A Chesapeake preview? Let's hope not. Sir Gitter, a retired race horse with his owner, Vincent Petit, up, was out for an afternoon trot along a picturesque Brittany beach on the French coastline, near Saint-Michele-en-Greve. 
     Petit was on foot, leading Sir Gitter by the reins, looking for a place to cross a stream running through the sand. There was a harmless white crust bordering the stream. The crust covered a decaying pile of green algae. In decaying, the algae had thrown off a voluminous amount of hydrogen sulfide gas and the crust had contained it.
     Far from harmless, the algae was a lethal trap. When Sir Gitter broke through the crust, he sank into the muck and so did Petit, up to his chest. Sir Gitter panicked, breathed in the fumes, gasped for half-a-minute while Petit looked on in horror, and died.
     Then Petit passed out, and would have died too had he not been pulled from the muck by a man on a bulldozer.
     According to an AP story by reporter Elaine Ganley, the green algae off the coast of France is fed by massive flows of nutrients from Brittany's thriving agricultural enterprises. And as long as the algae remain at sea, they are harmless to humans - and horses. But when they wash up on shore and decay, they turn the sand into a black deadly muck. You can read the rest of the story here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iu2Jx_1pUF4QSJNeCAEXSEObhoyQD9AC4CPG1


     Show us your towels. Back in the old days before there were cellphones and Twitter and Facebook and consolidated high schools and malls and boys with cars and big pickup trucks and motorcycles there was...cross-stitching. There's a story in the current edition of Lancaster Farming about the art of show towels made by young Pennsylvania German women to test and hone their needlework skills and to perhaps catch the eye of a young man on horseback. The article and photos are by correspondent Sue Bowman.


     Once again - Camelot. This time with home-grown vegetables.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpEr3kfWjc