I definitely concur about how good locally grown garlic is. I had been becoming suspicious of Chinese-grown garlic for some time because of its 'pearly white bleached' look, which can't be natural, and the fact that it has very little taste.

You can use six cloves of Chinese garlic in a dish and still only get a faint garlic flavour. Not to mention the worry about chemical pollution in Chinese-grown foodstuffs. I've been to Shanghai and Beijing and in both places, breathing the air was like inhaling liquid sandpaper.

What I've been amazed at since buying some locally grown garlic is that (a) it is very tasty and has a really 'garlicy' aroma, which goes to show that the good stuff is still available and (b) there are MANY different varieties of garlic available. From mild varieties that are close relatives of leeks to strong, fiery/bitey varieties that will give you a nip in the mouth as you eat them, and have an extremely strong flavour.

The ones Libs and I ordered most recently are giant russian garlic bulbs (still grown in Australia) and the cloves are giant-sized, so you can roast them and eat them with a knife and fork. Yum!!!

We've ordered from australiangarlicfarms.com and melodycreekorganics.com. Australian garlic farms has a wide range of garlic types available, but they took quite a while to process the order, which was a bit annoying, whereas melodycreekorganics.com shipped next day after I placed the order online.

Hahaha I know ... it is a parody :-)

I can't edit Mark's comments, but here's the correct URL...

If you don't want to install smartsleep (or Deep Sleep which is pretty good: http://deepsleep.free.fr/), then how about a purely physical approach:

http://www.markwheadon.com/blog/2009/01/hibernate...

Well thank God this joke video was wrong! ;-) I'm so glad Obama is in. Finally Team America World Police gets a thinking man at its helm.