"Next came Solórzano, who performed in a leather jacket, throwing his first snowball from a cocktail shaker—a blend of cedar, benzoin, and cardamom which conjured the smell of whiskey."

"To a soundtrack of ragtime and death-metal bluegrass, he waved his towel with muscular grace, using it to represent (variously) lightning in a prairie thunderstorm, his dead lover’s body, and a bar tray that he used to deflect bullets. Between vigorous towel-waving sequences, he narrated his moral dilemma, of whether or not to take vengeance on his former best friend, an outlaw who’d killed his girl.... As the temperature surged to two hundred degrees, Solórzano slammed a snowball scented with black pepper and juniper tar onto the rocks, filling the room with a gunpowdery musk, and waved furiously, darting up and down the sauna stairs, tossing his towel in an elegant plume of white. The crowd went wild."

From "Sweating and Storytelling in a Williamsburg Sauna/Aufguss: a world championship for twirling a really hot towel" (The New Yorker).

Had you heard about Aufguss?

Radical Locavore.

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words,

"I like elephants. I like how they swing through trees."

I love this kids' song, by Eric Herman, where the father keeps getting the facts wrong, prompting the child to say the right answer.

Do you have something like this with your kids, a structure for a song or a story that moves the child to speak at intervals and to feel — along with the entertainment — a sense of participation and accomplishment?

When my son John was quite young, I had an ongoing bedtime story that I called "A Boy Named John." I'd start with really nothing at all and get as quickly as I could to the question: And what do you think happened next? Whatever answer he gave, I'd express amazement that he got it right and go with a few details and stop again with the question. His answer would always be right, and the collaborative story could go on forever.

IN THE COMMENTS: Henry Buck said:

I'm trying the opposite with my kids. I start a story, ask what happens next, then, whatever answer they give, I say: "What are you, an idiot? Geesh, you'll never amount to anything." Then I take the story on a different track. I'm hoping it will toughen them up for a bleak future.