E D I T O R I A L

You have to see this because we can't quite get over it ourselves: we can offer the URL and honestly say if we had the choice of reading Get Lost Magazine or this story, we'd take "Mike the Headless Chicken Day" from our favorite rival, Salon magazine. (The irony is that this story is in their new travel and food department and pretty much hits both topics on the head, pardon the reference, at once.) The short version of this story is that a farmer chopped off Mike's head to turn him into dinner, but Mike ran back to the chicken coop sans head and resumed pecking blindly at corn. The farmer fed and watered Mike through his exposed esophegus for 4 years, then took him on the road as an oddity before the chicken suffocated one day in a dinner accident more tragic than the one where he lost his head.

Ed, a coworker who I made read the Salon article, said that it wasn't as surprising that a chicken lived four years without a head as it was that a man fed a headless chicken day in and day out for that long.

Planning the future from under a rock...

We got through Y2K okay, except that the internet service providers had a bogus Unix patch which treated the new year like a small child would. "What comes after 19-99? 19-100!" For a while, too, my email was dated 1939. It took them about a week to sort it out. While watching CNN as the New Year roll-overs happened from time zone to time zone, we liked the little scrolling announcement the "most of the nuclear facilities in Russia rolled over without incident..." We were on our feet in front of the television screaming, "MOST? MOST?! What does that mean, MOST??"

It's the last year of the second millenium. I'm getting ready for the real new century by looking for a new place to live. I figured last year that at an optimistic mid-life age, assuming I live to be 90, I should check out other places in the world for potential. I started this new year by rambling around Los Angeles. You can read all about it in my first Dumb-Ass Trip of the new year in the February issue, but as a summary, know that even blue skies, Malibu, great Mexican food, and neato palm trees can distract from the feeling of being followed by predators everywhere you go. Trust me, I won't be moving to Los Angeles in this lifetime.

Hey, I think I recognize that big apse...

I had the teevee on as background a few weeks ago, and there was a PBS Nova episode about the excavation of the shipwreck of explorer LaSalle's last boat La Belle. My attention is drawn to a rather stiff looking French man holding a parchment and a translator voicing over him. He says that the head carpenter of La Belle is a man named Honore Mallet and his son Pierre. A number of high-watt bulbs go off in my head, as this is almost surely an ancestor I'd been looking for for literally decades. I'm hopping around my living room... who do I tell? What do I do? I email my mom, I look on line for cheap tickets to Paris, I hit the Nova web site, the University of Texas web site, the Musee de Maritime in Paris. So a trip to Paris this year is in the works as well.

A consuming passion

Have a look at our "Eats" column for some great pumpkin and sweet potato pie recipes this month. Mom is, as usual, insufferable and observed that we're paying an awful lot of attention to something best headlined in November. I just happen to like pumpkin pie, and I AM editor, and am also equipped to tell a story about things catching fire, which is always good for a laugh.

A number of years ago I was making pumpkin pies by baking a pumpkin and pureeing the flesh. I thought that the nobility of the pursuit must equal a tastier pie. "Why don't you just use canned?" Mom asked, probably thinking it would also yield fifteen fewer pies. We argued about taste, and so settled down to Duelling Pumpkin Pies. We were very scientific about it with the same crusts, same baking time, same ingredients except for the pumpkin itself. In the final analysis, the pies were indistinguishable from each other. I could have killed myself, except I couldn't grip a gun what with all the pumpkin pulp on my hands.

I did win a Duelling Recipes contest against my mom once. It had to do with changing the texture of a chocolate chip cookie by leaving the cookie to cool on the pan for five minutes. They turn out chewier than if you remove them from the sheet promptly. We still can't quite agree on Duelling Cheese wafers, however. But in this case, everyone wins.

Being Adventure Girl is its own reward

I got a great bit of news about my new career as Adventure Girl: I found a great place to store my new used sea kayak, at an old boathouse on Lake Union next to a ship yard where on occasion we get to see the Sea Shepherd and other large ships towering over our puny craft. This means I can paddle whenever I want to pull the kayak off the rack and throw it in the water. Also, our Get Lost Magazine contributor Mike McCrea has offered to drag me through any and all of the 184 mile Chesapeake & Ohio canal route on the Potomac with his family as he researches a guidebook, and the amazing David Obelcz and his family (of our favorite web site Outdoorplaces.com) are moving to the Puget Sound area. So many rivers to paddle! So many new playmates! So much magazine article fodder! So many new friends to rat on! Should build quite an appetite for food we can set on fire.

- Leslie Strom, Your Waterlogged Editor

Dumb-Ass Trips goes to Los Angeles for New Years.

Leslie finally gets that sea kayak. Her internet kayaking friends tell her how to keep from getting killed in it.

45 years old, Seattle institution Dick's Drive-In sports a simple menu of the "no hamboigy, cheeboigy!" variety, except with hand-dipped icecream shakes so authentic that the original Waring Mixmaster sometimes drills a hole in the paper cup. Come dine where Bill Gates dines, but spend a bit more time and in a shabbier car.

Think whale-oil lanterns sound stinky? Candlemaking, the icky way.