Grape! Mango! Which?

Handel's Ice Cream started featuring grape ice cream as a seasonal flavor last week. That's a full rich Concord grape flavor that makes a fine milkshake.

Tonight, I went there looking forward to my grape ice cream fix, but found to my great suprise and consternation that Handel's was offering not only grape but mango.

For those of you who may know know, mango by Handel's is unique flavor and probably their very best. It even includes lots of mango pureé! The only better flavor I've had are the grapefruit gelatos in Italy and Hungary.

I had Mango.

Lions and Tigers, oh my!

Tigons and Ligers are real! But very diferent. What is interesting what a difference the mothers' species make.

My wife and I were speculating—or, rather I was bsing her—that tigers and lions probably have racist attitudes towards the halfbreeds, and probably need sensitivity training.

Haunting, Amazing, Evocative

When I was a kid, I loved the atmosphere of the inner "Charn" chapters in The Magician's Nephew. Well, Ukranian woman's motorcycle journeys through the exclusion zone around Chernobyl certainly remind me this.



The woman writes that This town might be an attractive place for tourists. Some tourists companies have been trying to arrange tours in this town, but the first group of tourists found the silence unnerving and downright SPOOKY. And it is. They charged 1200 hryvnas for a 2 hour excursion and after some 15 minutes, they wanted to flee to the outside world. The silence here is deafening.

Congratulations to Mr. Sarkozy!

The NR blog linked this pair of contrasting images. It will be interesting to what happens to the French left now. If only politics in this country were as . . . interesting.

Summer 2008 is a long ways off but if present trends continue, it strikes me that this sort of thing has some merit. If Bush persists in his policies through the summer of 2008, and if no strong Republican candidate emerges and is able to gain traction against that backdrop, then the real election may be taking place in the California primary and the choice will probably be between the two junior senators.

Here is an interesting slideshow of Hokkaido (click below to enter):

Ahmedinejad's letter to Bush is a fascinating apologetic document. He pretty much ignores the claims of Islam as such and tries to appeal to Bush on the basis of his professed Christianity. Many commentators have seen the letter as a simple propaganda piece, but I consider that it is really proof that Ahmedinejad lives or tries to live, much as I myself used to try, in a medieveal world where the ideas are real things and not merely traditions or conventions to which men are obliged to pay lip service. There is something of Charles Williams in this letter—I am thinking of The Place of the Lion—although seen from the other side.

Go Sarkozy!