Your Morning Slime Mold.

1. Great title for a newspaper, don't you think?

2. What did you wake up to this morning?

3. We've discussed slime mold on this blog before, remember:

Oh, it's slime mold. Dog Vomit Fungus! Remember? I mentioned it here once, you know, that day when I deliberately vomit-blogged. But I've never seen it in my yard before, even though I have seen -- and photoblogged -- some pretty impressive fungus, fungus that makes you think not of vomiting, but of one of those other bodily activities.

4. Meade says he remembers and claims to have participated, and I said it was before his time. (If you click the first link at #3, you'll see it was 2006, 3 years before I met Meade.) He says: "In the comments." I look. "Ah, yes! You're the first commenter":

Meade said...

Is that fresh mulch? Might have come with that. Could be worse - you could have stinkhorn mushrooms... you know - Phallus impudicus.

5. "In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), the psychologist Dr. Krokowski gives a lecture on the phallus impudicus:"

And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it -- a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective impudicus, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death. For the stench given off by the impudicus was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap. And even today, among the uneducated, this morel was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

6. What did you wake up to this morning? Are your spores dripping from your bell-shaped cap?