TGIF and OTBN..... Woo woo.

Well, I am glad we made it to Friday. A lot of interesting food articles were discovered this week, so we'll get to those in a sec. Lots to say - what a shock.

First off, I want to say that my thoughts and prayers are going out to the Edwards' family, as in John Edwards who is running for President. John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, recently announced that her cancer has returned and it is an incurable form. The good news is that a pretty decent quality of life can be maintained with the right treatment. That being said, it has been consistently reported that Mrs. Edwards was adamant about her husband remaining in the campaign. What galls me is that I can't believe some people are criticizing this family for their decision. It is their own decision and none of our business. Do people not have enough things to worry about? I still have no idea who I am voting for, but obviously I am pulling for the Edwards family as they deal with this news. For the record, I thought that Mr. Edwards was the better Democratic candidate in '04, but that's not giving him a lot of credit when you compare him to John Kerry.

I used to work at Merrill Lynch in their Research Technology area, and we supported all of the equity and fixed income analysts. With all of the regulatory scrutiny recently, everyone seem to be calling for the demise of sell-side research. Clearly this indicates it is not as close to death as people might think. I kind of think of the same thing when people talk about the demise of Windows (yes, that Windows). OK disclaimer - I work on networking technologies (this is another technology I support) on Windows at Microsoft. But why would I work on a product that I did not believe would be successful?!! DUH!

Lisa, my sister who is a guidance counselor in a middle school, has a tough job. Middle school education was the subject of a recent article in the New York Times. Check it out. Incidentally, I am going down in flames in my bracket for the NCAA Men's Tourney. I went the upset route with Duke. Big mistake. HUGE! The Women's Tourney is way more interesting with upsets. Go Marist!

OK - on to some entertainment to lighten things up a bit. I talked about Manny Ramirez auctioning his grill off earlier this week. Well I guess his auction violated eBay policy because they could not verify it was actually him. Too bad, Manny. Goes back to YCMTSU. :-)

R.W. Apple, Jr. keeps living on. He was the subject of a recent article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Mr. Apple's last piece is a glowing portrait of his favorite spots in a story headlined "Savoring Seattle," published in the spring issue of Town & Country Travel. I have blogged about him in the past here and here. He was a kick and seemed like he would have been a really cool person to listen to.

Article in this week's NYT Dining & Wine section regarding cooking with wine. Ian and I took many cooking classes together, and our first one was a paella class at Peter Kump's (now known as the Institute of Culinary Education). I remember the instructor, Shirley King, vividly, and most important, she taught us a very important lesson - keep in mind this was very early on in my cooking days. If a wine is not good enough to drink, why cook with it? I have used that philosophy for years, but this week Julia Moskin argues that you can cook with really poor tasting wine. I suppose you can, but why? There are so many excellent and inexpensive bottles of wine out there. Gosh - that was a fun class. I remember that Ian was massively hungover from too much port from that class.

Speaking of Ian, he always talks about "offroading" in the kitchen. This article talks about that, and I have to say - when you improvise on a recipe under pressure AND it works, it is pretty darn cool.

OTBN is tomorrow, albeit a month late because of the move. I am psyched. More on that on Sunday when Marc and I recover on the couch.