Corktastic

There's a very amusing post over at Dr. Vino about what one can do with leftover corks—I'm particularly fond of the cork castle with the Obama action figure on the balcony, but there are a number of other nifty options. And if none of them satisfy your cork obsession, you also might want to pick up a copy of Cork Boat, a quirky, charming, and very entertaining book about author John Pollack's successful attempt to build a boat out of corks (165,321 of them) and sail it down Portugal's Douro River. Ah, human ingenuity. No wonder we're the dominant species on the planet. —R.I.