Everyone touched this Charles Bridge plaque for luck. But what kind of luck? Faithful, financial, fertile? Eek. Googled later: To return to Prague.

What to eat after a huge breakfast? Ah — rolled dough, cooked on a spit and dipped into cinnamon and sugar. Perfect for walking up a hill.

Atop the hill was Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world, office to kings, emperors and now presidents. A crowd had gathered.

No idea what hour it was, we'd met the changing of the castle guard, and at noontime it brought with the only change fanfare of the day.

There at primetime, we circled St. Vitus cathedral but didn't try the line. We did have a good conversation about what nationalities cut in lines.

Thought Kristin was going over the side here. And a random girl came up to me and said she liked my Threadless T-shirt. (Go Threadless!)

Fun Explosive followed us everywhere. More writers need wild design.

Just outside the castle gates: absinthe ice cream. I passed on tiramisu gelato for it. It was great. (Potential slogan: "Go crazy for ice cream!")

Not done on the ice cream: Wonderfully light with the cream flavor just above the spirit. Also, may have made me fall back in love with cones.

Jess forwards a Serious Eats item on how gritty biodegradable spoons are possibly on their way to ruining our ice cream experiences, and I think this is a serious concern. If I have to choose between ice cream and the environment, I want to know how much ice cream is involved.

These new-fangled spoons sound awful, and I'm with those backing metal spoons in shops. But for ice cream to go? A few Eats readers suggest cones are the answer, doing away with cups altogether. But in Soviet Russia, ice cream cones… something, something … making everyone use cones is communist. Ice cream lines would be next.

How about, if we're going to hurt the environment, we hurt it slowly? Perhaps in a way that makes our ice cream look giant-sized and last longer? Tiny spoons, my friends. Tiny but sturdy gelato spoons are the answer. On top of helping the experience, these spoons mimic the ice cream size of the tongue and human bites. They also give America's top flavorologists the time they need to find delicious, environmentally good solutions. We are the ice cream spoons we've been waiting for.

Unless you're the one particular dude with a suburban Detroit improv joint who won. His essay got him $100k and, as mentioned in this blog previously, a role in introducing the new Edy's flavor, "Red, White & No More Blues." The flavor has strawberry and blueberry swirls mixed in vanilla ice cream, with a "Recovery never tasted so good" badge on it.

For a friend who's stressed… here's the beginning of "The Animals" by Geoffrey Lehmann, in a recent New Yorker, the first issue I've managed to knock off in months… "A 'domesticated bearded dragon $400' / is not my idea of an animal companion. / A calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps, / or a hare with long ears / crouched under a mahogany sideboard, / thumping the floor. / Or a koala that climbed up a four-poster bed / surprising a seventeen-year-old in her nightie. …"

Says one blog, "I really dislike this one but I've read it three times so I suppose that means there's something compelling in it." Sitting here with mint chocolate chip on my tongue and an ice cream scoop upside down in a glass of water, I'm going with the hare under the sideboard.

(Oh, and don't read the rest of the poem. Just realized it's a bummer.)

(Sorry about that one. The ice cream was distracting.)

(Mint chocolate chip on Wikipedia.)

It's national economic crisis-based, according to Dreyer's (PDF).

At the time of Rocky Road's birth in 1929, almost all ice cream was made in three flavors – vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry – and was always served as sundaes. Dreyer added walnuts (later replaced with almonds) to his chocolate ice cream and, using his wife's sewing shears, cut marshmallows into bite-sized pieces to make the first batch of Rocky Road. Dreyer and Edy picked a flavor name to give folks something to smile about in the face of the Great Depression. Rocky Road became America's first blockbuster flavor and remains one of the best-selling flavors of all time.

I wish there were a few more sources for the naming. As Wikipedia points out, there's at least one alternate story about the ingredients. But Google turns up nothing more … except a book called The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning interviews a Dreyer's ethic chief and the author notes on the Rocky Road story, "It's not a long drawn out narrative, yet the imagery is rich and generates associations." Various results in Google News put the invention a few weeks after the stock market crash in '29, but none are sourced.

Building off this story/legend/whatever, Edy's-Dreyer's is now running a contest where you help introduce a national economic crisis-based flavor and get $100,000 to turn around your Rocky Road of a life.

First, they took on your Dairy Queen. Now, as friend Sheri photo-txted from a supermarket, they're messing with your grocer's freezer. What next? They run at you on the street and kick the cone from your hand? I wouldn't put it past them. (Yogen Fruz Google Squad, welcome back.)

First, I won. Then Monica won. Now we want you to win. Edy's Slow Churned Neighborhood Salute has returned for a new summer of ice cream party community-building madness. There are 1,500 chances to win, and you can now even enter by video. Once again, to inspire you, here's what victory looks like, minus the vodka and my refrigerator:

This blog, April, on Edy's Cookies 'N Dreamz ice cream: "Yes, you read correctly — chocolate cookies and cream. I'm hoping they're testing the flavor for a permanent run. If that dream ever happens, we can debate regular cookies and cream vs. chocolate cookies and cream. The debate can rage all night and day, and we can consume multiple cartons of ice cream to make sure we reach the right decision."

Should've looked it up!

YumSugar, January, on a vote involving Edy's American Idol-themed flavors, including Cookies 'N Dreamz: "You have until May 31 to vote, but if you cast your vote before April 29, you will be entered in a contest to win a trip to the American Idol finale. The winning flavor will end up in the regular Slow Churned Light lineup."

Vote here. I've cast my ballot for Cookies 'N Dreamz over the two other candidates I've tried, Cheesecake Diva and Mint Karaoke Cookie. The latter flavor is a mint cookies and cream, which certainly gets my attention but loses to more chocolate. The other two flavors involve orange and banana. While I've expanded my palette plenty the last few years (mmm, foie gras), I'm not about to vote for fruit ice cream.

You stand by your flavor. The Post has a story this month about one woman's quest for her favorite flavor at her supermarket. Even when the situation becomes a disaster, she stands by her flavor.

It'd be nice to say here that I was holding the line for some good reason, maybe in honor of the recently departed Irvine Robbins of Baskin-Robbins fame. But apparently I have a lot of learn about my long-time favorite flavor. Cookies and cream, one of the original 31? No way. Turns out the flavor is about the same age as I am. The Edy's man with a claim to the invention, official taster John Harrison, eats his ice cream with a golden spoon.

Harrison is a fourth-generation ice cream man. Read more here about his cookies and cream creation — the byproduct of a peach crop hailstorm — and the thin line between success and failure.

It's that time of year again, Marketing Daily reminds us. Edy's Slow Churned Neighborhood Salute is waiting for your essays, and this year's prizes are even sweeter. In addition to the 12 cartons of ice cream — my winnings fed 80 people last year — there are now four boxes of ice cream bars, a commeorative ice cream scoop and an apron.

If my friends were to follow in my ice cream footsteps, I would be so proud and so happy to eat their ice cream. They could enjoy and chronicle the saga, as this blog did last year: the essay, the victory, the waiting and the party.

One 2008 follow-up to those posts: Last month I bought a carton of the Hollywood Cheesecake I'd enjoyed at the party. The flavor was tasty but, more importantly, led me to limited edition Cookies 'N Dreamz, cookies and cream where the ice cream is chocolate and currently in my freezer.

Yes, you read correctly — chocolate cookies and cream. I'm hoping they're testing the flavor for a permanent run. If that dream ever happens, we can debate regular cookies and cream vs. chocolate cookies and cream. The debate can rage all night and day, and we can consume multiple cartons of ice cream to make sure we reach the right decision. Until then, we yearn.

Or "How I Spent My Summer, by Patrick Cooper."

Comments at work hit a million this week, so we celebrated yesterday. Also, the long-awaited ice cream party went down.

The apartment people weren't interested. I gave them their shot. Gave them the essay, gave them the flyer. They appreciated the offer but felt they would had to buy many more cartons of ice cream to go with my 12. The ice cream had to live in my freezer for nearly two weeks.

But I knew what I had to do. Eating the cartons myself would've been awful ice cream karma. I wasn't a big karma person myself, but I did have a TiVo Season Pass for My Name Is Earl. (If you're just catching up on my ice cream saga now, read the essay, the victory news and the karmic ramifications.)

So, I found another venue. By a count of the cups left over, the ice cream fed about 80 people. Cleaning up, I grabbed a lingering spoonful from each carton. The "Take the Cake" yellow cake-flavored ice cream tasted amazingly like yellow cake. With my mileage varying there, I got my biggest kick elsewhere, from "Hollywood Cheesecake." It tasted like everything good about cheesecake.

My brain ended the day on a bit of Three 6 Mafia note, so sleep wasn't terrific. But that gave me the chance to start today with a loosely related link to the Smithereen's version of Behind the Wall of Sleep. The Globe caught me up on that one in the car a couple weeks ago, and I postponed giving up on the station.

Nats tonight with all sort of people in beautiful Section 512, and Nats finale at RFK on Sunday. A woman was likely a non-native speaker of English asked me in the apartment elevator the other day if you could bring bags into KFC Stadium. I replied and motioned that they checked your bag but that you could bring it in. But secretly I thought to myself how a KFC Stadium would need a mascot that was a giant biscuit.