Roll the cameras already: Here's another possible Thin Mints plug

Not long ago I mentioned Thin Mints, the world-famous, to-die-for, to-perhaps-fight-for Girl Scout cookie. Some roommates in Florida fought over them, one whopping the other upside the head with various blunt objects and the roomies chasing one another with scissors because of some stolen Thin Mints. Remember?

This photo crossed my transom the other day:

Here's a little background: Last year some friends and I were hiking up Mount LeConte, one of the bigger mountains in the Great Smokies. Wore my butt out, as I recall. Fairly steep in places, but worth it.

Now, on various trails there are people who make it a practice to hand out goodies to hikers. I saw this at a section of the Appalachian Trail (the trail former Gov. Mark Sanford made famous) by Max Patch in North Carolina. It's tradition, anyway.

On this hike, we're about halfway up when we ran across this lady passing out treats/energy food. Of course I had to make my cookie grab, and fellow hiker Rick Moore recorded the moment for posterity.

Of course, the lady had Thin Mints.

I almost fell in love that day.

What would a person do for a Thin Mint? Climb a mountain, perhaps?

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Look for the Union label ...

You could almost put that to music.

(Special thanks to one of the local truck drivers for the shirt design. Modeling it is my coworker Alan.)

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While thinking about spring ...

These started cropping up on median strips around Charleston this week. I'm not sure what they are; they may really be some sort of weed for all I know.

But a couple of things about this weed:

• I've never seen them grow anywhere else but in South Carolina. I've seen them in the Lowcountry and upstate, but oddly, not on the other side of the North Carolina line.

• They come out in the early spring, and are as much an indicator of the season as the dogwood, as the Bradford pear, as the pedestrian walking around in an intoxicated we-survived-winter-and-the-world's-all-right state.

• Plus, they hold their color for only a short time. Then they become true weeds; thrown into the fire and burned.

But the colors are very pretty. Weeds never looked this good.

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How do we know it's spring down south?

Dogwood! These blooms were seen on mall drive in north charleston, sc. They have the robin up north, and we have our dogwood. whatever your sign, enjoy the day.

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Hiking tip #3,684: It is

Hiking tip #3,684: It is not necessary to outrun a bear that is chasing you. You only need to outrun your hiking buddy.

Japanese mice become winos for research

Scientists at the University of Hiroshima discovered it's not that hard to teach a rodent the finer points of wine selection.

Here's the story from some website called io9, and another from Slashdot:

... as the researchers speculate, it might just be the mice liked what they liked, and no amount of rewards or conditioning could persuade them to choose a different wine: More importantly, 2 other mice exhibited lower than 30% concordance, indicating that they were more attracted to the nonrewarded red wine compared with the learned one. This result suggested that the individual mice directed attention to different subsets of volatile components emanating from the rewarded red wine, when they were trained to choose the liquor odor in the Y-maze ...

Now, I'm not making any statements of the veracity of this story, but I just can't make stuff like this up.

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