August 2005

This is not to suggest that during his thankfully brief lifetime Uday Hussein was not the most evil creature on the planet, but still, after seeing Marat Safin allow Bobby Ginepri to crush him in less than an hour in Cincinnati this morning, I can understand Uday’s mindset when, after the Iraqi national soccer team incurred a humiliating loss that tarnished the national honor, he was waiting for them at the airport upon their return and had the entire team bastinadoed.

Back in San Francisco, it’s Death by Wire:

A new recipe from the Downstairs kitchen.

Take slices of fresh bread, top them with thin strips of Gouda or other good cheese, and lay them on the bottom rack of your oven. Turn the oven on to the maximum temperature, and set a timer for ten minutes.

When the timer rings, turn the oven off, remove a slice of bread, and close the door. The slice will be lightly toasted on the bottom and the cheese will be perfectly melted. Eat it as a breakfast treat with your coffee.

Do not open the oven door for 24 hours.

The next morning, retrieve the other slice, which will have been transformed into an Easy Cheesy Crunchy. The bread and the cheese will both be a rich, caramelized brown and just wonderfully crunchy. Snap the slices into irregular serving pieces, and nibble at them till they’re gone.

I’m sitting in my office, too tired to get up and do something productive like sort that growing stack of papers in the kitchen, and I’m idly looking out my narrow window at the beauty of the houses rising up the hill. The top of the hill is obscured by a thin layer of incoming fog, but since the fog’s not thick, one flat side of the cap of a tall smokestack on a roof a few blocks away is periodically catching the sun as the stack flexes in the wind.

It signals me in a code I don’t understand.