How to make Fantasia ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery:

1. sweet cream ice cream with pistachio syrup
2. banana
3. cherry pie filling
4. roasted almonds

This isn’t 100% authentic, because Cold Stone doesn’t have pistachio nuts. The almonds work almost as well.

It seems to be back.

Just before today’s trade deadline, the Giants have traded Damian Moss, Kurt Ainsworth, and a left-handed prospect to Baltimore for 14-game winner Sidney Ponson. I can’t say I’ll miss Moss but it does hurt to lose Kurt. (I ought to sell these, I could make a million.) The question will be, are we better off with Ponson than we were with Ainsworth and Russ Ortiz, who was traded to Atlanta for Moss at the end of last year? Ortiz is having a terrific year, but then so, apparently, is Ponson.

This is not what Larry Niven had in mind when he wrote about “flash crowds”. A true flash crowd is a spontaneous, unplanned gathering that occurs at or near a newsworthy event. The online equivalent is the so-called “slashdot effect“, where Web servers are overwhelmed by a sudden surge in traffic caused by hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers following links on the main page.

The “planned mobs” organized by Rob Zazueta are interesting, but really nothing more than performance art. They are not flash crowds.