I'll let Catherine fill you in on all of the details, but right now she's napping: we just got back from a cooking class at Galileo. Between the two of us that's about 9 hours and 3 bottles of wine. Chef Roberto Donna does these classes focusing on a theme -- today's was pasta. We made yards and yards, then ate it and staggered home. You can look forward to wildly optimistic posts about future homemade pasta odysseys, promptly followed by oddly brief or entirely nonexistent updates brimming with unspoken recriminations.

Aside from that inevitable unpleasantness, I highly recommend the experience. You know those celebrity fantasy basketball camps that rich middle aged guys go to, at which they jockey with one another to receive compliments from Michael Jordan (or whoever) like "nice bounce pass!" and other phrases not ending with the word "jerk"? It was like that.

Did you roll that gnocchi yourself? Very impressive! The way you almost knocked over your wine but didn't? You looked like a pro! And I couldn't help but notice that you failed to burn yourself. You know, I've been looking for someone to head up the kitchen at our new location...

Yeah, I lapped it up.

So: the Architecture in Helsinki CD. It sounds like somebody snuck a Talking Heads CD and a bottle of schnapps along on the overnight trip to the state band competition. I'm starting to think this is (occasionally) a pretty great thing, but Catherine remains unconvinced. What say you?

(Do the Whirlwind kind of sucks, tho)

UPDATE: Also, I forgot to mention that the opening notes sounds exactly like The Undertaker's entrance music. But that's an impossibly awesome standard to live up to.

you know what the large, front-page picture on the washington post today was?

a camera phone shot, taken by a london subway rider, of people trudging through a dark, smokey tunnel. the post has an article here on the immediacy offered by such shots, and includes the photo they used on their front page in the sidebar. no, it's not great quality, but it shows terror and context and raw information better than any professional photojournalist could have.

despite the horrific nature of the attacks, i think that is rather amazing.