doit, doit now!

I am all over officiating at this fight, except that I can’t find anyone to answer the question.

What I know:

• “Sardine” and “anchovy” are used interchangeably in some parts of the world. (FWIW, so are “which” and “that,” and that doesn’t make it right).
• Sardines are sometimes said to be part of the herring family. Anchovies are also sometimes said to be similar to, if not part of, the herring family.
• Sardines travel in large schools similar to those you see in nature films. Anchovies also travel in large schools similar to those you see in nature films.

I asked our waiter at Zuni Cafe what the difference was, and he had no idea. He said Judy Rodgers was still there, though, and said he would ask her. Apparently when he asked her she ducked out. I don’t think she knows the answer. I told the waiter to have her call me. I am still waiting for her call.

I don’t think anyone knows. The best I can get is that sardines are thought to be larger, and anchovies smaller.

Google yields no results. My friend Aida Mollenkamp, Food Editor at my old client CHOW, also couldn’t really tell me.

My conclusion is this: while there might be a subtle technical difference between the two terms they have colloquially come to mean the same thing, except perhaps on the size issue. And thus sardines can be thought of as large anchovies.

I am sure someone somewhere knows the difference, but she might be a very old woman in Sardinia (parent island to the term “sardine”!) and this might be Lost Knowledge. My gut is that the answer is what I have inferred: the two terms have come to refer to the same types of fish, excepting only the difference in their size.

I want to find the precise, this-is-not-a-guess-answer. But I think I am close.

I’m going to update WordPress.

This post is really just to ping Google to get them to reindex tonight since I fixed up my sitemap.

Hey, crimes against humanity are only treason. Death penalty stuff. Why don’t I pardon myself before I even get convicted!

Thanks again to everyone who voted for him. Everything has gone so well since he’s been in office!

I think it sort of speaks for itself.

My sister is pregnant! I am being the gay uncle and buying lots of things for Cora (my unborn niece’s proposed name). Thus far I have bought a ridiculous number of bibs (including a bib with the Gerber Baby sporting devil horns on it), a rattle, and a spoon with a plastic plane attached to it (to play airplane with baby food). I bought the plane in blue and told my sister that I wasn’t buying pink crap and shoving gender stereotypes down the kid’s throat. She replied “No pink crap!”

Here’s a pic of us before Molly got preggers.

So as it turns out the media playback keys on the DiNovo work automagically under Leopard. Neat!

As usual Patty and I were roughhousing on Friday night and somehow we started shoving our iPhones into each other’s mouths. I bit down on his phone (very lightly) and felt glass fragments spray into my mouth. I shattered the screen and dented the aluminum on the back. SMRT.

So my friend Andy Hill and I went to Minako Organic Sushi for dinner the other night. Minako is my favorite restaurant in the world. It’s run by my friends Judy/Minako and her mother, Yoko. Judy, who used to work in the music industry (she will kill me for writing that), runs the floor and Yoko runs the kitchen. I call it the Japanese Laundry. It takes a long time to eat there and the food is exquisite. It’s also on Mission between 17th and 18th, which is essentially crackwhore central, and the street is thick with crazy drug addicts.

As we are wont to do, we closed the restaurant. Yoko came out and poured us some sake and started telling us the most absurd and funny story. She said that a (male) Yakuza came in to the restaurant a while back wearing pink pants and talking on a Hello Kitty cell phone. She said he was very quiet and normal and friendly.

But then he started telling her that he was smuggling cocaine and heroin stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom, apparently because then dogs can’t smell them. She also mentioned he was putting them inside sushi fish or something like that (in which case I imagine the dogs really can’t smell them). But then she said he went outside and a bum panhandled him and he karate-chopped the bum! And she actually said “Hi-ya!” in her adorable Japanese accent. I just about lost it. Granted, I had had a lot of sake at this point, but the mental image of a pink-panted Yakuza karate-chopping a panhandling bum was just a little much for me at the moment.

Plus I have had this picture of the Japanese man with the pink bear gun sitting around on my hard drive for a long time and this was a perfect opportunity to use it.

Speaking of good things in my life, there is now a herd of goats on the hillside of Corona Heights Park near my home. There has been a huge problem with homeless encampments there and they need to clear the brush out so they can build switchback trails to allow the cops to get to the encampments. It’s sort of funny to see 300+ goats a block above Castro Street, and no one knows they are there.

Sadly, this breakup threw me into severe acute depression, and it’s just now I am feeling a little like myself again.

I had lunch on Monday with Carol Lin, a former CNN and ABC anchor who has the distinction of being the first reporter to break the story of 9/11. (She is also friends with my friend Jason Bellini… Very small world. In one of email exchanges she said “Oh I love Jason! He picked me up in Kosovo and drove me to Macedonia.” How often do you get emails like that?). Her husband passed away from cancer at a young age and now her mother has it. When she found out her husband had cancer she decided that she was going to stop working and become his caregiver. Since his unfortunate passing she has decided that she wants to be a force for change in the world of cancer (and chronic disease in general). She’s a very motivated and passionate individual.

We were meeting over the possibility of me helping her out with a new venture she is trying to create. We got along great. After the technical and business discussions finished we began to get a little personal. At one point she started getting visibly and softly upset and said that in the midst of all of her sadness she one day realized that she just had to wake up every morning and choose happiness. She said it was work but that she had to choose it every morning.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a joyful person, that I love to laugh and take pleasure in the little and big wonders of the world. I take joy in joy itself. After my breakup I just felt crushed and horrible. And the day I met with Carol I felt horrible. But I decided that what I was going through was nothing compared to what she went through. I have great friends who care about me, I have a great business that I have built up by myself, I have a great apartment and a great dog and a great family. So what if some misfit kid stole my heart and played emotional and mental soccer with it?

I decided that I was going to wake up yesterday and choose happiness.

And yet the day sort of sucked, but I kept reminding myself to choose happiness. I got close to tears at several points during the day, as I am now. But I woke up again this morning and decided to choose happiness.

I am going to continue to wake up and choose happiness until I don’t have to wake up and consciously think that any more. There is too much in my life that is good.