Life by chocolate

Sometimes you feel like an acai berry: A Monroe chocolate maker has started simply but has plans to expand his business making truffles with merlot and cabernet wines and infusions of green tea, acai berry and other flavors.

We're more accustomed to chocolate made with infusions of peanut butter and crispy rice, but he had us at “chocolate.”

Kings of the wild frontier: Coonskin caps, buckskin coats, muzzleloaders and other 18th-century items of daily living were on display Sunday at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in Monroe.

Among the items for sale was a bumper sticker for the family mule cart that read, “You can have my flintlock when you can pour the black powder down the barrel, use the ramrod to load the patched roundball, open the frizzen, pour powder in the pan and pry it from my cold dead hands.”

Don't know much about history: On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.

Caesar had checked his horoscope that day in The Rome Today newsscroll but disregarded it because nobody knew what “ides” were then, either.

—Jon Bauer, Herald staff