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Drench - the world's simplest flash game

There are no instructions, but the premise really is simple: Turn the entire board any one color within a set number of moves. Begin at the upper left square and click one of the colors on the right; all adjacent squares will turn that color. Keep it up, keeping an eye on what color squares are blocking others, until you've changed them all to one color.

In the screenshot above, you'd click pale purple, and the pale green squares you start on will turn that color. You might then click darker green, to turn pale purple to dark green and expose the dark purple squares. Then red...

Even without instructions, I figured it out in a few clicks, and after that was able to complete the transformation in the allotted number of moves. Do it, there's another level. And another.

Kind of fun, not hard.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Intersecting swirling trails left by the earlier passage of dust devils across sand dunes, as they lifted lighter reddish-pink dust and exposed the darker material below. Also visible are darker slope streaks along dune edges, formed by a process which is still under investigation. More, or see location on Google Mars.

This is one of 35 larger photos Martian landscapes at The Big Picture at Boston.com today. So many of them look like skin. The images come from HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Related: Mars rover plans its escape : Crunch time approaches for a decision on how to free Spirit from a sand trap.

Ann Johansson for The New York Times
Léon Bing, a model for Rudy Gernreich in the '60s, in her Pasadena apartment.

Cathy Horyn, fashion critic of the Times, writes a surprisingly judgmental story (Modeling and All That Came After) about Léon Bing, a '60s model turned journalist who didn't fit the mold. Bing wrote her own tale in a book called Swans and Pistols: Modeling, Motherhood, and Making It in the Me Generation, published last week.

Oddly, Horyn doesn't seem to understand the '60s at all, and doesn't seem to like Bing.

It is difficult to explain someone like Ms. Bing. The problem is partly a contemporary one. We're not used to a dame like her, a woman who possesses both modesty and a sharp tongue, who goes from accommodating girlfriend of a dealer to accomplished writer. She fits more readily in a different era -- the '20s or '40s -- and yet here she is.

Bing actually seems to embody what the '60s were about: A life that wasn't about becoming Ozzie and Harriet, conventional folks in social roles that didn't let them fulfill their dreams. We lived out our fantasies, leaped into our opportunities, traveled as far as we could till we hit some wall or another.

And, by the way, ... Ladies Love Outlaws. Boredom is the enemy, bad boys are fun and writers like experiences.

The acquisition of money was not the point.

Today it's assumed that models and other beautiful creatures will manage to secure themselves financially, with the usual reality show or clothing line. "And Léon just never thinks that way," said John Steppling, a screenwriter and theatrical teacher, who has known Ms. Bing for 30 years. Another friend, the writer Dinah Kirgo (sister of Julie) said, "She's almost made her life more difficult by the choices she's made."

Well, she became a freelance journalist, for one thing. In 1985, at the urging of a neighbor, a writer named Larry DuBois, Ms. Bing hauled herself down to the boardwalk in Venice to interview some homeless teenagers squatting in a building nearby. She had brains, she didn't take a lot of guff and she wasn't inhibited by what she didn't know. To her, the homeless youths, like the gang members she met later, were no different than most American teenagers. "They just wanted to tell me how they felt," she said.

Perhaps understandably, Léon Bing doesn't say much on the phone to Horyn. "Modeling just gave me another kind of confidence, beyond what I had from my family." Very interesting doors opened for her. Horyn disapproves:

Apparently one husband was enough for Ms. Bing. In the '50s, while modeling in New York, she met a nice-looking television director named Mack Bing, and they had a daughter, Lisa. After returning to Los Angeles, and a divorce, Ms. Bing and Lisa moved into a Spanish-style apartment building in West Hollywood. Ms. Bing was hanging out with Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. There was a cloud of pot smoke. Doors were open.

"There was an understanding of what it was like to not have much money, and people opened their homes to those who were coming along," said the musician Keith Allison, best known for playing with the group Paul Revere and the Raiders. He met Ms. Bing in 1971, when he was staying in Don Johnson's house. "Sunday afternoon was poker games or lawn parties. Ringo lived up in the hills. You'd bop around to wherever you got invitations."

Yup, life in the '60s was one long attempt to find the groove and let it take you interesting places. What else can you show me? Serendipity got lots of chances, and catalysts were all along the way.

A model's looks and connections would have attracted singular experiences. As the sole reviewer of Bing's book so far at Amazon says,

"May you live many lives" is often considered a blessing. But it may also be a curse. You can decide for yourself by reading this memoir which covers fashion, art, movies, theater, drugs, gangsters and, oddly linking them all, being and having an extremely original mother. A definite blessing is that Leon Bing is a damn good writer. I felt present at the events of her life, some of which I was glad happened to her and not me.

One husband not enough? Maybe that husband was too much, or too little, or too wrong for her. Sometimes fairy-tale young marriages crumble in the face of reality and immaturity, and it takes a long time and a few tries to get yourself together and find somebody together to get it right with.

We are far away now from that flowering of freedom that so scandalized our parents' generation, and now seems to scandalize Horyn as well. Bing may indeed have taken freedom to limits that most of us stopped well short of. Most of those people didn't survive those mistakes.

But life is a series of tricky days. Spinning out on curves is to be expected if you do it right.

You just watch.

These all lead to far better visuals:

Enthused and Infused: 19 New Directions For Teapot Design at WebUrbanist. Shaped like a gun, books, a torus, swan or snail, changing color when hot, transparent, trapping tea leaves, making toast too -- these aren't the porcelain pots of Zen they used to be.

Leaf through! Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967. Via MeFi, which has more detail:

Between 1961, when the 25-year-old Hopper married the actress Brooke Hayward, until 1967, when he made Easy Rider, he took thousands of black-and-white photographs. He seemed to have his Nikon with him all the time, on sets, in galleries, at recording sessions. Now a selection of those wonderful, evocative photographs, many of them never seen before, is to be published in a limited-edition book, Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967.

Daily Drop Cap: an illustrative initial every day A drop cap is the large decorative first letter of the first word of text in a book, magazine story or, occasionally, newspaper story. Type design can be the elevation of the mundane into the rococo.

Weird Toilet Paper Roll Sculptures. Much nicer than you would expect, especially when stained.

So, the story goes, the venerable Henry Allen, 68-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor at the Washington Post Style section, poet and, imho the most graceful narrative writer of our time, threw a single punch at colleague Manuel Roig-Franzia in the Washington Post newsroom over -- of all things -- the quality of a story Roig-Franzia wrote, and that writer's dismissive obscenity.

It's all second hand, but the one with the best sources is Gene Weingarten in the WaPo newsroom.

Gawker has the self-portrait of Henry above along with The Undefeated Champ-een of the Washington Post Style Desk.

Henry Allen's feature writing makes him one of my very few newspaper heroes.

Back when I was the Journal's Lifestyles Editor, I ran this wire piece in the Sunday Journal Accent section, and still remember it enough to go looking for it, mostly hidden behind an archives wall:

Ah, Those Smoky Yesterdays; When Cigarettes Were The Lights of Our Lives
The Washington Post | June 16, 1988| Henry Allen

Best of all was the cigarette afterward.

You blew out the match with a thick, authoritative exhale. You lay back in the dark, maybe put the ashtray on your belly, and smoked in silence so profound that you could hear the tiny whistle and crack of the tobacco burning. It was an offering. It was communion. It was said to be as indispensable to lovemaking as the smashed bottle of champagne was to the launching of an aircraft carrier.

"Ah," you said.

After a while, you might tell the old joke:

Do you smoke after sex?

I don't know, I never looked.

This was back before you quit smoking, ...

Worth noting:

The outsider is the Guardian (U.K.): Fists fly in the Washington Post newsroom.

Newsrooms often resemble Christian Science Reading Rooms, except when they explode into purposeful frenzy. I have heard shrieks on the discovery of a mouse and watched a managing editor vault over desks, but no fights. Fisticuffs over good writing is a very good sign, except that Henry, already retired and working on an expiring contract, is probably not going to be around the newsroom any more to insist on it.

Politico says Allen surprised by WaPo fistfight coverage.

"Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable," Allen said when reached Monday evening. "The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn't even look up."

Update: The comments on this Washington City Paper piece about the incident are priceless. Some identify themselves as former "Posties" and flesh out the history of the men involved.

We cooked Thansgiving dinner yesterday.

This was not a trial run. I just saw a good deal on frozen free-range turkeys, and swooped down the aisles in search of dressing, cranberry sauce and stock. The family comes over on Sundays to watch Patriots games, and it became a habit even on bye weeks and off-season. Some weeks, they get science projects for dinner.

It's all coming back to me now: The turkey didn't quite thaw (I thought two days would be enough). A few hours of cold water bath helped, but to get the bag of gizzards out, Joe ran warm water through the turkey's tunnel.

Everybody pitched in, the gravy was good, mashed potatoes and fresh green beans perfectly cooked. I had remembered to chill the cranberry but didn't buy enough rolls. (The party grew unexpectedly). The only disappointments were the healthy store-bought pies: Both the apple and pecan fillings were mushy.

And while arriving guests loved the aroma of turkey cooking, the house now reeks of turkey grease, the scent of tiny fowl electrons strong as incense.

Lessons from yesterday:

-- Buy a fresh turkey. By Thanksgiving you won't want it in your fridge thawing for three days, and it may not have much luck thawing outdoors. You can put a fresh turkey in a cooler on the porch on late-November nights and make room in your fridge for the rest of the feast.

-- Consider looking into your oven with a flashlight. You might not want to clean it before Thanksgiving but I'm considering it. I just read reviews of Easy Off Max Fume Free Oven Cleaner, but I really think I need a commercial gunk-removal squad. This one gets raves from people willing to spray wet baking soda frequently for a while as long as they don't have to scrub: Eight Easy Steps to a Clean Oven.

-- Dried mushrooms are a nice addition stuffing, and add interesting contrast. Just pour boiling water over them while you're chopping onions and celery, drain and add them after 20 minutes or so.

-- Have a backup easy dessert, like cookies, ice cream and chocolate sauce.

It doesn't have to be so hard.

If you want to start recipe-browsing, here's what I blogged last year: 2008 Thanksgiving recipes from newspaper food sections. This grew to four parts and a personal finale, all linked from there. Not all the links at newspapers still work, but many do.

There are many more from Providence Journal Food sections at projo.com's Thanksgiving recipes.

Here's a search link to Thanksgiving recipes blogged in previous years.

I'll gather new recipes much closer to dinnertime.

Photo by Sheila Lennon
Right-handed former Red Sox pitcher Dick Drago as he recounts the memorable sixth game of the 1975 World Series. You can listen to his tale below.

Click the left arrow in the player above or, if you prefer, here's a direct link to the mp3: Dick Drago, 9:03.

Back in 1975, I watched the sixth game of the World Series in a bar called the First and Last Chance Cafe in Pawtucket. (It's still there, now called Doherty's East Ave Irish Pub.) Like nearly everyone else who watched the Red Sox beat the Cincinnati Reds at Fenway Park to tie the series that night, I remember Carlton Fisk's 12th-inning home run. Rather than run when he he hit a drive down the left-field line toward the foul pole, he turned sideways and willed the ball fair with his body English, at right.

But what made that possible was pinch hitter Bernie Carbo's game-tying home run into the center field bleachers in the eighth inning that shooed in Fred Lynn and Rico Petrocelli while Dick Drago was warming up to pitch for the Sox. For Dick, warming up to pitch the ninth inning with his team down by three runs, it suddenly became his chance to win a World Series game.

One Sunday afternoon last month, Drago, who pitched 13 seasons in the Major Leagues, from 1969-1981, and three scoreless innings in one of the best World Series games ever, sat on my back porch and told the tale of that game from his perspective.

A longtime friend of my brother, Dick was visiting Providence and they both came over to watch a Patriots game. Dick -- a good cook -- brought a pot of pasta sauce made from his Italian family's recipe and some killer guacamole. When we paused the game and took a break on my back porch, I asked him about that World Series game, his earliest baseball memories growing up in Toledo, Ohio, and his current involvement with a nonprofit project involving a baseball-themed children's book.

I turned on a digital recorder and just let him talk. (You'll hear birds.)

Here's a snippet:

When Bernie hit that ball into the center field seats, and I just remember kind of jumping up and down on the bullpen mound when it happened to tie the game up, and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, all of a sudden I'm in a game that's tied up in the sixth game of the World Series, and I'm coming in to pitch and everything is now on the line." So all of a sudden my game face has to change and I have to get that little fire in you, and it's good because when it happens, the nerves start, and you get the little butterflies in your stomach, knowing now we're into the ninth inning of a tie game...

I faced three future Hall of Famers, back to back to back. I think it was Rose, Bench and Perez in the top of the ninth, and retired them in order in the ninth... All that nerves -- it's an adrenaline that you either thrive on or you succumb to. And I enjoy it. It was a pressure that I like....

Pulled for a pinch hitter after holding off the Reds through the eleventh inning, Dick didn't become the pitcher of record. Rick Wise pitched the twelfth and final inning. The Sox went on to lose the seventh game, which none of us remember, and the Series.

Drago, now 64, lives in Tampa, Fla., and spends much of his time promoting a children's book called A Glove of Their Own which schools, PTOs and other nonprofit groups use as a fundraising tool.

The picture book is a long poem co-authored by Debbie Moldovan, Keri Conkling and Lisa Funari-Willever and illustrated by Lauren Lambiase, that tells of sandlot pickup games by a group of kids who share gloves and ratty bats until an old man comes by with bags of sports equipment from his garage, once used by his own kids, now long grown and gone. A portion of the proceeds from sale of the book is donated to three non-profit organizations, Pitch In For Baseball, Sports Gift, and Good Sports to provide sports equipment for kids who don't have enough bats, balls and gloves to go around.

The book's "Pay It Forward" philosophy has attracted institutional support from sporting-goods manufacturers such as Rawlings, Louisville Slugger and Modell's, which provide equipment to those organizations at wholesale prices. In addition to Drago, former Major League players such as Bernie Williams, Jason Grilli, Joe Torre, Tommy John, Craig Biggio, Roy White, Phil Niekro, Ken Griffey and Luis Tiant Jr. have lent their time and voices to the project.

You can find out much more about the organization and become part of the effort at the book's website.

GENESIS - RHODE ISLAND 1974 REVISITED
Providence 1974 [no label, 2CD, Dan Lampinski audience recording]
Live at the Palace Theater, Providence, RI, December 8, 1974.

An interesting anecdote regarding the show was posted by glampins: "Another little tidbit of info on this show from Dan Lampinski's brother. It was a miserable night in Providence with snow and then heavy rain. Peter Gabriel refers to the rain leaking through the roof directly over the stage. It was quite a delay until the rain stopped and the tarps were removed from the gear. What Mr. Gabriel doesn't tell you is that directly across the street from the theater was a Dunkin Donuts. Genesis arranged for dozens and dozens of donuts and gallons of coffee to be brought into the lobby, all for free because of the delay. Dan convinced me to go to this concert despite the fact that I had no idea what the Lamb was. I was mesmerized and to this day I still say it was the single best concert I have ever seen."

A note on Dan Lampinski: Dan recorded over 100 concerts in the Providence/Boston area, mostly between 1974 and 1978. Since Dan never traded copies of his recordings, they are all essentially uncirculated. Some copies were made for friends, but these releases are the first time most of these recordings have ever seen the light of day, and are direct from his master cassettes. No EQ'ing has been done to any of the transfers.

Helmet feeder attracts hummingbirds just inches from your face . Daily Mail Online, the Brits:

A new helmet with a built-in bird feeder will allow wearers to get amazing face to face contact with nature.

The flighty birds hover in front of the wearer's face for up to 30 seconds as they drink a sugar-water solution from between the eyes of the feeder mask.

The wearable hummingbird feeder is covered in images of red rhododendrons to further attract the birds and protects your eyes and face from being pecked...

Eye to eye with a hummingbird is okay. The flower camouflage is odd ("Hi! I'm the elf in the flowers") but if it's more effective, I understand..

Hummingbirds' wings beat 8 to 10 120 times per second. The human eye does not see them frozen in a millisecond of time, and cannot separate the many images, as a camera can. We see a blur. Maybe this close, you can see a frozen moment. Until the bird sees your eyes...

It feels almost irresponsible to blog this, but there's postmodern horror news on Halloween.

Imagine a world of large flies hobbled by tiny banner ads tied with thread to their legs like miniature airplanes at the beach, each disoriented and lurching from shoulder to human shoulder, spreading disease in the name of profits.

Eichborn fly banner at the Frankfurt Book Fair (853 x 505 at YouTube)

From Wired UK: Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz:

A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.

The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What's more, the zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its rapid movement.

Who speaks for the flies?