I'm a lasagna boy!

And the bike you rode in on.

Kai chose as his favourite pic of the week. It's mine too.

... monkey wrench to work one's clockwork.

The new clock-face at the toll plaza of the Golden Gate Bridge has illuminated numbers, but no illuminated hands. Faced with a budget dilemma, the Authority decided to go with glow-in-the-dark numbers rather than hands.

40 seconds? But I want it now!

I ate some deep-fried Oreos a few months ago, at Charlie Blair's Grill in Santa Clara, CA. I wandered in to the Grill looking for a burger, since everyone else wanted to get Thai food at some restaurant that a friend-of-a-friend recommended, and I just wanted a nice honest grilled piece of meat. Charlie Blair's was across the street from the shopping plaza with the third-hand Thai, and I stopped in and asked for some wings. As I was about to order the burger, I noticed a sign on the register that read "Try our deep-fried Oreos!" I asked the collegiate-looking young man behind the counter for one, and he said, "We only sell them by the half-dozen." Emboldended, I took the plunge.
I walked over to the nearby house where we were meeting with our various foodstuffs -- for an outdoors screening of the Michael Caine version of The Italian Job -- and tried one out on the way. I arrived covered with powdered sugar and wearing a big smile: they were delicious.
Everyone at the screening wanted a piece of the Oreos -- battered in funnel-cake mix and then briefly flash-fried. I dashed back to Charlie Blair's and ordered a dozen, but the counter quarterback said that they only had six left. I took 'em, and on the way out met Charlie Blair hisself: a 300+ pound Bostonian who could barely shift from his seat in front of the big-screen TV in order to shake my hand.

There's a wire story about the deep-fried action at the Texas State Fair.

DALLAS (Reuters) - Welcome to the State Fair of Texas -- a magical land where calorie counters cower for cover and almost every conceivable food product can end up deep fried.

Fried potatoes and catfish are old hat to Texans at what is billed as the largest state fair in the United States. What they long for is a new offering for the vats of hot grease to go along with fair favorites such as fried pickles, fried okra, fried corn on the cob and fried cheesecake.

This year, 14 new food items were introduced to the fair and eight of them are fried. New to the fair, held in a land that is home to chicken fried steak, are items such as fried Oreo cookies, fried candy bars, and fried cheese curds.

"Honey, I would fry pretty much anything because that is what the people like," said Olivia Acuna, who works at a booth that sells fried Snickers bars.

The candy bar is dipped in a batter, fried for about 30 seconds and served hot on a plate that quickly becomes saturated in oil. A calorie count was not immediately available.

Ron Black, the fair's vice president for food service said people spend an estimated $15 million on food at the state fair. The fair opened last Friday and runs for three weeks. It typically attracts about 3.5 million people.

Last year, fried Twinkies were a huge hit, and this year, the new food darling could be fried onion on a stick.

Some other fried favorites include fried tamales, fried turkey legs, and ice cream that is lumped into a ball, covered in breakfast cereal crumbs and dipped quickly in hot oil. Dieters can ask to have the ice cream served without chocolate syrup and whipped cream if they want a lighter version.

The most celebrated fried item at the state fair is the corny dog, which is know as a corn dog in the rest of the United States. Both items are hot dogs on sticks breaded with a cornmeal coating and deep fried.

Skip Fletcher, the head of the company called Fletcher's that has been selling corny dogs at the fair for over 60 years, said he uses peanut oil to fry the food in order to cut down on cholesterol.

Fletcher was a beaming judge on Sunday for the first corny dog eating competition at the fair. It was won by Rich LeFevre, who downed 12 dogs in 10 minutes.

LeFevre, an International Federation of Competitive Eating chili consumption champion who has also downed 25-1/2 hot dogs at the celebrated contest on New York's Coney Island, said the fried corny dog was a tough foe for the heavy eater.

"Corny dogs are wonderful, but it's hard to eat of a lot of them," he said.

These are the people that you meet ...

Woke up unexpectedly early this morning, read Wodehouse through several hours of the pitch-dark morning, and then walked down to Cooper's for an espresso just as the sun was rising.

At 7.31, I jumped on a commuter-laden N-Judah. Riding MUNI always makes me feel like a pleasant little cog in a great big city (not this, a!). I rode the Breda LRV to the terminus, at China Basin, and then walked across the street to the 8.07 Caltrain southbound. Exiting ditto, I ran into Clint, whose band just recorded their second album.

The commute made me reflect on things I dislike about MUNI and Caltrain. I don't know that it's fair to lump them together, but I'll start with that.

1. MUNI runs aboveground. Without right-of-way, moving down the Embarcadero between PacBell Park and the terminus is at a snail's pace.

2. MUNI doesn't offer fareboxes in each car: one must enter at the first car to pay cash (or with a token).

3. The connection between MUNI and Caltrain is broken by a street-level crossing.

4. MUNI doesn't allow bicycles on board the LRV carriages.

5. MUNI doesn't have signboards with expected wait times (although it does have the pleasing "ding * ding Two-car-J-outbound-in-three-minutes" stacatto voice announcement at some underground stations).

A day without a camera.

After a lunch-time trip to Rosamunde's and a pint of Drake's at the Toronado, Arshad and I headed in a roundabout way through the Inner Mission and out onto Highway 80 over to the Pick'n'Pull to find a new motor for the radiator fan on his (other) car.

And me without a camera! After ponying up our $2 entrance fee and signing a disclaimer, we wandered awestruck into a field of cars propped on old wheels, each with their hoods (if remaining) agape. Thousands of late-80s Japanese and American cars, mixed with a handful of Swedish and German models, stood in neat rows on several acres between the Union Pacific tracks and the elevated BART lines. We could hear the noise from the neighbouring Coliseum: massive applause as the Raiders scored, thundering pickups and SUVs as the game ended.

A two-engine diesel rolled by with a couple dozen tanker cars. Several BART trains rolled overhead; we had a spectacular view of the undercarriages.

We found not one, but two radiator fans that looked in good order; in order to save space (and, hopefully, cost), we picked apart the motor from the fan and housing. However, when we got up to the counter, the cashier sternly admonished us for "destroying" two fans and insisted on charging full price ($19.95 + 10% Environmental Surcharge Fee). Seems as though the company would be cheery if we bought the fans for $8 apiece, allowing them to sell the fan blades and the housing separately. No go. So we bagged on the less-reliable looking motor -- we'd pulled it from the wreckage of a Supra, not a Celica -- and arranged to hide the second one so that we could exchange if necessary. We took the first one out to Varonika, but the engine compartment is so durn tidy that we couldn't find any wires with which to test the motor! As we climbed in, I noticed two AA 1.5V batteries: we placed one against each contact on the motor, and then bridged them with a key. The motor spun weakly!