02/07/98

All hail Iron Chef, the finest television show in town. Watching it is my number one choice of things to do on Saturday nights. Of course, my number two choice is something like "read on the sofa while the cats heap up on me," so we already know I have a sad little life. Anyway, Iron Chef is a wonderfully amusing cooking show where visiting chefs challenge one of the Iron Chefs each week to create an entire menu using a particular ingredient in each dish. So far I've seen them face off with watermelon, yams, eggplant, and eel. Imagine trying to make a dessert dish with eel! The MC, who is dressed like a jumped-up concierge, does the dramatic introduction with much dry ice, flourishing of vegetables, and long closeups. The commentators are actors, actresses, and food experts. There's a huge stage, lots of fancy camera work, and rapid fire commentary from everyone. The commentary is hysterical. The Japanese are the only people I can think of who can turn cooking into a game show with overtones of a sporting event. I adore this program. If you live in the Bay Area, watch it on Channel 26 every Saturday night at 8 o'clock.

I got more books unpacked, and found four unread ones. Bonus! Score! Now I can cozy up with either Gaye Tuchman's Edging Women Out: Victorian novelists, publishers, and social change, Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain, John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, or Dominique Godineau's The Women of Paris and their French Revolution. I can't decide which to read first. I still have the most recent Bronte biography, too, but I don't worry too much about reading that one. It's more of a collector's item. Not that I'm a collector, no sir, not me. I'm just fixated on the eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I've been thinking about whether or not to make a random fact list. It's the latest craze among online journalists, but I can't imagine what I could tell you that you wouldn't have already picked up from reading this diary. If you've been paying attention, you already know most of my fixations, favorite colors, shameful secrets, likes, and dislikes. Besides, it's an exercise in narcissism... oh, wait, so is keeping an online diary. I guess I haven't got any excuses. But the fact is, I don't have much to list that I think would be interesting. It's because I've no earthly idea what anyone else would think is interesting about me. It's enough that you read this.

Domo arigato.