Here is The Evil Frosting. You can rate him on Mojizu by clicking here.
The Evil Frosting is a pretty nice guy unless you are Freddie or a Logger, then you better watch out. His mission in life is to take over Logtopia and eat all the Chocolate Logs but that annoying Freddie always gets in his way!
The Evil Frosting is always thinking of evil schemes, building super cool robots and laughing like a crazy man when he gets excited! Oh, and he likes to eat Chocolate Logs and any yummy treats.
Brasília
Coordinates: 15 47 S 47 55 W
Population: 3,341,00 (2006 est.)
It will be another 27 months until this modern metropolis can truly celebrate its golden anniversary, but 2007 did give the Brazilian capital two reasons to celebrate nonetheless. First, the famed construction of Lúcia Côsta’s Plano Piloto began here on the plateaus of Goiás state fifty years ago, although work on the airport and the presidential palace had already started in 1956. (more…)
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Tokaj, Hungary
Coordinates: 48 8 N 21 27 E
Population: 5,028 (2007 est.)
Eastern Europe isn’t likely to be the first place most people think of when they hear “wine country,” but red and white grapes have in fact been grown on the slopes of the Carpathians for centuries. Perhaps the best-known region is Tokaj in northwestern Hungary, where the Bodrog and Tisza Rivers converge near the village that lends its name to this part of the country. (more…)
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I’ve been blogging about the Place of the Week for nearly two years now, choosing a new location every seven days that I knew little about but had caught my attention or that appeared in the news. In the last year global warming has become much more than another subject debated within academia; in fact its found its way into our language, popular culture, and even our shopping habits. As I thought about this while I tried to pick my first Place of the Year, I kept coming back to the very visible ways the Earth’s landscape has been altered by the phenomena. (more…)
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Patagonia, Argentina
Coordinates: 45 0 S 69 0 W
Approximate area: 300,000 sq. mi. (770,000 sq. km)
Perhaps best characterized as a sparsely populated, expansive arid region situated almost literally at the ends of the Earth, Patagonia once teemed with an impressive range of flora and fauna. Of course to fully appreciate the abundance of life that once called this piece of South America home, it helps to have a degree in paleontology. (more…)
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In my MFA program, I wrote a thesis on the use of place as a literary device in stories. Place can play an important role in stories, sometimes almost as great a role as the characters that populate a story. It can be a character. I was reminded of this in reading an article titled "The Mushroom Hunters," by Burkhard Bilger, in the New Yorker (8/20/07). The rain soaked forest habitat of the secretive mushrooms makes for just such a character.
Picking for the market began in about the Seventies, in the National Forests of Washington and Oregon, and was mostly done by locals who kept their patches secret. However, mushroom hunting exploded beginning in the Nineties. The pickers in the referenced article lived in a roughshod, primitive campground, and were roughly divided into ethnic groups—Hmong, Mien, Cambodian, Laotian, Mexican, and Caucasian. Most of the pickers were Asian. Matsutake mushrooms may sell for up to one hundred and sixty dollars a pound, and though a highly experienced picker might find up to seventy-five pounds in a day, an experienced Cambodian couple together averaged less than twenty-five pounds a day. In six weeks they earned ten thousand dollars. The work can be arduous and pickers search for the mushrooms from sunup till sundown. One needs a sort of sixth sense, because the mushrooms usually lie hidden beneath a carpet of pine duff on the forest floor. Pickers are very clannish and each group is suspicious of any other group. The atmosphere in the camps can be a bit like the old Forty-Niner gold miners, with guns fired in the air during evening celebrations in camp. Pickers also fire guns in the deep forest to keep up a contact with each other and avoid getting lost. There's a story hidden in the sort of place described, and waiting to be populated with other characters.
David Guterson populated such a mushroom world with his own unique characters, in his novel, "Our Lady of the Forest," published in 2003. A frail young woman ekes out a marginal living hunting mushrooms in a National Forest in Washington. She has visions of the Virgin Mary appear to her in the deep forest, and when word gets out, people drive from all over seeking to witness the apparitions. Crowds follow her through the forest on her daily workday. A priest is dispatched by the Catholic Church to investigate the authenticity of the apparitions. It was an engrossing story and showed the power of place in the fictional world that Guterson constructed.
