NATIONAL PARKS AND S'MORES, QUITE A COUPLE

August is National S'mores month (Who knew?!?) and the 10th is actually National S'mores Day. In honor of this sweet occasion, several national parks will hold a celebration of the chocolate-marshmallow treat that is one of America's favorite summertime snacks. Visitors to the parks on that day, and throughout the month, will have the opportunity to enjoy the popular confection while swapping stories around the campfire.

Two of the more popular parks that have events planned include Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Shenandoah will play host to the Backyard Barbecue & S'Mores Festival on August 21st, which will serve up plenty of ribs and chicken, as well as down home music, to go along with those sticky treats. Meanwhile, visitors to Mesa Verde can take advantage of the complete camper package, which includes a reserved campsite, a pancake breakfast, two seats on the Far View Explorer tour, and all of the fix'ns necessary to make your own s'mores.

Preparing your own s'mores is an extremely easy affair. You'll need just three ingredients: graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars. With those items on hand, you simply melt the marshmallows, preferably over an open campfire, and place it on a graham cracker. Then, put the chocolate bar onto a second graham cracker, and combine it with the first. When squished together, the hot marshmallow will partially melt the chocolate bar, creating a yummy snack that few can resist.

If you can't make it to one of the parks to celebrate National S'mores Month, perhaps you can have a celebration of your own.

AND I QUOTE

"To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle." – Confucius

DO YOU REMEMBER?

Today, we take a look back at a true classic, an educational toy that lives and breaths and burrows and scurries. For over fifty years, kids have stared intently through the clear plastic walls of their formicarium (the scientific term for ant farm), as their new ant friends labor intensively to construct a sand-tunneled utopia. Granted, anyone can build one of these observation instruments with a handful of easy-to-obtain supplies, but we have long put our trust into a man named Milton Martin Levine, known to millions of kids as Uncle Milton, to supply us with his special Ant Farms.In case you are wondering if there have been any space-age advances since the first ant farms, rest assured that ant farm technology continues to progress. Uncle Milton offers a new Ant Farm Gel Colony, as well as an Illuminated Ant Farm Gel Colony. Take a look for yourself:

NIGERIA MAKES PROGRESS AGAINST POLIO

Image via CrunchBase

Bill Gates says he is impressed with the progress Nigeria has made against polio and urges partners in the fight to eradicate the disease not to let up. 

Gates, cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shared personal observations from his June trip to Nigeria on his blog, Gates Notes. The post, along with others about polio, are appearing this week on the Gates Foundation blog, Foundation Notes.

In addition, the Gates Foundation website is highlighting two videos produced in June for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

"I was very excited to visit northern Nigeria in June, because the progress there since my last visit in February 2009 has been especially impressive," Gates writes. As of 20 July, only six cases of the wild poliovirus have been reported in Nigeria this year, compared with 346 during the same period in 2009.

The Gates Foundation has given Rotary US$355 million in grants for its work to eradicate polio. In response, Rotary has committed to raising $200 million. As of 30 June, Rotary has raised $141.2 million. 

On his blog, Gates says he spent most of his first day in the northern state of Kano, which has been vulnerable to polio, meeting with community leaders, visiting a local health center, and stopping at a school where students were studying the Quran in Arabic.

"On the streets and most everywhere else we went, I noticed so many young children around," he writes. "Nigeria has more people by far than any other African country, and more than 40 percent of them are under the age of 15. That makes polio immunization a big challenge." 

Gates adds that during his trip, he learned about creative approaches to inform Nigerians about polio immunization. Pro-immunization messages are being woven into the plotlines of popular TV shows, and one of Nigeria's major mobile phone service providers has agreed to send about 25 million free text messages about polio and health.

He also mentions the importance of engaging local leaders and says the 'commitment from Nigeria's leaders has been crucial' to the fight against polio in the country. While in the capital city of Abuja, he had dinner with the minister of health, and the next day met with the nation's new president, Goodluck Jonathan. 

One of the videos on the Gates Foundation website praises efforts that have reduced the threat of polio by 99 percent but stresses the need to finish the job. "If you were an athlete, you would never only run 99 percent of the race," a voiceover on the video announces. "An astronaut wouldn't fly only 99 percent of the way to the moon, and a firefighter would never just put out 99 percent of a fire."

PROBLEMS? SOLVED!

EVER HEARD OF SKISHING? NOW YOU HAVE

Swimming With the Fishes: Anglers Tangle Over 'Skishing'
Extreme Method Puts Fishermen Deep in Water; Casting Aside Critics

MONTAUK, N.Y.—Fishing hasn't changed much over the years. Then along came Paul Melnyk. During a surfcasting tournament here in the mid-1990s, Mr. Melnyk landed a striped bass large enough to be in contention. Then word got around that he was swimming offshore in a wetsuit with a fishing rod when he caught it. Paul Melnyk believes that the best way to catch a bass off of Montauk, Long Island, is to jump in after it. He invented a form of fishing in which the fish pulls him through the water, as if he were skiing. Thus was born, Skishing. Christopher Rhoads reports. The tournament committee responded by banning fish caught while swimming. Later—after an incident involving an irate Mr. Melnyk in pirate garb, Captain Morgan rum and floating his baited line hundreds of yards from shore with a kite—it banned Mr. Melnyk. "They called it a crooked playing field," says Mr. Melnyk, a 55-year-old who works in construction. "I don't care about that—I care about winning." Instead of complying with the rules, Mr. Melnyk went rogue. He committed himself to his fishing method, attracting others with a penchant for the extreme. Today, they're challenging what it means to fish. A recent YouTube video shows a man swimming in Florida with a mask, snorkel and flyrod, catching a tarpon. ZeeBaaS, a fishing-gear company in Stratford, Conn., recently added a section to its product line and website devoted to the activity. Cable channels, like National Geographic, have featured it. Enthusiasts sharing tales on websites hail from the U.K., Turkey and South Africa. "There used to be a whole bunch of people against this concept," says Mr. Melnyk, whose right shoulder is covered with a tattoo of a skeleton, holding up a massive skeleton of a fish. "But there's a new generation of fishermen out there." Practitioners interviewed agree he coined the sport's name: "skishing." It's a mix of skiing and fishing. The idea is to hook a fish big enough to tow the angler through the water. Stripers can reach more than 50 pounds; the record caught with rod-and-reel weighed 78-1/2 pounds. Without the benefit of a boat or land, the fight is considered to be, by the fisherman anyway, on more equal terms. Skishers swim sometimes hundreds of yards from shore to water well over their head, with their flippers and the buoyancy of their wetsuits keeping them afloat. Some have come to skishing by persevering to become a protégé of Mr. Melnyk, who prefer skishing alone. Frank Blasko, a 39-year-old in the motion-picture lighting business in Bayport, Long Island, pestered Mr. Melnyk for several years with phone calls and emails, even offering him $300 if he would show him the ropes. Mr. Melnyk finally relented. "I needed a new carburetor on my chopper," he says. Mr. Blasko, who's making a documentary on the sport called "The Skisherman," describes the attraction this way: "I just like to get out in the middle of the night, catch a monster and have it splash its tail in my face."
Acceptance of skishing—and of Mr. Melnyk—has its limits. "I hope you get eaten by a shark," wrote one commenter on Mr. Melnyk's website, calling him a cheater. Mr. Melnyk says he receives hate mail, admonishing him for promoting such a dangerous activity. Among other risks: boats and strong currents whipping skishers out to sea. Skishing is typically done at night, when bass are thought to do most of their feeding. Since skishers can catch fish just beyond the reach of traditional surfcasters in waders, the skishers are sometimes blamed for scaring fish away or catching what might otherwise belong to the purists closer to shore. Mr. Blasko, Mr. Melnyk's protégé, says he's been hooked twice by surfcasters, probably intentionally. Cursing is common. As he prepares to head out to sea, Paul Melnyk shows off the eels he uses as bait to catch striped bass. Before suiting up, he usually drives along the beach in his pickup truck in the pre-dawn hours, looking for good spots to fish. Gary Stephens, a 54-year-old landscaper nicknamed "The Toad" for his ability to jump over car hoods, is a traditional surfcaster and is considered Mr. Melnyk's main rival for bragging rights among locals. "Wetsuiters have a clear advantage," says Mr. Stephens. "If they think that's fun, that's fine. I stick with the fishing." Once, when Mr. Melnyk was skishing far from shore, a fishing-boat captain, startled to see a person in the water with a fishing rod, came up alongside him and derided him as a "menace to navigation," Mr. Melnyk recalls."That's when I started carrying a knife," he says. The annual surfcasting tournaments, held from spring to late fall here on the eastern end of Long Island—a place some locals call a drinking town with a fishing problem—forbid skishing. The rules read like they were written for Mr. Melnyk. "Feet must be on mother earth or rock when you hook up," reads Rule No. 4. "No free-floating, drifting or swimming while actually fishing. No boats, prams, kayaks, balloons or kites." Fred Kalkstein, a member of the executive committee for the locals-only tournament, says skishing "will never be allowed." It gives the practitioner too much of an advantage, he says. "It's not surfcasting," says Mr. Kalkstein, an East Hampton stockbroker nicknamed "Eelman" for using only eels as bait when striper fishing. "They're using their body as a boat." But some views have softened. About ten years ago, a separate wetsuit division was created. Old-timers protested, but today about 15 of the customary 50 participants don wetsuits, allowing them to swim to rocks from which to cast. Mr. Melnyk was eventually invited back, though he's mostly declined. Maneuvering his pickup along a beach here one night in the pre-dawn cold, Mr. Melnyk spotted waves crashing about 200 yards from shore. He crammed his thick frame into a wetsuit, strapped on a ziploc bag of live eels and, with a fishing rod under his arm, clomped past startled fishermen on shore in his yellow flippers and swam out to sea. Within minutes, as dawn broke, he bobbed in the swells in about 15 feet of frigid water. Birds dove at the baitfish around him. After some casts, he reeled in a small bass. He put a short rope from his waist through its gills, so he could continue to fish. Finally, he made his way through the heavy surf back to the beach, just in time to see one of the surfcasters from shore trudge by with a 25-pounder. "Hey!" Mr. Melnyk shouted. "That should've been mine!"

IS A SPACE SHUTTLE COMING TO A MUSEUM NEAR YOU?

NASA has set the date for the last Space Shuttle launch at February 26, 2011, and as an era comes to a close, museums around the country are fighting to get their hands on one of the retiring vessels.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is earmarked for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. It has graciously agreed to give up the shuttle it already has--the Enterprise, which was used for testing but never flew into space. Besides the Enterprise, Shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour will also be available for museums.

The scramble for a Shuttle has not always been polite. A total of twenty-one institutions in almost as many states are competing for them, and Congressmen from Florida and Texas tried to get wording put in NASA's latest funding bill that would give their states preferential treatment. The House Committee on Science and Technology rejected that move.

AND I QUOTE

"We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh." – Agnes Repplier

THE $51 POT LIVES FOR ANOTHER DAY

TODAY IN HISTORY

AUGUST 1

1981:Fledgling cable channel MTV begins broadcasting to several thousand subscribers, prophetically playing the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” as the future popular music and culture juggernaut’s first video.

1619: The first Africans are brought to Jamestown, Va., aboard a Dutch man-of-war. Although they were most likely indentured servants, their arrival marks the beginning of black slavery in the British North American colonies.

1936: The Summer Olympic Games begin in Berlin, with Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler presiding over the opening ceremony.

MAYBE NEXT YEAR