I'm neither a "dog person" nor a "cat person," as I like them equally. And there are particular places I like to find them, as well. For example, every good bookstore should have a cat, just as every good bar should have a dog. I found that the number of dogs in any bar at a certain time is directly and positively proportional to how much I enjoy ( Read more... )

So, my New Year's Resolution to eat more strange meat is going well. Friday night, siulongbao fulfilled his long-standing promise to take us out for siu long bao, which are dumplings filled with soup. They are liquid mouth-bombs of delight. We have nothing like them in our cuisine. The closest I can think of is those candy "Gushers" that kids who weren't me ( Read more... )

Check this out: SlateV recently posted a video excerpt of a new book in which famous and not-so-famous writers create six-word life stories. The prompt was based on a bar bet that Ernest Hemingway won. His entry:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Check it out here: Six-word biographies.Want to try? I challenge you to write your own six-word ( Read more... )

My New Year's resolution, as I told siulongbao the other day, is to eat more offal. I'm talking about the nasty bits, the "fifth quarter," the stuff generally spilled out into buckets as the animal dangles from the meathook ( Read more... )

Every day, the tourists ask me where the ferry to San Quentin is. It's an incredibly popular tour. The ferry leaves for the North Bay several times a day, and there's nowhere on the boat you can stand that's not being photographed from some angle at any moment. Effectively, it is the tightest surveillance system in the Western world ( Read more... )

I want to comment on the escaped tiger story. For those of you in other parts of the country, I know this appeared as sort of a generic "news of the weird" animal story, but out in San Francisco it's been on the front page all week. And I do a lot of thinking about animals in confinement now that I work for a company under Association of Zoos and ( Read more... )

After a 17 hour drive from DC, upendedurn and I spent New Year's Eve in the sticks of Arkansas, chilling a $30 bottle of Moet champagne in the sink of our $55 Super 8 Motel. Not a bad way to spend the holiday ( Read more... )

Thanks to everyone who came out to see Laura and I feature at the Plough last night. We had a great time, and I thought we managed to keep it really fresh. Felt a lot of California love in the room, and I'm grateful for it ( Read more... )

Let's take a break from all the aqua-stuff for a minute and pay a moment's homage to one of my favorite animals, the weasel ( Read more... )

As I was standing at the bat ray touch pool at work:

Father to 5-year old boy who just touched his first ray: What does it feel like?

5-year old boy: It feels like... a miracle!

(For reference, the most common answer to that question is usually something like, "a wet mushroom.")

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9-year old girl, to me, after noticing one ( Read more... )