I’m heading out the door, off for a long drive to the airport and a slightly shorter flight to Denver, so I’ll leave you with an open thread. Go ahead, fill it up, I can always make more.

MAJeff with your morning weather.

My dad took this picture and sent it to me last weekend. It’s a cold water air funnel. I thought it was cool, so I’m sharing it

When I first saw the picture, my reaction was, “OH, NO!” A couple summers ago, my dad’s business was hit by a tornado. As he tells it, the sirens went off, so he and everyone in the building went to the central storage room because it had no windows (no basement in this building). The building starts to rumble and shake, as it tends to do when you take a direct hit from a tornado. After a bit, things start to calm down, and folks begin to leave the storage room. One person asks, “Where is it?”

“Right there,” comes the reply from another staffer who was pointing out the window as the tornado made its way through a neighboring cornfield.

They ended up with some glass from the windows embedded in the cement walls, and there was structural damage that required a new roof. A couple of employee cars were damaged or destroyed, but no one in the building was injured. The houses next door and across the street, however, were flattened. When the news crews came to visit town from the Twin Cities, they had to go to one of the local bars to find the owner of the house across the street from Dad’s business. He’d also had a house destroyed in a tornado 9 years previously.

I remember that previous tornado. I had been driving home–I was living with my parents while finishing my MA–and got into the house before we got nailed with a severe thunderstorm. Got into the house, and made my way to the basement with Mom and the pets. After it calmed down a bit, I did what rural Midwesterners do: I went to the front steps to see what was happening.

When folks talk about an eerie calm, they aren’t kidding. Above my house, I watched what turned out to be an F5 tornado forming. It touched down about a mile away, and caused massive damage. The town’s power generating station was destroyed, and I ended up staying with a friend in a neighboring town, just so I could work on my thesis in light.

I had a very strange near miss this summer, but it wasn’t a tornado. Earlier this spring, we had what seemed to me to be an unusually high level of thunderstorm activity for this area. I love thunderstorms, but I love them when I’m inside watching through the windows. I was walking to class one evening in June, when all of a sudden a tree about a hundred yards or so from me was hit by lightning. My hair was all on end, and I started to move a lot more quickly to get to my classroom. I only had one city block to go, but by the time I got to my building, it had started raining HARD and hailing. I took my shoes off so they could dry and taught barefoot that night.

At least we haven’t had any “green sky” thunderstorms yet this year. Hopefully, I’ll be in the house if we do.

MAJeff bringing you some ‘pod porn, culinary style.

That’s the fried calamari at one of my favorite restaurants, The Daily Catch in Boston’s North End.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times, had an article on the return of the Jersey Tomato. Now, I’ve never had a “Jersey Tomato” so I’ll have to take the word of folks from there that it’s really tasty. I wouldn’t mind being one of the tasters they’ve got in the article, though. Coming from the rural Midwest, I’m pretty familiar with good produce.

I love the summer, and desperately miss my parents’ garden during this season. A few weeks ago, I bought some corn-on-the-cob from a local grocery store…I nearly cried, it tasted like field corn. Grocery store corn is worthless, and people here in New England have no idea what good corn is like (and it’s also impossible to get a good bratwurst here). Then again, anything that spends several days going from the field to a store isn’t going to be as good as something picked that day.

Living in an urban setting, the “picked that day” option is rarely available to me. This year, though, I planted a small window box garden on my landing–basil, mint, grape tomatoes, and a few other herbs (that window box got flooded during a couple of our early July evening thunderstorms–we’ve had a rainy summer in Boston). I’ve been eating at least one meal of fresh basil pesto per week, but now my tomatoes are starting to come in, which means basil-tomato salad for the rest of the month. It’s a good thing.

So, here’s to summer. To great tomatoes and corn and beans and peas and apples and peaches… To celebrate, share your favorite recipes. Let’s get seasonal. If you’ve got access to food coming right out of the garden, you’ll know why I’m stressing the seasonal aspect. There’s nothing quite like picking something and eating it right away.

I’ll get things started on the recipe front below the fold.
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OK, people, you’ve got to stop this. These comment threads keep filling up with noise — I’m closing one bloated thread and starting this one, if you feel you must.

Just a suggestion: if you are an outraged Catholic who is here to tell us a) you’re very upset, b) the cracker is very, very important to you, or c) that you’ll pray for us all, please, don’t bother. We’ve heard it a few thousand times already, it wasn’t at all persuasive the first time, and we’re just getting more and more exasperated at your obtuse lack of originality. Go to church, instead.

This has been a fun and informative meeting here in Atlanta — I also think my talk yesterday went well — but it has had one downside: we broke the internet. Practically everyone here has a laptop or two, and the hotel network has been rendered nearly useless in a major net traffic jam. Who would have thought that attending a computer science meeting would be like being cast away on a desert island? Oh, well, having the web reduced to a slow trickle is a kind of vacation, anyway.

That’s about to end, though. I’m getting ready to run off and catch a plane back to Yankee-land, where the interwebs flow freely like water, and I’ll catch up with all my email then (which will be an experience to dread, I’m sure), and will also restore the outflow of regular posting. Until then, use this thread to talk about whatever.