Certain death - Spy kites - Double points - Why Turkey?

Dear Readers 1 & 2, Lisa E, Lilly, and Mom,

Thank you for your loyalty and dedication. This may very well be my last post. Read on to learn why.

Last evening Wife arose from bed, where she has been recovering from Bird Flu or whatever, to announce that we would go mushroom picking. We left Daughter to replay Ace Ventura: Animal Detective for the 43rd time this week and headed through the nearby vineyard up to a hilltop lined with stands of pine. There Wife found two types of mushrooms which she immediately deemed not only edible but also unusually tasty. I, with my keen untrained eye, determined them to be of the genus Fungus Toxicdeathus and Moldus Whowouldeatthis. They are to become our lunch tomorrow. Mom, if I don't post again for, say one week, you'll find my will in our desk, second drawer from the bottom. Daughter will let you in; she'll probably be watching Ace Ventura for the 87th time.

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While at the top of the hill we watched an extremely large, motionless bird sail high above our heads. Without a flap of its wings it maintained its altitude for about one kilometer before slowly floating down to the far end of the fields next to our apartment building. It was at this point we figured out that it was in fact an escaped kite. I was about to point out that it could be a Chinese spy kite keeping track of our movements, but wisely shut up because Wife doesn't want to hear anything relating to Huangyangtan or Google Earth. But I did comment that if a kite could float by itself that far in very little wind, that's the kind of kite we should get for Daughter; all previous ones we had picked were allergic to flight or genetically predisposed to hugging the ground. Wife agreed, and we determined to go recover the kite, though only after she had gathered enough Toadstools of Death.

On our way back we were dismayed to see that off in the distance some child was running off with the kite. How likely was it that someone else had spotted the falling kite in the waning dusk? The child was headed in the direction of where we would come out of the vineyard, and sure enough when we got there, there he was, with his father waiting by a car. It turns out that the two of them had been tracking the kite since it got away from them in a village a couple of kilometers away. When asked whether it an exotic professional kite, they replied that, no, Aldi had been selling them this week, for 4 euros. Aldi usually runs out of its weekly special offers, so we'll see whether they have any left tomorrow.

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I just searched Google for Huangyangtan, which gave me 50,200 results. Crikey! That's double the number from a couple of days ago. Looking through the results I see nothing different. I'll give Google a few days to fix the numbers.

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On a whim did a search for the first time on the word KenGrok. The interesting thing to note is disproportionally high number of blogs in Turkey that have discussed HYT. With my Turkish being a bit rusty I can't say what there might be of special interest to Turks.