I love jewelry... Tanzanite is my latest pet obsession.

I replaced a generic five-solitaire diamond ring, sort of a wedding band, with this new bluish-purple marvel of a gem on a 14kt white gold ring. In the center of the ring is a gorgeous cushion-cut tanzanite stone. Surrounding the tanzanite stone are six round brilliant-cut diamonds and six straight baguette-cut diamonds. The tanzanite stone is sparkly-transparent purple. Beautiful. I love the way the bluish purple gem is surrounded by diamonds in this piece of jewelry, the setting forms sort of a picture frame for the tanzanite stone.

It makes me happy. Money well spent.

Russian Women. No doubt a good many, maybe even most are big, blonde, beautiful and bad, lonely, single, hot, horny, sexy young and once young women looking, pretty much like the best of us on this lonely planet, for love, sex and marriage in all the wrong places, including abroad in the USA via online chat rooms, mail order bride catalogs and guides, dating services and escort agencies, free pen pal address sites and networks, and, of course, by posting 1000s of personals with festooned galleries of photos, pics, pictures and videos -- desperate and non-so-desperate model shots, some nearly undressed, some completely unclothed, some almost exotic erotica -- anything to make contact! at any rate to close the sale! -- all seeking that meeting, that one date with that mythical All-American marrying man, that mature but not necessarily old or older, tall or short, smoking or non-smoking, white or black potential husband out there just waiting to meet and marry that equally mythical Russian tennis player of a wife. American men. Beware! When it comes to Russian women, never try to scam a scammer. All sapphires are not blue!

Excuse My French!

An extra credit assignment for my French class at our local community college.

Yes, these are the same doggies you can see me wrangling early on a Sunday morning back in May, here and over at whybother.org and posted on the New York Times "A Moment in Time" reader project back then.

It's already in the pan, but, really, what the hell is "Chicken Bratwurst"?

I can fish the package out of the garbage, but it sort of begs the question....

Go vote for Margarita, Ela and "The Critter" at the New York Time's Lens project "A Moment in Time"!

Rotate the planet to look around. We're in the California "stack," closest to the top in the "Community" sort. It's more fun to hunt through and see the range of pictures people thought representative of "a moment in time," but if you want to get to us quickly, click Sunday morning dog wrangling in Ocean Beach, CA.

Here it is: Earth, covered by stacks of thousands of virtual photographs, corresponding in location to where they were taken by Lens readers at one "Moment in Time" (15:00 U.T.C., Sunday, May 2).

Zach Wise designed the interactive gallery and Jacqui Maher developed the submission process.

Spin the globe in any direction to get where you want to go. Click on a stack and the top photo will open, giving the photographer’s name or pseudonym (if supplied) and a brief caption (again, if supplied). Another click will send that picture to the bottom of the stack so the next one can open. The uppermost pictures in any stack are those you’ve recommended to one another. The height of the stacks reflects the number of submissions from any given area. Note the pull-down menu in the upper left corner. Pictures can be searched by topic — community, arts and entertainment, family, money and the economy, nature and the environment, play, religion, social issues or work — but not, unfortunately, by photographer. (That’s for “A Moment in Time 2.0.”) From any individual picture, you can always return to the globe by clicking on “Return to Globe X” in the upper right corner.

And here's a link to the larger, submitted version of Ocean Beach Dog Wrangling.