LOL! I needed a laugh today and ya'll have provided it! I suppose this is a "flower" and due to being rather odd looking plus really smelling bad, it should qualify! My local variety is the Clathrus columnatus but trust me, when they appear, you'll be asking "what died?" Country goodbye titles? These are all real and a local hillbilly radio station occasionally broadcasts those that won't get them kicked out of church!

I put mine in monthly rose society raffles. Some rose societies also have a lending library. You can also give them to rose novices who still have that spark of all-things-roses excitement. Your generosity can mean a great deal to the person just getting into rose growing. I still wish all these rose pictures had a scratch & sniff feature.

This year I gave my sister Mark Vieira's book, Into the Dark (Turner Classic Movies): The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950, and for Mark's birthday, I gave him aKierkegaard anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, which contains the best translations. I had Mark over for brunch week-end before last to give him his late birthday present because I wanted to read part of Either/Or to him to help explain why I was giving him this book, and he wrote me a nice thank you note afterwards. My sister really liked getting Mark's book, partly because I introduced her to him at his studio in Hollywood when she came to visit me one year. Right now I am reading the autobiography of Brenda Lee. I only recently discovered her very early (pre-teen) recordings when I saw her on MeTV on the Danny Thomas Show, during which show Danny Thomas advised her to put off her music career. Anyway, she sang Dynamite on that show, which I had not heard before and had to have. She recorded that song, along with Rock the Bop when she was 12, and they are my two favorite songs of hers - I'm not really a fan of country music, but I do like Rockabilly, which is what she recorded in the beginning. Her autobiography is really interesting and makes me like her even more. She got to meet Elvis when she was 12 and also tried to help the Beatles get a record contract in the '50's but was unsuccessful in that attempt. I seldom read novels any more - most of what I read is non-fiction, but I do read some science-fiction. I have a collection of "UFO, CONTACT from..." books (from Wendelle C. Stevens) that I bought at UFO conventions that I used to go to, and I consider those to be some of the best science-fiction books. I used to go to the UFO conventions with my friend Jimmy to listen to the outrageous (and often funny) stories that people would tell there, but they stopped having the conventions here after the year 2000, when their predictions did not come true.

LOL Bon! In a related incident, a friend of mine tried to back out of her garage with the rear door of her SUV up....on more than one occasion! :) Donna