belatedly.

Gifts abound. We found this homemade gevulde speculaas (suspiciously similar to the one in the eG thread, no?) in our mailbox just moments before Valentina brought some freshly baked Genovese foccacia down the hall. Andy brought down bowls of the Thai shrimp soup he learned to cook in Thailand on Tuesday night. Urban life redeems itself.

We will return fire imminently, but tonight's ammo was inappropriate in terms of form factor (scallops), perishability (scallops), and number (we had four between the two of us...yes we're still on a budget). But stay alert.

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As you may know, I am usually pro-Wikipedia, but it's true that sometimes you'll find an entry that treads extra carelessly on that boundary between refreshing populist informality and bong-induced fantasy.

Witness this casual aside from the coconut crab entry I linked to a couple of days ago: "Recent discoveries suggest that the coconut crab may be responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, consuming her remains and hording her bones in its crab burrow.[29]"

Questionable grammar notwithstanding (so there's just one coconut crab and one burrow involved here?), this sounds pretty implausible. Coconut crabs took her bones? OK this could totally be true. Coconut crabs are responsible for her disappearance? That would require a not-insignificant level of long-range planning and communication skills from our hugely crabby suspects. Technical savvy as well.

And the motive? Unclear at best. If it was just a "humans taste good" kind of thing, you'd think there would have been easier predatory gambits than "lure celebrity aviatrix to remote Pacific atoll and force plane to crash".

There's some actual humor to be mined from this, but I'd need a film crew, a reasonable CGI budget and at least one more cup of coffee. And we're out of milk.

We also laughed at this (via Poesy Galore).

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