This is not a picture I would have predicted being in at age thirty.  But overall this picture is not a bad place to be.   Don’t my students look so cute in their dress blues?

The restaurant for the 24th Street Project has an online home. Kind of.

Last week, a few people held a belated surprise birthday party for To-Shi-O, who is my beloved roommate of lo these last three-and-a-half-plus years. By complete coincidence I also happen to be To-Shi-O’s beloved roommate of lo these last three-and-a-half-plus years and so I was invited. To the best of our combined ability we dressed in costume as Him, transcribed His paper crane tattoo upon our forearms, and greeted Him in the way of his own tongue, thus consummating the cult of To-Shi-O. And the good thing about belated surprise birthday parties is that they are all the more unexpected.

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The principle printing for the 24th Street project is in the books.  Oh my god!  I didn’t think it was possible.  Yet tonight at 9:22 pm PST, the following took place:

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That’s right: the final pull of the final piece.  If you thought that was boring, imagine setting up one hundred and four of those screens and watching the video seven hundred and sixteen times.   Okay so it wasn’t the biggest project in the world, but at least I can show up at my day job now.

Here are the last two prints: Potrero and Vermont.

My favorite part of today’s SF Chronicle:

I guess one of my  new year resolutions is to try some new San Francisco restaurants.  If I sound reluctant it is only because when it it comes to San Francisco restaurants, I am an arrogant motherfucker who believes his taste to be impeccable without even trying.

The truth is that I’ve been getting lazy.  For that reason it was a rare treat to discover two new instant favorites in one weekend.  The inspiration to crawl out of my comfort zone came in the form of the San Francisco Panorama’s “Best of the Rest,”  twenty short profiles of low key restaurants relatively unknown outside of their neighborhoods.  As soon as I saw Cordon Bleu on this list—A Vietnamese restaurant in my old neighborhood specializing in dumping gallons of meat sauce over sticky rice—I knew what they had in mind.  This sort of thing was supposed to be the promise of yelp.com, totally undelivered as far as I’m concerned (If I had the time to waste sifting for useful information amidst an endless roll call of losers looking for a place to validate their petty grievances, then I would just prefer to be reading the Craigslist casual encounters where the pictures are a lot clearer).

So I guess my resolution is to try every new place on this list.  These first two selections did not disappoint.

This list is also trustworthy.