I thought perhaps the stamp rate change had somehow hindered the USPS in creating a Chinese New Year stamp this year, but apparently there was none issued because they are done with all the animals. They finished off with the monkey in 2004, issued a commemorative sheet of all twelve animals in 2005 and ... that's it. If they don't want to bother with new art, I hope they will at least reissue the appropriate animal with updated postage every year.
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Lucy Jane Wasserstein, your mom loved you very very very much. Even if she described your conception as "a surreal cross between PBS’s 'Nature' and the Food Channel." Or maybe especially because she did.

Playwright and author Wendy Wasserstein died on Monday. She was fifty-five. Here is my favorite monologue from her play "An American Daughter" wherein the Jewish African-American Doctor Judith Kaufman remembers some advice during Tashlikh.
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Thursday, January 26, 2006

When I started reading the cover article in the Seattle Times' Sunday magazine "A Man, A Fence, An Empire", I was expecting a boring "entrepreneur IPO'd, bought a mansion, blah blah" story. But the details in the breadth of coverage are fascinating. First there's the atmosphere of the main character's empire's headquarters: a shack on a pier with two outhouses. And said character, Rick Preble, is from Maine so I imagined his "beguiling accent" as he told the story of how a little pile of wood outside a New Hampshire doorway led him to a niche market in fence postcaps that provided $15 million in sales last year. Along the way I found out that Lowe's store design and marketing are more attractive to women, who typically hold the postcap buying power as it's a decorative item. And I learned how Preble coped with making the hard choice to move his manufacturing to China, and that, contrary to what you may believe, he is getting high quality, detail oriented work that he would not have obtained from the ultimate mechanization of his production in the U.S. Preble and his partner (owner of that little pile of wood) sold the company for $8.5 million, but Preble has stayed on in his shack on the pier and travels the world evangelizing his postcaps.
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Thursday, January 12, 2006

When my friend Pavel moved from the SF Bay area to the Seattle area he was unable to find Republic of Tea's Cardamon Cinnamon in local stores. I kept an eye out whenever I saw Republic of Tea displays and happened across it at Whole Foods in Seattle (this was before the Bellevue store opened) but they only had it loose, not in bags. He decided this was acceptable, but since then has been trying various methods of infusing loose tea in his mug at work. For reasons best left to psychoanalysts specializing in some odd cross-section of typical female behavior and Chinese culture, I felt responsible for achieving closure on his tea enjoyment. Thus when I came across the Teastick (and found out they take Paypal) I had to get it for him. Here's his Teastick review. And here's a photo I took of all the packaging it arrived in. (As for me, I just dump loose tea in the bottom of a teapot or mug. That way I can read my fortune.)
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My father used to read me Dr. Seuss' "Hop on Pop" and it's the book I first remember recognizing words in. Thus, it's the first book I ever read! I hadn't looked at it since I was a kid but I bought a board book version for our son so I could read it to him. He loves it and actually asks for it in baby babble: "hob bob pob?". In the book there's a drawing of "Red, Ned, Ted and Ed in Bed." I've decided that "Ted" is actually a self portrait of the author, Theodor Seuss Geisel. I'm sure I'm right because he looks like an actual human instead of a typical Seuss character and, well, his name was "Ted", so of course it's him. Perhaps this is common knowledge amongst Seuss fans. Now that I've noticed this neat self reference, the book is even more fun.
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