"LOVE is worth seven points in scrabble."

The New York Times invited their readers to define love. Most are posted in the comment section of the Weekend Competition.

Several humorous definitions were submitted:
"Love is something silly that women invented over thousands of years while men were out there building the world...Like women, it is undefinable."
"Love is how your dog looks at you (not too be confused with longing, which is how she looks at your sandwich)."

There are many that are plays off of famous sayings:
"If music be the food of love, what's for dessert?"
"For a polygamist, love is a many-splintered thing."

There are deeper definitions:
"That which makes life worth living, makes man worth knowing, and makes woman worth touching."
"Love itself never dies, and never goes away. True love never does, and it is never wasted."

And there are confessions:
"I don't know what love is. But I do know, unmistakably, when I feel it."
"I love a good cheeseburger and I love my wife and my children. On a really good day, like my birthday, I can have all of them at once. If I have to choose, I'll take the wife and the children over the cheeseburger, usually."

Shakespeare said:
"...Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved"

And he also told us that "loving goes by haps".

But whatever the real definition of LOVE is, lots of it to the Carlson Clan. Happy Valentine's Day.

Jon and Jake hit the mountains and party life

Herewith is a (sanitized) part of Jon's email to me from France:

these party animals had me out till
3:::::::::up in the mountains at another ancient home,
pictureslllllllstill cant find the keyboard period::::::::::::it was a
goat trail to get therellllllllwild dogs, wild pigs; the man needs a
rifle, has nonelllllllllthe wind power here is well developed, many
massive units to be seen, like war of the worlds things on the
horizon:::::::::::::::i was told that since carolina has a license to
practice in england that since its all now the eu that would be much
easier for her to work here::::::::::::fresh oysters and muscles
yesterday from saltwater farm:::::::::::not cheap; but the muscles
were especially good:::::::::::::were drinking wild thyme tea to ward
off the flu::::::::::::abnormal amounts of rain; but welcomed in this
climate:::::::::i seem to be the only party surviver; only one up at
10 morning::

He must have been posting on a sub-mini netbook that the old guy could barely see or type upon. I wonder what ::::: and lllll mean on that computer ?

How to catch a snake peacefully

An old trick for making a grabber for anything I show here in the following picture.



An alternative way to make it is not use a pipe, instead use a stick with another loop tied to the end of it. Insert the rope loop through that loop. Ask the snake to please insert herself into the loop of the rope. If she refuses you know it is probably another pesky male.