One of my friends first introduced me to Pleiades last year.  Pleiades is a star cluster located in Taurus that contains hundreds of stars, though only a few of them are visible to the naked eye.  It has recently come into view again in my night sky (when there aren’t too many clouds, as there often is in West Michigan this time of year…).  I can now find it pretty easily, by first spotting Orion then looking a little ways up and to the right.  It’s fairly faint, especially without my glasses, but I can make out a small cluster of stars.  It’s pretty neat because it is one of the closest star clusters to Earth and one of the easiest to spot in the night sky.  The star cluster is also called “The Seven Sisters” because the nine brightest stars are named for the seven sisters of Greek mythology and their parents.  You may also be surprised to learn that “Pleiades” in Japanese is “Subaru.”  That’s right.  Think about it – the Subaru logo is a cluster of six stars.  Pretty cool.  Kind of makes me wish we had gotten me a Subaru instead of a Toyota. ;-)

And speaking of cars…I was getting concerned about my Toyota yesterday.  You know the problem that some of the Toyotas have been having with the sticking accelerator?  Well, mine was seemingly having the opposite problem.  I had left work and was on my way to go Christmas shopping, and as I was driving I felt my foot kind of sticking to the brake pedal.  Of course, immediately my mind goes to all of the problems with Toyotas, even though mine is not one of the ones on the “bad” list.  It was the strangest thing, though.  It wasn’t really the pedal sticking as much as my foot sticking to the pedal.  It almost felt like a magnetic attraction which I could pull away from if I pulled hard enough.  Weird.  The thought crossed my mind that I might be going crazy, but then the problem seemed to get worse.  It took until I got to my destination before I could thoroughly investigate.  Turns out that somehow in my 10 foot walk from my work building to my car I must have stepped in a MASSIVE glob of chewed gum with my right foot.  As I began driving, the gum was transferred to and smashed into all of the grooves on my brake pedal.  To make matters worse, I had the heat on, which subsequently made the gum even stickier.  So, gum remnants on my shoe stuck to the gum remnants on my brake, and with the added heat it equated to quite a sticky situation and some pretty erratic driving!  Gross.  The moral of this story: watch where you step.  Do that and your Toyota should work fine.