The Ramen noodle guy and the Scooby-Doo guy died this week.  I was never much of a fan of Scooby-Doo, but Ramen noodles were a major food group in college.  My roommate’s mom would send us cartons of the stuff from Chinatown every few months.  Every night we would sit down to the hotplate and make ourselves a bowl.  I think I got hooked on the MSG and had trouble breaking the habit later on. 

Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

Le Blog Berube is no more.  He’s not willing to squander so much time on the blog anymore.  Sissy.  No, I get it.  As ogged said,

There comes a time in every frequently-updated blog’s life–and it seems to be around the three-year mark–that you have to either make your peace with the fact that it’s the most important thing in your life, or turn it into a paying gig, or make it a group blog. You can tell yourself that it’s "just blogging" only so many times before you can’t ignore the fact that it’s an incredible amount of work, both in terms of time spent and mental energy expended.

Read more from Tim Burke on the 3-year wall and blogging.  Good comments, too.

Two nanny stories: LizardBreath and Lisa Belkin.