OMG! I get to go to a medical records office on my lunch hour.

I am weak with jealousy!

My in-laws always went for Chinese when they went out, too!

Aw, msbelle. You have a hard row to hoe lately.

I am going OUT! on a DATE! tonight with my DH. Going to see Inglourious Basterds. Woo hoo!

My in-laws always went for Chinese when they went out, too!

Mine too. And when they stay in, come to think of it.

More fancy food: [link]

Myhrvold, who’s writing a book exploring the science and technology of modern cuisine, is working with six chefs, including Chris Young, formerly of the Fat Duck in London, one of Myhrvold’s favorite restaurants.

The restaurant is known for “molecular gastronomy,” manipulating food chemically and physically to create unusual taste combinations. (The current menu includes snail porridge, salmon poached in licorice gel, and mango and Douglas fir purée.) Myhrvold enthusiastically describes it as a “Klingon cafeteria” — a reference to the alien warrior race on “Star Trek.”

The still-untitled cookbook is scheduled to be completed in 2009. Myhrvold is looking for a publisher.

mango and Douglas fir purée

Douglas fir?? What won't these people turn into food? "And for dessert, peppermint bark! Made with REAL BARK!"

Bon, maybe we can do something next week==with my father if you want to meet him, or without, just to break up the pattern.

Whatever you prefer, just give me a ring.

This is in'eresting: Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Oh, gronk. This is me this morning.

Just to get the three hours of sleep I got, I had to shut the cat out of the bedroom (she was very meow-y last night, except for the time when she was sleeping and I was reading). When I finally woke up and opened the door to go to the bathroom, she came darting in like she'd been waiting out there the entire time.

Speaking of the cat, I think summer might be over. Amarna never sleeps on my bed during the summer--from May through (usually) mid-September, she'll join me for snuggles and petting, but she'll sleep on the floor. Even if we have a cool spell in July, she won't fall asleep while I'm on the bed. But last night, she was snoozing away on her corner of the bed.

Puppies Dressed As Cats: The Best Thing Ever? (VIDEO, POLL)

Conan gave the world a present last night, a "mini dose of joy" as he call it, in the form of puppies dressed as cats. While the theme song made us want to kill ourselves, the puppies themselves were amazing!

Ugh. Car got broken into. Here's a PSA: thieves who see the GPS mount will break into a 10-year-old Honda for the GPS in the glove box. Now you know! Off to the police station!