I'm a lasagna boy!

These are the people that you meet ...

Woke up unexpectedly early this morning, read Wodehouse through several hours of the pitch-dark morning, and then walked down to Cooper's for an espresso just as the sun was rising.

At 7.31, I jumped on a commuter-laden N-Judah. Riding MUNI always makes me feel like a pleasant little cog in a great big city (not this, a!). I rode the Breda LRV to the terminus, at China Basin, and then walked across the street to the 8.07 Caltrain southbound. Exiting ditto, I ran into Clint, whose band just recorded their second album.

The commute made me reflect on things I dislike about MUNI and Caltrain. I don't know that it's fair to lump them together, but I'll start with that.

1. MUNI runs aboveground. Without right-of-way, moving down the Embarcadero between PacBell Park and the terminus is at a snail's pace.

2. MUNI doesn't offer fareboxes in each car: one must enter at the first car to pay cash (or with a token).

3. The connection between MUNI and Caltrain is broken by a street-level crossing.

4. MUNI doesn't allow bicycles on board the LRV carriages.

5. MUNI doesn't have signboards with expected wait times (although it does have the pleasing "ding * ding Two-car-J-outbound-in-three-minutes" stacatto voice announcement at some underground stations).

A day without a camera.

After a lunch-time trip to Rosamunde's and a pint of Drake's at the Toronado, Arshad and I headed in a roundabout way through the Inner Mission and out onto Highway 80 over to the Pick'n'Pull to find a new motor for the radiator fan on his (other) car.

And me without a camera! After ponying up our $2 entrance fee and signing a disclaimer, we wandered awestruck into a field of cars propped on old wheels, each with their hoods (if remaining) agape. Thousands of late-80s Japanese and American cars, mixed with a handful of Swedish and German models, stood in neat rows on several acres between the Union Pacific tracks and the elevated BART lines. We could hear the noise from the neighbouring Coliseum: massive applause as the Raiders scored, thundering pickups and SUVs as the game ended.

A two-engine diesel rolled by with a couple dozen tanker cars. Several BART trains rolled overhead; we had a spectacular view of the undercarriages.

We found not one, but two radiator fans that looked in good order; in order to save space (and, hopefully, cost), we picked apart the motor from the fan and housing. However, when we got up to the counter, the cashier sternly admonished us for "destroying" two fans and insisted on charging full price ($19.95 + 10% Environmental Surcharge Fee). Seems as though the company would be cheery if we bought the fans for $8 apiece, allowing them to sell the fan blades and the housing separately. No go. So we bagged on the less-reliable looking motor -- we'd pulled it from the wreckage of a Supra, not a Celica -- and arranged to hide the second one so that we could exchange if necessary. We took the first one out to Varonika, but the engine compartment is so durn tidy that we couldn't find any wires with which to test the motor! As we climbed in, I noticed two AA 1.5V batteries: we placed one against each contact on the motor, and then bridged them with a key. The motor spun weakly!

Got the balance right?

While Europe was enjoying a car-free day or two, some people back at the homestead were falling off Segways.

Commuters in London, Paris, and Berlin have plenty of problems of their own. Not to mention Pittsburgh.

Dang, it's the new thang.

Watching Newlyweds at the Dopehouse, and the lilting vocals of the Shins' New Slang are in the background. They're source music playing at a mega-pop-star's house? Yowza.

The newlyweds are spending time apart for the first time since the big day; they take an SUV limo to the airport, which afford us an excellent view of
LAX, but it's not quite Garry Winograd's. Sublime!

Okay, here's a snippet that hearkens back to the confusion about tuna (which is, unbeknownst to Jessica, a fish. This takes place over an appetizer of wings:

Jessica: I don't eat buffalo.
Other Girl: They're not buffalo. They're chicken.
Jessica: It's not? Then why are they called buffalo wings?
Nick: I think barbeuced wings started in Buffalo.
Other Guy: Yeah, they're chicken. Didn't you ever find it weird that buffalos don't have wings?

She knows the Jaws movies by number, but didn't know that dolphins have blowholes.

Beef: it's what's for dessert!

Wow. Deep-fried cheeseburger sticks. As a snack. For schoolchildren.

From and (c) copyright 2003, the New York Times:

September 23, 2003

Cheeseburger and Fries, Wrapped Up in One

By TANIA RALLI

f the National Cattlemen's Beef Association has its way, beef will not be just for dinner anymore.

Looking to emulate the success of Chicken McNuggets and fried mozzarella sticks, the group is hoping to inject some red meat into the American snack food diet with cheeseburger fries. The fries, which look like a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a meat-and-cheese compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a cheeseburger.

Breaded, then deep-fried and served with ketchup or barbecue sauce, cheeseburger fries have found their way onto menus in several states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since June. There is also a version being made available to public school cafeterias.

"The challenge is getting people to think of other ways to eat beef," said Betty Hogan, director of new product development for the association.

Beef, mostly in the form of hamburger, still dominates the menus of fast-food restaurants and bars across the country. But even the enduring popularity of the hamburger is not enough to counteract the long-term decline in national beef consumption. Twenty years ago Americans ate 77.1 pounds of beef per capita and 51.3 pounds of chicken. In 2001, the figures were 66.2 pounds of beef per capita and 75.6 pounds of chicken.

That reversal took place in part because of the popularity of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, which were introduced in 1983, altering the public's perception of chicken by turning it into a quick and convenient food. Beef was still largely relegated to the evening meal, and the National Beef Council's popular slogan — "Beef: It's What's for Dinner" — seemed out of step when fewer families were sitting down to dinner together.

Looking for other avenues into the American diet, the beef industry noticed that restaurants sell over 900 million portions of chicken strips and fried cheese sticks, many of them as appetizers.

"You just don't see beef-based appetizers," Rob McLaughlin, vice president for product management at the Advance Food Company in Enid, Okla., which is manufacturing cheeseburger fries.

The fries themselves are surprisingly light, weighing only about one ounce each. The meat, so that it holds together, is firm like a meatball. And while the taste is not distinctly beef, biting into one does impart the lingering flavoring of processed cheese.

Steve Mason, owner of the Brass Rail restaurant in Beatrice, Neb., said he served five fries in a portion and charged $2.95. "They're very profitable," he added.

Like most bar snacks, cheeseburger fries pack quite a dietary wallop. Each individual fry has about 75 calories and four grams of fat. The fries for schools have less beef per serving but still have about 60 calories and, in fact, more fat — a total of 6 grams — in each fry. And nobody eats just one.

Developing a beef-based snack was a process that took about two years. According to Dr. Tony Mata, the technical coordinator of the association's research and development branch, the final shape of cheeseburger fries was almost an accident. "There's an interesting twist to how this product came about," he said. "We were actually working on a cheeseburger by the slice."

The idea had been to manufacture precooked patties that tasted like a cheeseburger by combining ground beef and cheese.

"It was supposed to have the same dimension of a regular hamburger patty," Dr. Mata said. The consumer would simply heat the burger in a pan or microwave, place it in a bun, and dress it like a regular burger.

"It looked good on paper," Dr. Mata said. "Then we tried it at the laboratory, and the initial appeal was horrible."

Dr. Mata and the development group decided to rework the product, changing its shape, adding batter and bread and dropping it into the deep fryer.

The new prototype was tested in Evanston, Ill., at the Keg of Evanston, a popular bar near Northwestern University. Satisfied with the response, the association enlisted a food scientist, Steve Moore, who is known in the business for his expertise in developing breaded coatings. In the past Mr. Moore worked on breading projects like onion rings, jalapeño peppers, seafood and even French toast sticks (in effect, adding breading to bread).

"I started the project by putting a variety of flavors together with coatings," Mr. Moore said about the cheeseburger fries.

He likened the coating process to walking a tightrope, since the moisture of the meat and cheese must be carefully controlled for the breading to adhere. Otherwise, when the product is deep-fried, the heat of the oil will produce enough steam to blow off the breading.

"You always follow wet by dry," he said. So, before the meat and cheese could be battered and breaded, the shaped mixture had to be coated in a fine flourlike substance called predust to dry the surface of the moist mixture.

Picking the right cheese was also an issue. Mr. Moore tested everything from premium sharp cheddar cheese to processed American cheese.

"We didn't want it so cheesy that we overwhelmed the beef flavor," he said.

"When people bite into it, you want them to get the wow effect: `Wow, this tastes just like a cheeseburger,' " Mr. Moore said.

After testing different types of cheeses, Mr. Moore settled on a processed restricted-melt cheese, meaning that it is manufactured to withstand high temperatures.

"Some cheeses are so restricted melt that we bit in and it looked like little yellow pieces of plastic," he said.

He created three flavor profiles. The first tasted like plain beef with salt and pepper. Then he made a prototype mimicking the flavor of beef fried on a flat-top grill, as at McDonald's, and another that suggested a charbroiled flavor, like a Burger King hamburger.

Tasters like the charbroiled flavor, but said it did not make sense to have something like that also taste deep-fried.

"It's hard to please everyone," Mr. Moore said.

When Advance Food began producing the cheeseburger fries at the beginning of the year under license from the cattlemen's association, the company limited distribution to the central states but the product is now available across the country.

"We think that we will sell about a million dollars' worth this year," Mr. McLaughlin said.

All this, of course, pleases the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "We want beef in dessert if we can get it there," Ms. Hogan said.

Dear diary ...

From Joe Rogers' "Metropoitan Diary" feature of the New York Times comes this:

Dear Diary:

I work downtown, and on Water Street in front of Fleet Bank, I often buy my breakfast from the sidewalk vendor. Recently I approached the cart, nodded to the proprietor and waited by the side while three other people came to the window, one at a time.

One was given a coffee, the second a coffee and a danish, and the third, coffee and a bagel. I just laughed when the vendor handed me my scrambled egg whites on a roll with orange juice. While each of us said thank you and paid for our food, not a single one of us had actually spoken our orders.   

David A. Sifre

The other side of summer?

Drove out to Mount Tam to check out the New Music on the Mountain, with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Had I sensibly checked the web, I could have read that the event was cancelled due to high fire hazards. But I didn't check, so Larry and I drove all the way up and up and up the mountain, stopping at a Central Valley farmer's stand for some figs, peaches, and plums. We reached the ranger post and found the road blocked off with orange plastic barrels. A small hand-written sign read "ROVA: New Music cancelled." We grinned and turned back down the mountain.

Even more exciting was the subsequent drive to San Rafael to visit Josh, Alisa, and Max. Just as we were pulling off the highway into downtown, Winnie started spewing thick white steam from the hood. At the signal, the car stalled completely; as I put on the flashers and motioned for people to move around me, a wiry man hopped out of his car and said urgently "Can you steer? I'll push!" and energetically heaved his shoulder against the back of the truck. Larry looked bewildered (I later found out that he doesn't drive), as a woman and then another woman leaped from their cars and aided in the pushing. We quickly relocated the car to the filling station at the corner and assessed the damage. One of the helpful women and her boyfriend cheerfully offered us a ride to our destination, and then asked "Are you going to have breakfast?" (I started to laugh, and then swallowed it: the time was 2:30 pm, and I'd eaten breakfast seven hours earlier. But this was Marin, and things are different there.)
A quick visit to Chez Raymond-Blatter and then a long wait for a tow back to San Francisco, and we were in apple-pie order.

So much for the last day of summer!

Doing it right (facts are useless in emergencies).

Yojo sent a link to an awesome (disturbing + amusing) story about grade-schoolers' reaction to Radiohead.

Bright in the night.

This morning I rode the Crystal Springs route to work -- for the first time in a month! -- and felt glorious. Later in the day I spoke with aram and he pointed out the Kogswell fixed-gear frame. Not only does it have tidy rear fork-ends (or drop-outs, whatever), but it's fully lugged! I decided then and there to get a rainy-day frame; ever since I cracked the frame of the Blue Dutchess, I've needed a spare frame. A nice relaxed road-geometry fixie setup with fenders. And the Kogswell has eyelets!

Later in the evening, sitting on the stoop with jimg, who was explaining half-step gearing and his desire to build up an audax bike, we saw a bright set of lights pedal past. I called out "Nice Bike!" and the rider wheeled around and pulled up to the stoop. jimg recognised the bike, a custom Sycip, as the idiosyncratic three-speed that recently rode PBP. Turns out that the rider, Joel Metz, recently organized a race from SF to Portland.

Portland being my current fave-rave bike city! Legend has it that some kinds spirt places donuts and coffee (or bagels and cream cheese, depending on whose version of the lenged one hears) out on the Broadway Bridge. And drivers and cyclists appear to coëxist much more happily, with motorists giving cyclists ample room, and cyclists riding more courteously and confidently. The grass is always greener? and Portland has wide, clean bicycle lanes marked on the roadway and on signs posted along the side of the road. San Francisco recently started a campaign to educate drivers and cyclists about courteous and safe behaviour, but the campaign consists of clever ads on the side of MUNI buses, not better-maintained signs along bike paths or the clear and accurate "Bicycles on Roadway -- Merge carefully" sort of sign one sees in Portland.
The SF campaign is certainly useful, but the wordy ads are only a part of the solution. We need more and better signs, wider and safe spaces for cycling, and better traffic calming than those ridiculous ersatz roundabouts.

Where everyone knows your name!

Stopped in at La Mooné today for the first time in more than a month! That's a sure sigh that things are getting better. Matt made a delicious Milwaukee roll with his signature tempura flakes, and told us that he's still holding down three jobs.

Two men eating sushi at the bar greeted a newly-arrived friend: "What is that on your t-shirt? I really like it!""Oh, it's Arabic! It took me ages to figure it out." The two other men cooed over the shirt.
Later, when they all ducked outside to have a smoke, I saw that the writing was devanagari

You might think.

I used to think that I would ride four miles for every mile I rode in a car. And I did, for three years. But after getting a car and a job, I find myself driving more and more and more and more. And biking less, alas.

Goril^.la goril^.la

Sad to see a headline that Floquet de Neu, or Snowflake, the beloved albino gorilla at the Barcelona Zoo, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

When I saw him last autumn, he had just fathered several little 'uns, and was quietly playing with them (but staying out of the sun). He's the only known albino gorilla *ever*, and a proud emblem of Barcelona.

You can read me the riot act.

Strolling down Alberta Street, saw a yard full of chopper bikes, a porch full of punkrock, and a street chock-full of food vendors.

Belly-dancers and oud players, glittering pink-bedizened ballerinas, six-foot-tall choppers, endless steel-drum barbecues, jigsaw art ...

... frustrating attempts to obtain beer, first a forgetful but friendly waiter named Brooks who brought me a shandy but forgot all other beer at the table; then a pleasant but pointless hostess who cleared a nice sunny table for us, but negelected to tell us that we needed to go inside to procure comestibles. A half-hour wait at the next pleasant beer garden we saw; and then a nice pub further down the street, with an obscure and romantic patio but distinctly snooty service. Said one as she brought out the food we ordered, "You'll have to go inside to get more beer; we're very busy." And she then came back with the rest of the food, asked "Do you need anything else?" in a pleasant way and immediately walked off as we contemplated getting another pitcher.

Duct-tape voodoo.

Miss Mona is the name of the duct-tape artist whose art decorates the walls of Voodoo Doughnuts, a crazy little hole-in-the-wall snack-food-junkie purgatory of donut concoctions (and wedding chapel). Stoked with a pint of the best java, I picked up a pastry box with a dozen of their best (including an applesuace donut, but not an Arnold Palmer, the dough of which is made with powdered iced-tea and lemonade mixes.) Their hours, which I strongly suspect to be irregular, are 10 in the pip emma to the same in the ack emma. Wonderful! Perfect for a donuteria.

This took place after an exxxtended evening romping over bridges and under flyovers, from one happy hour to the next: first at Kells (before the drunken singing begins), then on to Red Star, and thither to Billy Reed's, where we heard the soul cover band Cool Breeze. They started off their second set with "Billie Jean" and "Word Up". And wings were available in quantity at each of these stops. Leaving Billy Reed's at a high rate of speed, we turned up at the no-longer-sordid White Eagle Pub but quickly left because singer-songwriter night had the place packed. We relocated to Lowbrow, had mini corn dogs and tater tots against a scene of phosphorescene and black light, and then discovered that we could obtain the doughnuts. Had we but thought to get married ...!

Get me unto here.

Not only does Portland have tasty late-night tapas and cocktails, but they know how to sign their roundabouts.

What a good name for a city!

As I was thinking fondly of PDX, was thrilled to receive a phone call from Justin. He shares my high opinion of The Kells, where happy hour extends to tasty burgers, plates of oyster, and Jameson's-battered wings. Sitting out front, one can watch bicyclists heading home.

Walking after midnight.

Downtown in the Civic Center, faced with the task of getting home, I decided to walk rather than take the bus (or F Market).

Walking past fighting couple, each sitting on separate stoops, smoking cigarettes. Another woman on the intervening stoop, talking on a mobile. People chatting at the bus stop. The warm night air, San Francisco's indian summer.

Get me away from here.

Installing the wrong sign in the new traffic circles doesn't help matters:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/08/BA176360.DTL

And some motorists think that now that some intersections have pseudo-roundabouts, they can blow through stop signs elsewhere. Last night a car loaded with three young bucks blew past the westbound stop sign on Haight at Scott and came within inches of hitting me. I could hear them gunning the engine at me.

The Stoop Report.

Unlike anything else, the stoop provides a respite, my place. This morning I stepped outside and as I stood looking up and down the street, Stan the UPS man drove by and waved; three women with strollers and ambling toddlers walked by, smiled and said "Good Morning"; Kilby the real-estate agent drove past and waved; and the old man with a cane -- who always sits on his stoop on the next block of Scott -- recgonized me and smiled.

Joy comes from the stoop. Merriment flows. And sitting on the stoop makes me quite happy indeed.

Neighborhood relationships and the pleasure of knowing the faces around me --

A toast.

While eating rice and beans at Justin's a few weeks ago, he suggested drinking some 2-for-$1 pounders of Night Flight (cheaper even than Night Train) and watching South Park in French (superbly well-done, especially the songs).

That got me started on a South Park kick (that, plus everyone at work started naming servers after the show's characters). Butters stutters. Heh.
But mostly it's details like Cartman singing Sheena Easton while pedalling his big wheel round a mountain pass.

I like the show: it's funny, absurb, and brutally crass. But most of all, it's animated and has lots of physical comedy. Between the thrice-weekly reruns on Comedy Central and the early-morning Looney Tunes theme shows, I'm certainly getting a good fix of animated mayhem.

Today, another weekend spent as a shut-in, I took occasional scotch-on-the-stoop breaks and two cartoon breaks (one for SP, one for LT).

Oy, this caused a stir.

Another episode of speed-eating: almost 200 oyster in 3 minutes. The previous world record from the Irish town of Hillsborough was under 100. The Water St. oyster dealie doesn't really count as an oyster-eating contest.

Here's a tidy little Flash slideshow on eating contests. Most of the pictures are of an American (duh) wing-eating championship, where ample and pasty men are crowded by lingerie-clad women. Compare to the young and good-looking Irish contestants.

Iron-stomached Norwegian gulps down oyster record. 07/09/2003. ABC News Online

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s940545.htm]

Last Update: Sunday, September 7, 2003. 5:49am (AEST)

Iron-stomached Norwegian gulps down oyster record

A Norwegian man has annihilated the world record for eating oysters by downing a stomach-churning 187 of the slippery molluscs in three minutes before polishing off a few pints of Guinness.

Rune Naeri said he felt "fine, wonderful" after shattering the previous official record of 97 at the annual Hillsborough oyster festival in Northern Ireland.

Local favourite Jim Glackin of Belfast, who beat the previous world record by eating 100 oysters during an unofficial practice run earlier this week, failed to keep up with the impressive Norwegian.

Despite managing to scoff 168 oysters, he trailed in fourth against the international competition when it really mattered.

Looking forward to a late dinner, an unflappable Naeri said "I think I'll probably have something fishy".

-- AFP

Gastr tax.

From sfgate.com:

Rebellion in the wind: As a thousand farmers chant "we won't pay the fart tax," MP Shane Ardern drives his tractor up the steps of New Zealand's parliament in Wellington. The farmers led cows and dogs, and drove tractors and other farm equipment to protest a greenhouse gas research levy on farm animals and their intestinal emissions

Parking Karma Nr.2

Arrived back in the hood with a sense of dread: it was just before 3 AM, and I didn't think I'd even be able to find a 7 AM tow-away parking spot. Would it be a 6 AM street-cleaning zone? I don't think I can stomach a parking ticket, although it would be a reasonable price to pay for a good night's sleep.

I saw a couple of 8 AM spots on Haight St., and just as I was about to pull into one I thought, "Let me take a lap before I commit to a location." I drove around the corner and past the roundabout, and then: behold! The coveted spot right at the corner of Scott and Fell!

Jaw-dropping.

Where are the old camaro and crappy jalopy that have occupied the two spots in front of 456 and 460 for the last seven years? The cars that would idle while the Wednesday 12:25 street cleaning passed by, and then immediately swing back into place. But today they were gone, and the spot was open. At three o'clock in the morning.

With glee she eats the lil' buggers.

Saw Insectivora at the Sideshow by the Seashore last month when I was traipsing around the Island of the Coneys. Smiling mischievously, Insectivora devoured worms and crickets with a huge smile on her face, but that wasn't as startling as the immediate and visceral reaction of a woman in the second row of the bleachers. She gagged and made a strong retching sound, causing the man sitting immediately in front of her to leap from his seat with alarm.

Where the alphabet starts with Z.

Sitting at the Dopehouse writing code (duh) and half-watching tivo (duh!) and thinking about Sara's cooking (duh!!), and I hear the strains of Tones on Tail's "Go!". It's the backing sound for a commerical. However, since that song was also on the soundtrack to Grosse Pointe Blanke, it's not as surprising as sitting at the counter of Bob's Donuts and hearing a Nissan ad set to "Gravity Rides Everything" by Modest Fuckin Mouse. Do a Google search on "Nissan Modest Mouse" and you'll get a bunch of smart alterna blogs on this same topic.

This way to the future.

Planners are again barking about the Transbay Terminal, about spending three-quarters of a billion dollars to bring Caltrain a little further downtown. More interestingly, they've sprinkled housing and public space into the plan, which will immediately grab the attention of legislators.

A signifcant problem with the idea is the massive cost with relatively little improvement to infrastructure: a rail terminal for Caltrain that doesn't directly connect to BART? or to MUNI trains? that's a big horse pill. And a rail terminal that doesn't include Amtrak? Presumably the Amtrak bus bridge could stop at the new Transbay, but with this kind of a budget I'd hope that actual train connections might happen. There isn't anything in this plan that really improves the transportation nature of the Transbay Terminal itself. -- except that you're potentially adding more customers for the buses to the immediate area.

All that glitters.

The Travel channel is doing a countdown of the Top 10 bridges. At #1 is of course the beautiful Golden Gate, but somehow I feel that's a gimme.

The narrator sums up the magic of this bridge with a vapid statistic: "Enough custom International Orange paint to cover the White House 17 1/2 times over!"

This program has less substance than the WGBH series on engineering fun:
Building Big; the web site has sections on bridges! dams! tunnels! hot damn!

The Travel Channel's Top 10:

1. Golden Gate Bridge
2. Akashi Kaiyko Bridge (Kobe, which is the reason it's Nr 2 and not Nr 1)
3. Sunshine Skyway Bridge (St. Petersburg? -- if so, I'll never see it!)
4. Tower Bridge
5. Firth of Forth Bridge
6. Brooklyn Bridge
7. Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
8. Sydney Harbour Bridge
9. Leonard P. Zakim Bridge
10. London Bridge (Lake Havasu)

Their top-ten list skipped over nostalgic and beautiful bridges such as the Charles in Prague; the Pont Neuf in Paris; the inestimable convergence of bridges in Pittsburgh, PA; the Bridge of Sighs in Venezia; the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze; the peculiar gondola bridge in Bilbo; the imagined bridge between Sicilia and the mainland.

And what about canals? In its way, the Suez is a bridge between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, as proud an engineering achievement as the Brooklyn or the Golden Gate.

Special-occasion donuts.

With a name like The Donut Pub, you'd think this place were heaven on earth. In a way, the establishment caters to exactly that notion: they cater wakes as well as weddings.
But they don't serve any public-house function: there are only neat trays of deep-fried delicacy along the walls, no taps or casks in sight. No-one carded me as I walked in, nor could I order a "old-fashioned and an old-fashioned".

The Donut Pub is also the ill-fated home to the donut croissant, a peculiar deep-fried brioche filled with third-rate jelly -- not at all like the delicious jelly donuts from the Donuts Luncheonette in Park Slope! Those are the most delicious jelly donuts I've ever tasted.

I came upon the menu while I was going through the hundreds of old newspapers lying in neat stacks around the apartment, armed with a scissors and a glue stick. I am faced with the formidable task of remembering why I had set aside the paper in the first place. Now I have several dozen clippings which I need to scan, file, or send on to someone else.

Kitchenware? That's where I used to keep it!

Watching Clueless for the Nth time. I need to figure out a good Clueless drink.

Wonder how many times I've seen this film: at least three times in theatres, starting with a college-break trip to a suburban cinema with Arshad and Erica. And with how many people? Since then I've broken the times-I've-seen-the-same-movie-in-the-theatre record with Rivers and Tides, Th. Ridelsheimer's beautiful film about Andy Goldsworthy's sculpture (aka "The Movie That Saved the Roxie"), and then again with The Italian Job (the pants-dropping Marky Mark remake, not the Michael Caine original).

... but until TIJ appears on DVD (October 7th), I'll probably keep watching Cher climb into Christian's Nash convertible and delightedly say "I love him!" when he asks her "Do you like Billie Holiday?".

If iTunes, or tivo, or some software or appliance kept track of how often I watch movies, or scenes therein, I'd be a lot happier.
All of this technology, and it falls *just* short of doing what I want.
I spent way too much time over the past week trying to get my new phone (Nokia 3650) to talk to a wireless headset (Jabra FreeSpeech) and powerbook (via a D-Link USB adapter). The problem stemmed from the incompatibility in Bluetooth implementations in the Nokia device and the Jabra, but became irritating when Amazon refused to ship the revised Jabra to me, insisting that I RMA the unit from Jabra.

So much technology.