Get in my belly

I am almost certain that a great deal of my love for food is genetically inherited from my grandmother, whom I call Puo-Puo. I have only muddled memories of food she made for me as a child — ma-puo tofu that I was afraid to eat because it might be too spicy, candied slices of virginia ham pressed between two layers of wonderbread that I would fetch out of a foil wrapped package in the refrigerator (a variant of a hunan dish using what was available in America). The memories are confused with a household that was full of people and many many talented cooks. I can’t remember offhand when she stopped cooking — was it when I was in elementary school or middle school?

Puo-Puo is 93 years old, having been born in 1914, just months after the onset of World War I. She has six children, thirteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. She danced at her grandchild’s wedding at the age of 90. On Sunday, she protested when my uncle made her use a walker to get down the hallway of the rehab center where she was recovering from hip surgery. I happened to be in town and was very fortunate to get to see her. Here is a photo of her that day:

On Monday Puo-puo had a massive stroke. She is still in the ICU but is stable, but the doctors don’t think she will recover fully from this. I am back in San Francisco anxiously awaiting updates from my family and am thinking of her.

Sadly, Puo-puo passed away in her sleep in the early morning hours of June 26. I will miss her.

Someday, I hope to have a home (that I actually own, though right now it seems more likely that I’ll win the lottery — especially sad, given that I don’t even play the lottery) that is filled only with things made by my friends or by me. This weekend, on his trip down from Montreal, David made good on his end of our barter and put me a little closer to that goal. I have about five months to get him outfitted for next winter, since I couldn’t seem to get my knit on this past one.

But back to my pasta bowls: Beauties, aren’t they?

And best of all, because David knows me and knows food and knows how I like to roll, he cleverly placed a little divot at the bottom of each bowl to catch some extra sauce.

Did you know that Chris Ware looks just like a character out of his books? Not only that, but he acts like one too. I saw him with Art Spiegelman at a talk at the JCCSF, which has a fabulous lecture series. Definitely see Art Spiegelman sometime — he is hilarious.

Just queued up at on the SFPL request list: Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes (both Ware and Spiegelman are huge fans of him), Black Hole by Charles Burns, and Blankets by Craig Thompson. Also Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Disc 2. Have I told you how much I love the library?

I was about to write the following sentence: If you get the chance, catch the Eels on their current tour. But then I checked their tour dates and it turns out they’ve already hit the east coast. Joyce, you can still go see it this week.

They played at the Palace of the Fine Arts Theatre, which I’ve never been to before. I knew vaguely where it was, but I didn’t realize it was the same building as the Exploratorium. The ticket people let us take our burritos into the lobby and we bought cold beer and life was good. The venue itself is pretty drab but full of cushy seats, and as soon as I sat down, I said, “This would be a great spot to watch a movie.”

And then the lights went down and the movie started. Really. (My friend leaned over and whispered, “Next time you should wish winning the lottery.”) The opener was a movie about E’s father who, as a graduate student, invented/discovered (the different between these two concepts is not clear to me when it comes to theoretical physics or math) the concept of parallel universes. Seriously. I looked it up on Wikipedia so it must be real. The film, Parallel Lives, Parallel Universes, was made for the BBC, and it’s worth seeing if you get the chance. The show was great too, a sweet-and-sad rock show with a dose of melodramatic rock opera. We were sitting in the center, six rows back, and it felt incredibly intimate even though 1,000 people were sitting behind us. Storytime with a crazy guy, his friend, and a circle of musical instruments.

I think I forgot to post my photos from the big wheels race. Please proceed through my flickr set for a brief tour of the 2008 edition of “Bring Your Own Big Wheels”.

This is an actual screenshot of my gmail spam folder today.

How does a subject header like this get generated?

a) Perhaps there are minions that type spam subject headers, and one of them thought the title to the book was actually “7 hobbies”

b) Perhaps one of those minions thought he was being funny when he intentionally mistyped the book title

c) How might this phrase become generated by a computer? One might assume that a computer would not randomly through this phrase together. But perhaps it draws phrases out from the collective wisdom of the internet. Which leads me to the obvious conclusion that someone else on the internet must have once upon a time typed this phrase. Which brings us back to hypotheses a and b.

The California primaries are tomorrow, and I don’t know who to vote for. And let’s not get into the ever-present California propositions — the Superbowl was sprinkled liberally with ads for and against the series of four propositions on gaming deals with various native american tribes.

I don’t believe in voting on this concept of “electability”. It’s always seemed like some sort of projection of yourself onto the American public, like playing some sort of cat-and-mouse mental games with everyone else, and it makes me feel like a pawn in some game I don’t quite understand. So I just can’t bring myself to do it, or really, even consider it. Who am I to say that the public will respond to a certain candidate in a certain way? And I don’t trust polls unless I see the polling methods and the statistical errors.

For the first part of the primary season, I was leaning about 75% towards voting for Clinton. She has plans within plans. She totally knows all about the attack alligators that hang out in the moat around the White House. She’s developed a tough skin to deal with all of this. I already knew who she was, I was happy with having her as a choice to vote for, and didn’t really care to learn more about any other candidate. And Obama seemed so positive and optimistic about everything, and I am too cynical for that.

A couple weeks ago I read a New Yorker article about Clinton vs Obama and how in some sense, it’s a question of how one views the role of the President. Is the President a do-er, or is he or she supposed to be an inspirer? This question is still lingering with me, and at the time, tipped the scales back to near-even.

And then this weekend, those goddamn Obama ads got me all teary and I totally feel manipulated by the forces of advertising agencies. But it worked and now I’m about 60% Obama and I’ve got 24 hours left. I don’t know how to decide — I don’t really want to decide — I think I’ll just go and see what the pen wants to do tomorrow morning.

I would rather have the option that was occasionally pulled out in high school class president elections and decide that we will have co-presidents for the next 8 years.

By the way, the best proposition ever is on the San Francisco ballot this year:
Proposition C: Shall It Be The Policy Of The City Of San Francisco To Support And Facilitate The Acquisition Of Alcatraz Island For The Express Purpose Of Transforming Alcatraz Island Into The Global Peace center?

Hippies are hilarious.

Jeremy has this amazing post about a fellow passenger on his airplane.

But dude, check this out:

(Thanks, Ryan.)

This sounds amazing.

I got to spend the afternoon at the Google NY offices, and oh man, it’s as awesome as you’ve heard. Besides all the stations set up with old computer models (the Apple IIe and the ‘84 Macintosh were definitely there, but I’ll bet there was an Amiga and some other stuff too that I’d never seen in person before — and all of it was functional!) and various ancient tech paraphernalia (HUGE floppies), nerds scootering down the hall, and a lego station in one of the many, many snack areas, there was a wall with two posters, this O’Reilly one with a timeline of the history of programming languages and another timeline of the history of operating systems. So cool, right?

(And yeah, I ate there too. More about that later.)