Origins

Okay, so people have asked about the name of the blog. Cookie is a rabbit who lives in Toronto with my colleague Amanda. A real rabbit, not the Donnie Darko kind. Anyway, last year I went out to Toronto to visit Sean and Gordon, and we stayed at Amanda’s place while she was away. Her gracious offer was only contingent on one thing – we had to look after Cookie. Not a difficult task. Anyway, Sean and I stayed out all night drinking and talking and having a good time (much easier to stay out all night in Toronto than in Boston, by the way), and we finally got back around 5AM. We stayed up for a while longer drinking, playing guitar, and talking philosophy, and at one point there was a lull in the conversation. We both looked at Cookie and simultaneously said “What would Cookie do?” And there you have it. As awesome as Aubrey's blog is, there is no titular relation. The “there is water underground” is from the Talking Heads and has no real relation to Cookie either; it’s just a few words from a great song. In any case, I’d kinda like to get some shirts made up with “W.W.C.D.?” and have little rabbit ears coming out of the letter C.

And now for something completely different… Imagine a flower that’s seven feet tall and, depending on the news coverage, smells like "rotting flesh" or “several days’ old roadkill on a hot, sunny day.” Thankfully, the "corpse flower" only blooms once every few years for a couple of days at a time. I guess there’s a place for everything in nature… and I’m glad that the place for this plant is not in my apartment (and I feel sorry for the people at Virginia Tech who have to smell the damn thing). Georgia O’Keefe would probably love this plant.