Has anyone actually tried making these? I was so taken with them that I tried making some out of butcher paper. Thought I'd spray them black (I'm never without black spray paint.) and glitter them before they dried. Well, they came out goofy looking. I made three different versions and they all looked like they were made by an alcoholic spider on a binge. They look so easy, but I never did figure out just how to do it. In fact, I wish I'd have taken a picture of the results. It would have been good for a laugh or two. OA

The husband of One of the ladies in my garden club had his email hacked and suddenly everyone he knows is getting these sent to them saying he is in another country and needs money for an emergency. The bad thing in this case is he does often travel to foreign countries and since they have access to his email account they now know specifics about him and his family and friends to make it sound very real. We all got them in our email since she has us on her email list which was a part of his. Luckily we all knew they were not out of the country since we had just had a meeting and she was there, she had just undergone breast cancer surgery and is recuperating at home. One of the ladies called them to alert them but of course they already knew by then since family had called immediately. Like they really need this on their plate at this time. I just hope karma takes a big hit on people like that.

Windows and cross ventilation only handle smoke, and then only to partially dissipate it. They don't deal with the steam that makes the kitchen walls sweat and damages your cabinets over the long run. Natural ventilaion won't remove the odors that the steam of even boiling veggies will carry through the home and deposit into your soft furnishings. Permanent boiled cabbage smell in grammas house, anyone? Open windows can help some with the heat buildup in a summer kitchen, but not enough. Especially if you live in a climate that uses AC. You'd be letting in hot moist air that was not any better than the stuff you wanted to get rid of. In the olden days in the South, that's why the big meal of the day was at 11 a.m., because you couldn't stand to be in the kitchen with a hot stove during the apex of the hot summer day. Then the stove was shut down for the rest of the day. You got a cold biscuit, buttermilk, and maybe leftover ham or fatback at 6, and then you were in bed to get up at 3 with the chickens. That's the natural lifestyle consequence of dealing with no ventilation or climate control. The big offender that windows won't handle though is grease. You needn't ever fry a thing to have grease coat your cabinets, walls, and soft furnishings. Just boiling that cabbage causes it to render some of it's natural vegetable oils into the steam that carries it onto all of those surfaces, creating an icky sticky film that attracts dust to it. Which forms a really difficult to remove shellac type coating over time. And this is why even homes in the 50's realized that you needed some form of active ventilation over passive ventilation. So, through wall fans were born. And quickly went out of favor, because they had no real capture ability, no cleaning ability, and were giant fire hazards as a result. It's amusing that so many people want to recreate those useless and dangerous fans as a nod to ''retro''. They were only popular for a relatively short period of time before better design sense prevailed and the overhead vent hood with cleanable capture aea was developed and took over the market. Hood technology has improved over the intervening 70 years as to sound, cleanability, and CFM. What has not changed one iota is that an ovehead hood works naturally with Mother Nature's rising, heat, odors, grease, steam, and smoke in order to capture it, and remove it from your kitchen. Not just blow it back and forth. There is no need to attempt to reinvent the wheel for much poorer results, even though Jennair tried. Every kitchen needs a good quality overhead vent fan. Period.

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