When I type in my first and last name, I discover things I didn’t realize or remember, and I’m a little surprised that I have more than one page of goodies. Evidently I have a ScrapBlog and a ScrapBio, probably created back when I actually made scrapbook pages and labored under the cruel delusion that someday the world might want to share in the awesomeness that is my craftiness.

My LinkedIn thing also pops up. There’s some Zonta deal that lists me as a member, and a few things from the school district and high school where I taught. Newsletters and board meeting minutes and junk like that.

I’m reminded that I submitted ideas to a site called Writing Fix, because that shows up as the fourth item in the list. And I have some kind of freelance writer/editor portfolio that I must have created recently, given the address attached to it, but I don’t recall creating such a thing even vaguely.

Page 2 of the Google listings shows an interesting bit from the German version of Amazon.com. My name is clearly mentioned, but I’m not sure why, as I can’t read German. Some kind of profile (or profil) of me, it seems. And I guess I’m a Top Reviewer on Amazon because I submitted two reviews, one for a book that I don’t even remember reading. I appallingly used way too many exclamation points, which might be why I don’t write Amazon reviews anymore.

Oh, and then somewhere down the list is my infant vision article. Well, not actually the article. My article is referenced on some website written in Spanish. I’m sure if I continued to scroll through the pages, or searched by my initials instead of full first name, I’d find the actual article, or at least an abstract of it. Exciting stuff.

Then, for some reason, the section of my photo gallery that has pictures of my pets pops up.

Well, all this excitement has worn me out. It seems like seeing myself in lights for all these inane “accomplishments” should spur me into writing an ebook, finishing my mystery novel, or at least becoming a spectacular celebrity stalker, but no. It makes me want to curl up in anonymity and hope none of the hiring managers I’m pimping myself out to actually try Googling my name.

So there I was, sitting at a Mongolian grill, eating my baby corn cooked before my eyes in my own selection of vegetables and oils, when it occurred to me for about the thousandth time that I don’t know what baby corn really is. Is it corn that just hasn’t grown up? (And if that’s the case, why? Is it a Peter Pan syndrome on the part of the corn, or maybe some kind of cruel corn-puberty-prevention ritual?) Or is it some kind of vegetable not even remotely related to corn that just happens to look like corn, and hence was named in its honor? Or is it a weird variety of corn that naturally grows up to look like a Munchkinland version of a summertime BBQ favorite?

Perhaps you have pondered the same weighty question — I wouldn’t be surprised. Well, today is the day we wonder no more!

Turns out, baby corn actually is baby corn. Immature corn. Plucked from the vines while still young and crunchy, before the cobs get too hard to eat. Not a masquerading tuber. Not a genetic mutation. Just plain old baby corn.

Educate yourself in a small way: Baby Corn a la Wikipedia

Or Educate yourself in a slightly bigger way: More than you probably want or need to know about baby corn, unless you plan to become a baby corn farmer, which you can apparently learn at such backwater universities as WSU

DIY Blogging: Insert some witty Children of the Corn reference here.

I read a book once (it was a picture book, but it still counts) that talked about how cheetahs all look alike. I never really noticed that, because all lions look alike, and all giraffes look alike, and basically any group of animals in the wild look a lot like each other.

But then I looked more closely at the pictures of the cheetahs. They really do look alike. I mean, alike-alike. They have the same markings. Not in the way that giraffes all have spots, or tigers all have stripes, but they really have the same markings. The same dark spots near their eyes, for starters.

Plus, they’re all built the same way. You don’t have big cheetahs and little cheetahs. Fast cheetahs and slow cheetahs. Pinheaded cheetahs and cheetahs with big old noggins. Cheetahs with longer or shorter limbs, or ears, or tails, or noses, or anything. They all look the same.

And it’s no accident.

Evidently, experts think that, during one of the ice ages long ago, the cheetah population got very low, almost to extinction. And I don’t mean only a few hundred cheetahs left in the world. I mean only a few cheetahs left. Like maybe fewer than five. Maybe even two.

And then, those Adam and Eve cats reproduced, and reproduced some more, and after a long line of inbreeding that doesn’t pay to think about when using the Adam and Eve analogy, their numbers went back up to healthy levels. Cheetahs were on the brink of extinction, possibly even more brinkish than any other species, but they made it.

Of course, since they all come now from the same basic family, they’ve lost the genetic diversity that once allowed them to survive at all. In other words, they’re all the same now. If there’s another environmental catastrophe, or even a major shift in environment or climate, it’s a coin-toss whether cheetahs will survive this time. Since they’re all fundamentally the same, there won’t be any outliers to adapt to the change.

I like cheetahs. They’re fast, sneaky, and beautiful. They manage to find their own mates and offspring among countless identical cheetahs, which you know is no small feat if you’ve ever tried to find your sister, one person among thousands wearing red coats, at the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales.