Are secret foods held in the deepest dark black aisles of the long dead cyclopean supermarkets in the farthest reaches of madness? The truth of this has left my mind reeling into fragments. The awesome abominations I have learned of can do the same to you, but here I document only one. It happened in fall of my 3rd year in the Research and Development Department at the Nabisco Food Corporation that I found the journal of one Prof. T. N. McCready. McCready had been the East Asian correspondent for the R&D department, visiting and reporting on the cuisine of the Mongol's Steppes and the deepest jungles of French Indo-China, but it is one unusual entry, timed and dated... his last odd and vexing entry, that has left a constant dread in the bottom pits of the cockles of my soul: Dec 13th 9 PM The Isles of Zippon are filled by flavorful delights and tasty oddities that make the tongue and the soul leap in delight. I have found many an exotic concotion that are sure to make the lads and lasses in the Occidental hemisphere spend many a shiny new penny. But most intriguing is this tale that my matron has said breaks down into "the burned flesh/bindings of that Honorable He Moss Beareded One of the many arms/cylinders/appendages that Sleeps Ocean Bottomed." Certainly a terrible tongue twister, but surely the boys in marketing can conjure up a more appetizing name. I have yet to sample some and I have only heard of it this morning from the elderly groom of the sweetshop that laughed and muttered about it. I noticed everyone in the room, my matron included, had blanched at the naming of it, and it took a long and weary argument to convince them to take me the journey to the lone place it is prepared. Seemingly it is a guarded delicacy and they must fear to let the unwashed caucasian devils have their taste of it. Fortunately the place that it is prepared is not far away, but it is remote, on the other far end of the rocky cape that no roads go to, my party must travel the long route around by boat. My party starts out early tomorrow morning. Dec 14th 10 AM After much ado our vessel has launched into the bay. Nary a boatsman could be found keen for us to make use of his craft as taxi around the small cape. It seems tale of my journey did go from tavern to tavern last night and all souls are now opposed to my tasting of the delicacy. Only in paying a large sum of the local currency to one of the young seaman could my party convince a vessel to set forth. Noon At the brink of the cape the skies have turned a noisome grey and horrible gales began to make a great howl. 4pm Inexplicably our craft had been caught in some subsurface estuary or current and it took many hours to correct the course. The now dark, stinking clouds have completely veiled the good mother sun. 8pm Due to the inclement climate, the inhospitable ferrymen, and the strange tides of this island country, a journey that should have been a half a days travel has taken us now into the dark of night. Luckily my party has sited the lamps and torches of the inhabits of the far side of the cape and the young seaman assures us that the party can touch land soon. A strange reek emanates from this side of the bay. Faint now, but growing more odorous and more potent. Midnight The STENCH! The Stench! I all but gagged upon the rotting sweet tang in the thick thick air. I cannot see how this horrible stench is emitted, perhaps some local vegetation or fruit native to this side of the island (my matron lies retching in the boat from it) but out guide and boatman seem indifferent to it, if not perhaps, reverent and desiring of it. I can only best describe it as the smell that Alexander the Great must have left Thebes rotting in. My Guide has suggested the party tarry till morning to seek out the craftsmen of the delicacy, and even though my olfactory senses beg of me to leave this horrible place soon, the murk-some dark that lurks beyond the light of our torches is more the horrible. Dec 15th Dawn I have seen the origin of the stench. Strewn on the beach. Rows upon rows upon rows upon ranks. Like the vast lines at the Battle of Agincourt. Dried and shriveled by the hot rays of good mother sun. Shrunken. Shining. Squid. Their vast brows dried up. Those eight appendages gnarled and twisted , as if affixed in a frozen seizure. The Eyes. The eyes. DAMN THEIR EYES! People have come forth from the tree-line at the edge of the beach. Carrying baskets they are going through the rows and ranks and taking some squids and leaving the others. Females carry deep clay buckets containing a slop they sludge on the squid corpses then men have not taken. It is surely that this is the base of that food I am supposed to eat. I have come so far to quail now. I must. Noon After much haggling my guide (my matron remains a pale quailing mess at the bottom of our boat) has convinced one of the men to take us to their home in the forest and allow me to sup upon the

What would Botanic Gardens be in Spring without Tulips? Even a most marvellous place such as the Chicago Botanic Garden at Glencoe, north from Chicago an hour or so by efficient Metra train? Tulips were, of course, only introduced to the West from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Soon everyone had to have tulips. It was particularly through the work of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), onetime prefect of the Imperial Botanical Garden of Maximilian II at Vienna and later famous and influential professor of botany at the newly founded University at Leiden in the Netherlands, that tulips became to be greatly admired; and he put down, too, the foundations for their scientific study. The late '30s of the seventeenth century saw a brief period of 'Tulipomania'. An illness of the human spirit which led people to see tulips not as something in their own natural right, but as a commodity to be traded; indeed, as a form of currency. Much like present-day Wall Street commodities and stocks and their excess, the price of tulips was hugely inflated. They were traded even when faded, their bulbs split and sold and resold. One tulip might easily be priced at many years' salary. Great fortunes were made and lost again. Scholars today still debate just how much impact this 'economic bubble' had on the general economy of countries like Holland. One of the few direct historical sources for this Tulip Madness is a description given of it by the professor of botany of the Groningen University, Abraham Munting (1626-1683). His father - who had preceded him as professor - had a 'Groningen Paradise', a Hortus or Botanical Garden. Always in need of money to buy new and exotic plants, he decided to venture into the trading of tulips in 1636. Henricus didn't actually lose money, but he'd expected to become wealthy from his schemes. Abraham - ten years old at the time - much later details the events with a fine sense of irony and amazement. He claims that this madness in fact originated in France (not suprisingly for him; he is writing in the early '70s, in the middle of the disastrous events for Holland that led to the war of 1672 in which the French king Louis XIV was an infamous enemy). Tulips were so favored in Paris that gentlemen gave them to their ladies instead of jewels; but when their erstwhile admirers learned of the financial debacle in Holland, the flowers 'lost their admiration, which proved to be as short as the Tulip's own beauty'. And already here in the Botanic Garden at Glencoe, too, these beautiful specimens are falling from the height of their Bloom...