The Dow has come back almost 500 pts, the Naz near 100 pts. In other words, losses from yesterday have been regained. Via Briefing.com.

The establishment shall remain anonymous, if nothing else than for the sheer numbers of obese people eating there tonight. The thin gentleman seated behind me was terribly sick with some upper respiratory infection, eating his pot roast alone while reading the last pages of his paperback. Then he left his table for a long, long time.

The couple on the other side turned heads when they reached their table. The woman was quite large. I had heard rude remarks about people who looked as if small children were fighting under their clothing. Now I’ve seen it.

If it appears on the menu at some seafood joint, or if it looks enticing at the fish counter in Asian markets, choose something else. It’s not white tuna, but has similarities to real oilfish. Here’s a new word for your vocabulary: keriorrhea. Read the Wikipedia entry (the definition of your new word is there), every bit of it, including the parts about the FDA, Japan and Canada, and how they deal with the legalities of it.

After that, if you want a more, uh, colorful description of the consequences of eating escolar, go here.

You’ll be glad you listened to your Aunt Spacebar.

Using the stuff of daily life - drinking straws, styrofoam cups, paper plates, fishing line - she produces jaw-dropping works that remind the viewer of clouds, land patterns and bacterial growth. Some of her art can be seen here.

As one who used to get the shakes from a sip of my mom’s coffee, I learned early to avoid caffeine. However, my large, extended family members thought it was funny to give me the last few swallows of their Cokes back in the day when there was no such thing as non-caffeinated sodas. I stayed wired.

Nowadays, there are such drinks as Cocaine, with 280mg of caffeine, equal to eight times the usual amount in a can of cola. Drink enough, and panic attacks set in, not to mention vomiting, chest pain, and other signs of
caffeine overload.

Many of the tomato plants are dry and brown with large holes next to the rootballs, courtesy of our cuddly squirrel friends. These same adorable rodents are also going at the apples even though I don’t feel it’s quite time to pick. So this first fall afternoon, I did some tidying up in the garden. My lone producing zucchini plant had a large surprise. The squirrels felt it necessary to start chewing on the baby zucchinis, so I covered one with some garden cloth. Worked like a charm.

Since there is a lot of that cloth around, I think the apple tree will undergo some swaddling later today. It will look Halloweeny.

I threw a bunch of garlic in the soup that was too bland, but what made it much, much better was the addition of a bit of the oil used to fry the shrimp last night. Then I sliced up the leftover shrimp, put it on toast, and melted cheese on top. Soy cheese for me, which wasn’t so bad. Then I made a blt with the sugared home-cured bacon for another family member, who inhaled everything.

Lest you think I only watch movies and eat on weekends, I paused the movie about halfway in. Because I have to work tonight.

It will break your heart for sure, but I started laughing in the first couple of minutes- it’s a very funny movie. And sad, of course.

Dinner was home-fried shrimp and vegetable soup. I didn’t salt the soup enough, left out some key ingredients, so it was underwhelming.

Steak. And because I didn’t get home till late, the carbs were a selection of Cho’s potstickers and egg rolls. The vegetables were in the egg rolls.

Lee Pace, who portrays one of the suitors, looks like the offspring resulting from an alliance between Keanu Reeves and Andy Garcia. I’m sure Amy Adams is perfect for the role of Delysia, but she began annoying me early on.

Why not cover the whole age spectrum? Fertile ground for ads, no doubt. Before you know it, there will be a fetal network as well. (Hi, do you have toes yet? Is that a twin I see? Post a recent photo!)

Gee, I sound a little cranky. It has been, at best, a most trying week. Today, I tried to catch up with all the things I was too distracted to do during the last few days, but the bumper crop of tomatoes has been piling up in the back bedroom. Partly because I had to empty the kitchen of clutter with our unexpected company last weekend. And every day I pick some more.

So I spent part of the day prepping the smaller ones for freezing. The last time I had this many tomatoes, the kids were still in junior high. Maybe elementary school. It’s wonderful, but labor-intensive.

Working in front of a window has its advantages. However, I always forget to change the shutter speed since I seldom take photos of live creatures.

This bird nests on the ground in the ivy, and raises its young in record time. I tried to set up a shot on a tabletop with birdseed last week, but had no takers. Except for the black cat checking out the offering. That would have been a good shot, but I didn’t realize it till I shooed the cat away.

It is named Martialis heureka after Edward O. Wilson exclaimed, ‘Wow, this ant might as well be from Mars, it’s so different.’

It happens, but not very often.

I may have posted about this incident before, but perhaps I didn’t due to taste constraints. When the kids were small, we lived in another house. This was before the era of low-flush toilets. Some appliance was on the fritz, and a handyman was on the premises. He was not a plumber.

During the course of his work, he asked to use the bathroom. No problem. Or so I thought. He used the kids’ bathroom, and it wasn’t till after he departed that I discovered that he left something behind.

Jeez. Guys, I thought, and flushed the toilet. The offending object did not go away. I flushed again. There it was once more.

It would not leave despite my best efforts. And there it remained for what seemed a long, long time. Another family member dealt with it, and is reluctant to discuss the matter to this day.

As I browsed the toilet display at the store a few days ago, I read all the advertised promises posted above each model. One in particular caught my eye, the one that boasted of power enough to flush dozens of golf balls in one go.

I hoped the handyman had one.

For some reason, the squirrels, raccoons and bluejays are staying away from the produce lately. The squirrels dug up all seedlings in the spring, so that everything got off to a slow start, especially the basil. Then once the tomatoes got established, they dug big holes right beside the rootballs of most of them. I even put pistachios in the traps, but no takers.

Wolves know that it is better to catch a salmon than to go after a deer. For one thing, they sustain fewer serious injuries. For another, well, there’s that omega-3 thing.

While it’s true I start work before dawn, there are some things I’m not up to at that hour. Sometimes I spend the first hour wishing I could tolerate caffeine. Due to the nature of my work, there tends to be a lot of cursing. Seldom do I shoot pictures.

Every morning for the past few weeks, we’ve heard the honking of geese coming in to land at the jr. high fields. There are at least three flocks, staggering the landings. Labor Day morning, I got up extra early to do some shooting. However it seems they took the day off. Ditto Tues. and Wed.

A family member gets very excited when he hears them. I was urged to get out there because ‘they’re here, they’re here!’ Grabbing the tripod, I managed to clamp the camera on, but didn’t have time to put on the right lens. The mature trees of the neighborhood blocked much of the action. The rest, as they say, is blurry.

I was ready for the flights back to their original unknown location, but the geese had a leisurely breakfast. By 10, the first flock took off, but they were too close to the horizon.

Perhaps this will be my September project, shooting Canada geese in large numbers. Who knew there was so much wildlife in suburban backyards.

Some journalists have quite the crush on Bristol Palin’s boyfriend. I’ve missed the distinctive voice of New York magazine, maybe I should subscribe again.

It doesn’t like this 90s+ weather any more than I do. Now it’s getting audible about it, because it’s hard to get my attention otherwise. For the past few days, there’s been random static. Low, but annoyingly there. Today, it popped out a sparking noise (I’m rehearsing what to tell the Mac Geniuses), and set me to checking the Mac forums. Where this seems to be a fairly common problem coming from the left speaker.

As someone who is alarmed by the loud beep that sometimes occurs when the Mac restarts, I got worried. I hurriedly bought the AppleCare. Then I turned on the a/c.

Then I switched work areas. Someone mentioned checking the power supply, maybe something’s amiss with the outlet at the other desk. So far, no more popping.

Interesting that my old Macbook Pro had none of these problems.