So I am posting it: I am getting married on October 4th, 2008, to Jonathan Scott Taylor, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.

I love you, JT.

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.

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

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

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

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.