Batch of links

- This weekend is the premiere of Season 2 of Game of Thrones. For those of you who, like me, take a while to figure out who’s who, here’s a nifty cheat sheet for each house.

- Tomorrow is March 31st. We’re turning off the lights for one hour, starting at 8:30 pm. For some fun, visit the Earth Hour site here and flick off a virtual switch.

- Thinking of buying a new lawn mower? Television? Curling iron? Stroller? Fridge? Don’t forget to check out Consumer Search for reviews and recommendations! (Pour les francophones, Protégez-vous, qui offre en plus des exemples de traductions loufoques hilarants.)

- The rules for long S – you know, the one that looks like an F in 18th-century-or-so texts? Turns out it wasn’t just a weird way to type an S back then, there was actually a purpose. But I’m glad we’re all just using a regular S now, it’s so much less confusing.

- Seattle will be building (planting) the nation’s first food forest. It’ll basically be like a 7-acre public park, filled with fruit trees and edible plants (think blueberries, pears, walnuts, yuzu citrus, herbs, etc.) grown by permaculture, and everything will be free for the taking by locals. In fact, the locals’ opinion was so important to the developers that it went so far as to hire a Chinese interpreter to make sure the Chinese residents could voice their opinion properly. I think this is fantastic, and just one more reason why I’d love to go to Seattle someday. (I’m also not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but Seattle seems to have an unusually high concentration of successful food bloggers, acclaimed restaurants and specialty ingredients supply stores, so it seems perfectly fitting as the place for the first food forest, too.)

- 50 women game-changers in the world of food. An interesting list!

- Yeasted buckwheat waffles, Molly Wizenberg’s latest variation on Marion Cunningham’s raised waffles, are really good. Buckwheat, and whole wheat, are fantastic with maple syrup. I found the waffles a bit thin, though, perhaps because buckwheat has no gluten. That being said, I made the WIGs again the following weekend, when we had houseguests, and they were better.