Rumpelstiltskin was a low sort, but he did get the miller’s daughter out of a tight spot or two. Once again, a main character is mutiliated beyond repair. I don’t recall if there was a graphic depiction of the end of Rumpy, or if it was too horrible to stay in my memory.

In my book, the last illustration was that of the witch exploding into a hundred pieces. I used to stare at the picture, trying to understand how that could happen. I felt really awful that they would leave her that way, even though she had planned to do evil things.

The soldier in this Hans Christian Andersen story is a flawed hero, but I didn’t realize that as a child, mesmerized as I was by the illustrations in my book. The dogs looked like our family dog, Tuffy, except for the eyes, which were bad enough when they were big as teacups. When I saw the one with eyes as big as towers and imagined them turning around and around like wheels, I quit paying attention to the story, and just watched those dogs.

Now that song is running through my head. . . I believe I can touch the sky. But enough. I have How Insensitive, Meditation, Wave, and Corcovado to listen to. Good dinner music, good after dinner music.

My lunch was poached chicken and a tomato. For dinner, I had a third of a Carl’s Superstar without cheese and a McDonald’s medium fry. (That’s terrible, you might say. Yes, I know, but I had a bad day.)

I’m afraid I am still not with daylight saving time yet. It seems to early to eat, and I’m sleepy a lot of the time. But then I’ve been staying up a lot later, thanks to these books I can’t put down.

Quicktime movies of flying snakes in action.

From the Johns Hopkins Orthopedic Biomechanics Lab - click on ‘projects’, then on the ‘biomechanics of baseball pitching’ image.

The crustacean that plays a violin.

I always found Old Brown to be a bit scary.

In parts of the U.S., squirrels are eaten on a regular basis, and their brains considered by some to be a delicacy. This can lead to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - yes, the same as mad-cow.

Maybe we should be studying squirrel brains more.

No, it’s not a dish I’m desperate enough to cook up, but an article about the foraging of squirrels. Around here, they go after the emerging leaf buds of my walnut tree, miscellaneous flowers, and, according to one neighbor, lemons from her tree.

Plastic bronchitis, first observed in Europe in the 1800s, attacks mostly children.

A local story. Here’s a very thorough explanation of what necrotizing faciitis is.