The abecedarian mystery.

Still can't find anything that'll tell me what abecedary is. I looked in some plant dictionaries in the company library, but no luck. (Anyone out there have easy access to a copy of Hortus Third?)

I have found that there's something called "alphabet plant," also known as "toothache plant," "para cress," and "Brasil cress." (Spilanthes acmella and a couple other species). That could plausibly be something someone used to call abecedary, but I can't tell for sure.

Disturbing site du jour.

From scherzoid, one of the scarier things I've seen lately. It's a site that offers photo retouching for glamour shots for kids in beauty pageants. That's scary enough; the whole child beauty pageant thing is disturbing in a lot of ways.

But their results are scarier.

More terrifying examples. (That last one is particularly fake-looking.) Would any pageant actually be taken in by things like this?

And what really gets me is, the URL is "naturalbeautiescontest." There is nothing natural going on here.