitous opportunity.

A Webcam's View of a Small Town Street

"Small Town America: Central Minnesota"
"From the heart of darkest Minnesota: my view of small town America."
Webcam, updated twice a second

This photo was taken inches from the webcam, one morning this week.

This is my contribution - if you can call it that - to the world of webcams. This particular one shows what I see, looking in a generally north-northwesterly direction out my window. The idea, when I set it up, was to give my neighbors something to look at when they were online - and give anyone who cared to look a glimpse at a real small town in America.

It's not, I'll grant, filled with wild action: but you will see lawns, part of an intersection, cars, trucks, cyclists, pedestrians and intermittent hummingbirds.

Unhappily, it's not always online: I make an effort to have it broadcasting during most daylight hours, but need to reboot my computer from time to time. And, at night there really isn't all that much to see.

This particular webcam has its own blog, also called Small Town America: Minnesota. My view of what's happening here in Sauk Centre, in the heart of Darkest Minnesota, is in the "Sauk Centre Journal."

And that, I think, is quite enough self-promotion for one day.

New Abraham Lincoln Statue Cheesy: Literally

"Abe Lincoln, the Big Cheese!"
Oddly Enough, Reuters blog (July 4, 2009)

"Happy July 4th, Blog Guy. I just saw an Abe Lincoln statue made of cheese. Isn’t that disrespectful?

"No. If you know your history, you know Lincoln was a passionate cheese enthusiast.

"It was Abe who pushed the bounds of home entertaining by rolling up cheese and pecans together, creating the popular cheese log.

"HE did that?

"Sure. He called them Lincoln Logs. He also pioneered new forms of smelly Limburger Cheese, making his own pungent recipe...."

What follows is one of the more redolent collection of puns and cheesy wordplay that it's been my pleasure to read. The history of Oddly Enough is, of course, bogus: although I wouldn't be all that surprised to find it in an American secondary school textbook in a few years.

But, I'm getting off-topic.

Historically imaginative as the post is, the cheddar chunk of Americana is quite real: and the third in a series. Cheez-It® did a cheesy sculpture of Mt. Rushmore (more or less) in 2007, another of the founding fathers in 2008: and now a life-size statue of Abraham Lincoln, rendered in Wisconsin cheddar cheese. Cheese sculptor Troy Landwehr's Lincoln even has Honest Abe's trademark top hat.

As Yakov Smirnoff says, "what a country!"

More about this cheesy promotion, including more photos:

• "Life-Sized Cheese Carving of Abraham Lincoln Displayed in Washington, D.C. July 3rd"
  marketwire (July 3, 2009) (press release)
• "CHEESE LINCOLN IS REAL!"
  Tiffany Bridge, WELOVEDC (July 3, 2009)
• "Abe Lincoln Cheese
  Sculpture in DC"
  WCCB-TV / FOXCharlotte (July 3, 2009)

Fourth of July Recipes: Nine of Them

"Fourth of July Recipes "
101 Cookbooks (July 1, 2009)

"I hope all of you have a great holiday weekend. I thought it might be helpful to dust off a few Fourth of July-friendly recipes from the archives and highlight them here. I did my best to keep the list relatively short and sweet - just favorites...."

The list starts with Fourth of July Roasted Tomato Salsa and Lime & Peanut Coleslaw (that's not a typo: "Lime & Peanut") and goes through Giant Black Bean Salad to Hummus en Fuego. The author kept the list short: just nine recipes. Each one might not be a favorite for everybody, but I think you're likely to find something you like.

Now, it's time for the Lemming to take a break, and enjoy Independence Day here in America.