You know what drives me batty? When people�mostly chefs on TV�with a usually straight American accent (whatever that is) over-pronounce foreign words. Sometimes they�re first generation American, as in the case of Jacques Pepin�s daughter� the way she whisks the words �pinot noir� off her tongue just irritates me. Michael Chiarello (above) is another one. I didn�t notice it until Brent pointed it out to me. His pronunciation of �prosciutto� is scathing. If I�m watching his show and Brent�s around he has to go play guitar. His show is good, though. There was one on tomatoes that made me cry� he was eating them right off the vine, still warm, with a little bit of coarse salt. I did have PMS, which could account for tomato-related tears.

Oh! This is too good. Lemurs and John Cleese on PBS! Yay! He adores lemurs as much as I do. They�re native to Madagascar only and are just so darn cool. They�re a very docile, migratory familial bunch. I saw this one program on lemurs a few years ago where cameramen followed lemurs in their migration. One of the babies, (Sapphire, pictured above with his mother) was all white, the runt, and was too cute. But he got sick and had a distended belly and ended up dying and they had to leave him behind. It was one of the saddest things I�ve ever seen. Watching the mother trying to leave the baby was unbelievable. They had to move on because it in their nature. Tears flowed. So lemurs make the scariest freakin� sound I think I�ve ever heard� if the sound I just heard was them and not some weird monkey-human. It sounded vaguely like the uncomfortable vocalizing in the middle of Morrissey�s �November Spawned a Monster� only more violent. It was like maniacal laughing and schizophrenic screaming at the same time. The ring-tailed lemurs sound like they�re meowing. Anyway, they�re fun. They have �stink fights� over territory, not unlike what goes on at Charlie�s kitchen weekend nights after 2:15 when everyone�s out on the sidewalk trying to decide where (and how) to go. This also goes on some Thursday nights. Actually, one of the bartenders just got fired because one of her friends decided to punch one of my acquaintances. Then he got in a (stink) fight with Jup (pronounced Yup), the odd Swedish (?) owner's brother, who runs the joint. He has the strangest accent I've ever heard, I think. So the chick got fired and she was a crappy bartender anyway.

I just had dinner with Wil and Susan and it was very good. Susan and I went underwear shopping and then Wil made chicken booda. Delish.

I think I even cried once watching Antiques Roadshow... but I swear it was a really good one! It was this early painting by an American folk artist that had been perfectly preserved because it was under a relatively uninteresting poster for years and years. The woman who brought it in didn't even know it was under there and it ended up being worth like hundreds of thousands of clams. If that doesn't bring a tear to your eye... well, you don't have PMS.