Doh! I wasn't on the radio last night, after all. That'll teach me to count my little chickies before they hatch. Meanwhile, I've been taking a break from regular life. I've reduced my activities to something like 35% sleep, 25% cooking & eating, 20% knitting (finished a felted hat & a fizzy scarf, yay!), 3% swimming, & the rest is trying to rescue my poor computer from the evils wrought by Panther. I am so not one of the happy upgraders. In fact, this is the absolute worst upgrade experience I've ever experienced at the hands of Apple. What happened?! Oh well, I've been one of the Mac faithful since approximately 1988, & this is the only time it's ever been so horrible; I'll chalk it up to "can't win 'em all" & cross my fingers that it's not a downhill trend.

Still having my 15 minutes of fame: Ben Fong-Torres mentions me almost in the same breath with Grace Slick & other rockstars. Kewl!

Also, I don't know who listens to the radio on turkey day, but if you Bay Area folks happen to remember, while you're putting the finishing touches (we all know that means marshmallows, right?) on those yams, tune in to KQED 88.5 FM (or in Sacramento 89.3) to hear an interview with me on the show Pacific Time. It's at 6:30 pm & they air it again at 11 pm, which is maybe more realistic; you can listen while you're doing the dishes, or finishing off the champagne, or getting ready for bed, or whatever people do at the end of all that gluttony.

Speaking of gluttony, I've noticed that people seem to think I'm some kind of expert on Chinese food, or something. Like if I'm doing this project I must be a real connoisseur of the stuff. I hate to break it to you, but I'm really not... I can barely cook Chinese food & usually when I do it's a sort of Berkeley hippified version, thanks to having spent my formative cooking years as a vegetarian. I still don't eat pork. How can I possibly be a real Chinese food foodie if I don't eat pork? On the redeeming side, I do eat duck, but just cause you see em hacking that bird apart for me at the 99 Ranch deli counter, doesn't mean I can tell you the fine details of how they cooked it.

I do know that cream cheese in Chinese food is wrong, & I can rant about chop suey for days, with great vehemence. That's what this project is really about. (Well, okay, that's only partly true.)

For some reason I've been driving an awful lot lately, running errands all over the place. Fortunately, for a change, I've had enough breathing room in my schedule to discover that the stress level really plummets when you're not racing against the clock to get all this stuff done. If you can believe it, I actually enjoyed my several recent trips across the eternal Bay Bridge, my one trip across the Golden Gate (fortunately in the non-toll direction), & my old favorite, the underdog Richmond-San Rafael bridge. I almost always enjoy driving that bridge, unlike those others. I don't think it gets nearly enough appreciation. The views from it are stupendous, & the shadows on a sunny afternoon can't be beat, even on the lower deck. The Bay Bridge's lower deck is too wide for really good shadows, but there's no arguing about the views. All of these bridges present our best view-appreciating opportunities in the course of our daily lives, opportunities that are actually enhanced by bad traffic. Now if I could just figure how to have this leisurely feeling more often (like way more often!), I'd be one happy camper.

As if we needed any more proof of Margaret Cho's fierceness... daily doses of it are easily accessible on her blog. I mean fresh new paragraphs every single day. Yow! I am humbled, to put it mildly.

I only just now realized this about Friday night's Art Health Fair, when I was doing Venn diagrams of people's favorite foods: I don't remember anybody including any Chinese dishes! Hmm, interesting.... It's true I only did a handful of the food diagrams, but it was enough for me to notice at least one trend: pizza & ice cream showed up quite prominently, being the center of the diagram (where the circles overlap) in more than one Venn.

Lots & lots of people got sentences diagrammed, though. My Jenny Holzer tribute proved quite popular, with many satisfied Art Health patients taking home diagrammed truisms.

Ohmigawd, the publicity has gone bilingual! Gracias, Edgar Gonzalez!

It's crazy out there on the web. I hereby give up keeping track of who has blogged about me. Thank you, all you bloggers.

I have noticed that explaining crab rangoons to Asian Americans feels almost exactly the same as reading gory ghost stories to people in a darkened room. I had opportunity to do both in the past few days, & in both cases you get that same sort of playful-powerful feeling as you listen to your audience gasp & groan & shudder & say "eek!" It's kinda fun.

I may not be in the Whitney Biennial but at least I get to be on TV. Morning people & insomniacs can see me at the impossible hour of 6:30 am this Saturday morning on Bay Area People, KTVU Channel 2 in the Bay Area. The rest of us can tape it, or do that other newfangled thing so we can watch it later. Woohoo!

Seems that cheap plastic cameras are kind of addictive. Emboldened by my recent successes with the famous Holga, I have now acquired an all-plastic underwater camera for a mere $8.99+tax, how can you beat that? I brought it to the pool with me today to take advantage of the beautiful November sunshine. Taking pictures underwater is actually kinda hard! You can't really tell if you're holding still enough. Probably I will end up with lots of fuzzy blue pictures, but hey, this is for fun! Unless I find some underwater Chinese restaurants... not that those wouldn't be fun, of course.

Just so there are no misunderstandings or unrealistic expectations: I'm not going to make this kind of Venn diagram at the Art Health Fair. I mean, woah... I don't even understand these things! All those squiggly shapes are way over my head.

Nope. Mine are the kind with straightforward circles, easy to understand, & much more fun. Trust me on this one.