bath salts for turkeys
A very happy, albeit jet-lagged Thanksgiving to you all.  Major apologies for not getting this up earlier, but it represents my first attempt at vlogging and the learning curve ended up being a little steeper than I anticipated.I just returned from London last night (this morning?) and, after trying to figure out the correct encoding right up to the time I had to leave for the airport, I dragged the whole project with me to England, only to find out that my poo

a moveable feast
The Spousal Unit and I are in Vegas for a long Thanksgiving weekend, because nothing says "Turkey Day" like poker, fine dining, and spa treatments, possibly with a bit of early Christmas shopping thrown in. So Jen-Luc Piquant is left to her own devices to find amusing holiday-related science tidbits for your reading pleasure. Fortunately, the Interwebz provide a rich cornucopia of T-Day scienc-y goodness, so she didn't have to forage very far.

taster's choice
Over at Swans on Tea, Tom expounded recently on how cooking isn't "really" science, recalling a family holiday gathering where his grade school niece wanted to bake something for her school science project. For Tom, this bit of information "elicited a mental face palm." He has a point: what he's really objecting to is not cooking per se, but the blind f

bad moon rising
Halloween may be over, but Jen-Luc Piquant is all aflutter about the forthcoming release on November 20 of New Moon, the film adaption of the second book in Stephanie Meyer's bestselling Twilight trilogy. (She is equally aflutter over Lady Gaga's awesome new video for "Bad Romance," the perfect mix of high fashion, catchy technopop, and edgy burlesque performance art.

The Mayans Warned Us: Don't Trespass In Yellowstone
Last night I settled down into a cushy high-backed chair, got comfortable, turned off my brain and let my mouth hang open for three hours, while Hollywood spoon feed me a sweet gruel made of the worst dialogue, cheesiest moments and most unnecessary (but awesome) special effects they had to offer. I got to see a preview screening of 2012, the latest in a long line of terrible end-of-the world blo