October, 2025

"This Just In..."

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Welcome to October. There simply isn't a more beautiful month. Warm early, colors exploding, maple everything, pumpkins and goblins and what ever happened to Mischief Night? Well, we have a whole bunch of mischief for you here. Read. Play. Win. And thanks for your time.

We’re thinking this is an idea whose time has come. No?

No. You’re not a Virgo. According to NASA.

Proof? http://bit.ly/4grTVbA

The modernist western art is by Edward Mell. 

An American painter from Phoenix, Arizona. He specialized in depictions of landscapes of the Southwestern United States, including the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. 

His paintings are in the collections of many museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tacoma Art Museum,^[6] and the University of Arizona Museum of Art.

More of his work: https://altamiraart.com/products/single-strike-98-200

Click here for PDF Download

“When I was pulled over for speeding, I told the officer, ‘I’m sorry, but the road seemed clear, and’…”

“How would you have reacted if Mister Fog had suddently appeared”, he interrupted.

Annoyed at his patronizing manner, I replied, “I suppose I would’ve applied Mr. Brake and summoned Mr. and Mrs. Headlight.”

Enunciating each syllable, the officer repeated, “How would you have reacted if mist…or…fog had suddenly appeared?”

-    Peter Melville, Cornwall, England

-ESS changes POET to POETESS.

-ETTE changes BACHELOR to BACHELORETTE

 -INA changes CZAR to CZARINA

-INE changes HERO to HEROINE.

What suffix changes a word from feminine to masculine?

Tell us here – and you may win a $25 Amazon gift card

Extremophiles are real and absolutely astounding.

Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human.

t lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on Level 104 of the Mponeng Mine near Johannesburg. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It needs no oxygen to live.

It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323º Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for one hundred millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via DNA. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hair spray.

It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It thrives in the acidic runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc.  It can endure pressures equivalent to sixty-five tons of force per square inch, nine times greater than the pressure at the nadir of the ocean and one tenth of the pressure required to crush graphite into diamond.

It eats arsenic. It eats uranium. It resides inside the core of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It thrives in hydrochloric acid. It can survive the effects of g-forces more than two thousand times greater than the surface gravity of the earth. It can hibernate for five hundred millennia in the core of a snowflake deep beneath the permafrost of Siberia.

It survives direct immersion in liquid nitrogen. It survives one thousand times the dosage of gamma radiation that can kill a human being. It feeds on nylon byproducts. It feeds on stainless steel. It can lie dormant for forty million years, hibernating inside the gut of a honeybee shrouded in a jewel of amber. It inhabits a dormant volcano in the Atacama Desert, where the rain falls only once per century.

Oh, and it devours plutonium.

It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the moon. It awaits your experiments. This is just an excerpt from an upcoming book by Christian Bok entitled The Xenotext: Book 2. 

Well, I, for one, am afraid. More, if you dare here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile

Now, seriously, where else do you get this kind of info?

This is a special internetweb link. I believe it answers the most perplexing, infuriating, downright misery-inducing moment everyone suffers at least ONCE a week. After this - your life will be full of joy and merriment. 

Ratfactor's Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets

Welcome to Neuf-Brisach, France.

An aerial view of an octagonal fortress that forms one of the most extraordinary cities in the world.

Constructed in the 17th-century by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a military architect serving King Louis XIV, the city in Alsace features evenly spaced bastions, perpendicular streets and star-shaped fortifications. Plus it is cool.

Here's the Wikipedia entry. And you can zoom in and see streetviews at Google Maps.

A midsagittal view showing the inner boundaries of the cerebral cortex (Structures outside of the cerebrum are labeled in italics.)

See larger Image Here

“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years."

A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size - about the size of a grain of sand - could hold 2,000 terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included… 

Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something in the order of 200 exabytes of information, roughly equal to ‘the entire digital content of today’s world’.”



- Bill Bryson, The Body (2019).

This is so simple. Pick any one of these ugly trees and give us a scary caption.

One particularly scary, nasty, bone-chillingly weird response wins a gift card!

Copy the pix and give us the caption. Send it here

Is it us or is the second thing people ask (after what do you do for a living) is, “So, what are you watching on TV?”

In an effort to help you help us – We're sharing four fantastic video series and well, thought you might share your favorites too.

We're also staying away from some the biggest, most famous series like Wired, Fargo and Better Call Saul. Trying to find some that you might not have heard of. Here are our suggestions:

Slow Horses

Season five is here and we wish they’d drop all of them at the same time so we could binge, but it is worth waiting each week for the misadventures of Gary Oldman.

Ice Cold Murders

There simply aren’t enough seasons of this show for me. Slightly bent Italian detective from Rome gets sent to Aosta in the Italian Alps. Fish out of water story stars the incomparable Marco Giallini as Rocco Schiavone. Promise you – you will love him and the show.

The Americans

Intense. Smart. Scary. Plus Matthew Rhys and the fantastic Keri Russell. Wicked good.

Deadwood

OK, we will be the first to admit that David Milch’s language might be juuuuuust this side of vulgar, but then in the next breath, it’s poetry. Seriously.

Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Molly Parker and Robin Weigert are nothing short of astonishing.

Now….what have you got for us? Tell us here.

Caramel Filled Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients. Makes 20

·      1/2 cup Butter

·      1 1/4 cup Brown Sugar

·      1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons Unsweetened Cocoa Powder

·      2 Eggs

·      1 1/4 cup Flour 

·      1 teaspoon Baking Powder

·      1/4 teaspoon Salt

·      1 cup Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips(optional)

·      1/2 cup Powdered Sugar

·      14 - 20 Soft Chewy Caramels (such as Werther's Soft Chewy Caramels, Mrs. Call's Caramels, Rolos

Instructions

·      In a medium saucepan, over medium-low heat, melt the butter.

·      Remove from heat and add brown sugar and cocoa powder. Stir for 1-2 minutes until glossy smooth.

·      Once at room temperature, add eggs and stir well.

·      Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt. Add chocolate chips, if

·      Let dough chill, covered, for 30 minutes.

·      Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

·      Remove dough from refrigerator and roll into 1 1/2 - 2 inch balls, depending on the size of caramel. Using your thumb, make an indention in the center. Place caramel in the center and wrap cookie dough completely around.

·      Place powdered sugar in bowl. Generously coat each ball in powdered sugar.

·      Place the cookies on parchment or Silpat lined baking sheet.

·      Bake for 8-10 minutes or until the cookies start to crack on edges. Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from the baking sheet.

That’s what people always say….just before the hurricane comes to visit.

May we suggest topping off your propane tanks as we’re not through hurricane season – and there’s always a possibility of a blizzard down the road. Just give us a call and we’ll come by this week!

She starred in a couple of different series at the turn of the century. One of them was West Wing. Who is she? 

Tell us and any other series she was in -- and you might win a #25 Amazon gift card. You know who did win last month?



Michele F and Valerie S and 106 of you identified the four masters of horror – Carradine, Price, Lee and Cushing. George H and James O and 47 of you identified Tristan De Cunha the island in the middle of nowhere in the So. Pacific.

And then – there was the chocolate shops. They included Mother Myricks in VT, Tschudin in Middeltown (3 votes), Munsons, Guilford Chocolate, Choco Shell in Old Lyme, Joy Chocolate (3 votes) in Essex, Fasica in Waterbury, Divine Treasures in Manchester, a shop in Bruges (Belgium) 45 on Main in Kent and Bestemor-Imports in Old Mystic Village.

Kayla H was our chocolate winner. Now get out there and grab a caramel.