What time is it at the North Pole?

I don't know the answer to this, but it's a pretty neat question. Because at the North Pole, all the time zones come together.

So take a couple of steps in any direction and then turn left and with every step it'll get an hour later.

The part that's neat to me is that the hours may vary, but the minutes don't. If it's 1:19 when you're in Pacific Standard time, it'll be 4:;19 when you step into Eastern Standard time.

By the way, if I had to guess, I'd say that the time at the North and South Poles is officially the same as Greenwich Mean Time.

At some point, the temperature in Celsius is the same in Farenheit.

It's kind of obvious when you think about it, but most people don't. There's a point at which the temperature is the same for both scales.

That point is -40 degrees. So now you know.

How to make a decent omelet.

When you were little, I used to make you breakfast, just about every morning. Usually it was an omelet.

I started off trying to make fluffy omelets, and I figured the fluffier, the better. So I'd separate the whites from the yolks, whip the whites (by hand) until they formed soft peaks, then fold in the yolks. I'd cook the mixture over a really low heat, covered, for a long time.

They were good. But they took a lot of work and a long time.

Then I stumbled onto a video segment by Julia Child. In case you're not familiar with your television history, Julia Child was an American woman with an annoying voice--kind of a combination upper-crust accent and falsetto--who had a cooking show on television back in the 1960s and 70s. She was trained as a French chef, and pretty much revolutionized American cooking by opening people's eyes to the way ingredients and kitchen equipment worked.

Anyway, I wish you could hear me imitate her voice because it adds a certain something, but here's what she said:

"To make an omelet, you need a hot fire, butter, salt, pepper, and eggs." You also need a little water, which I've found makes the omelet lighter.

You mix all the ingredients together except the butter. The butter goes in the pan, but only after the pan is hot. And only one or two eggs. I'd sometimes use three egg whites and one yolk, but that was usually too much to fit in the pan.

The tricky part for me is the heat. You want the fire to be as hot as possible without making the butter go brown.

I also don't use a non-stick pan. I don't have one.

I use a lot of butter--enough so that tilting the pan back and forth will get the entire bottom covered with melted butter. If I put too much in the pan, once the bottom is covered I'll pour some out into the sink.

Julia Child says an omelet should take 20 seconds to cook. For me it works out closer to a minute. Either way, it's not long.

I shake the pan immediately so that the egg doesn't stick to the bottom. And sometimes I'll tilt it so that the egg liquid will flow beyond the edge of the puddle that it formed at first, making the omelet bigger.

When it's about halfway done, I'll sometimes sprinkle dill in. Or thyme. Then I use a spatula to fold the omelet in half. That way half of the bottom is cooking at a time, which means the insides can spend more time total being cooked.

When it's 3/4 of the way done, I flip it over.

And that's it. Simple. But delicious. You seemed to agree.