→ What’s Your Smell? ∞

I wonder what coffee, grass, and new computer would smell like?

→ COPS: Flushing Drugs Could Create “Meth-Gators” ∞

The Alabama Meth-Gators is my new favorite college football team.

→ Hogs Head Cheese: A Disappearing Delicacy ∞

I can’t claim that I was one who helped to postpone the extinction. Somebody told me once as a kid that it contained pig’s brains, so I never ate it. It pretty much looked like jello’d meat, too, which didn’t add to the appeal. I’d try it today, though, if I still lived there, and probably would like it. Vinegar and pork is not a bad combo.

→ Do Ants Like Coffee? ∞

🐜❤️☕️

Ants are my favorite insect. That they have actually been observed to plant coffee seeds, live in and among the plants they grow, and actually harvest the beans floors me with wonder for these remarkable creatures that are so different from us, yet so much resemble us in our social behaviors. This is real agriculture; and we already know they practice ranching and husbandry behaviors, with aphids for example — “milking” them of the dew produced by their bodies. That coffee is what they go for makes me love them even more.

But the article also tells a remarkable story about a South American farmer trying to learn from nature, in a way that hurts him financially, but that he thinks is important for his country and for the future. We’d never know these things were it not for people like that. And who knows what else there is yet to discover.