It’s a train I really want to ride with Peter some day, dressed to the nines… 
Put the term into Google and all kinds of things come out. But I think one of the most entertaining is this knowledgeable dissertation by Mark Smith, who runs the website “The Man in Seat Sixty-One”, an incredible concatenation of info about riding the rails in Europe. Comprehensive doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s a true labor of love…and accurate.
“Paper capable of playing videos has been invented at the Philips Research laboratory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. 
“…The invention is the latest version of ‘electronic ink’. Researchers hope to combine the convenience, robustness and readability of printed material with the vast and flexible information content of laptop computers.
“In principle, a plastic sheet covered with electronic ink could display an entire library, page by page. The information would be stored in a portable chip, and the display would be powered by a slimline, lightweight battery. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would weigh no more than a feather.”
“Not only is the country’s leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.”
“Taken from the Japanese words wabi, which translates to less is more, and sabi, which means attentive melancholy, wabi sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in the things that bear the mark of this impermanence. As a design style, wabi sabi helps us to appreciate the simple beauty in imperfection�of a chipped vase or a rainy day, for example.”
(Oh, boy, I’ve got their rain and chipped stuff right here…)
While I was in LA doing “on-site” work on The Ring, I passed by a restaurant with a banner on it that said “Tokyo-Style Cuisine”. That interested me, so I tried it, and I really liked it. 
The restaurant is called “Musha”; it’s at 424 Wilshire Boulevard. What attracted me — besides the idea of trying a Japanese regional cuisine, even if only an urban one — was that the menu had different sorts of things from what you normally see in a “mainstream” Japanese restaurant. What I particularly liked was the “shichirin” grilling, in which they bring you a little crucible of odor-free live charcoal and some beautifully cut meat or fish to grill over it, piece by piece, at your own speed. A pleasant way to wind down after a hard day’s script-bashing. The staff were friendly and helpful: the place has a comfortable, casual feel.
Here’s Musha’s web page (in Japanese). (A post at this discussion forum suggests that this restaurant is an outpost of an older, bigger branch in Torrance.) For anyone who might be interested, I’ll link to a complete scan of their menu at some point. A .PDF file of its first page is here. (Beware, the file is about 1.2 Mb.)
And by popular demand, here are the other menu pages: page 2, page 3, and page 4.
“My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth.” (California Governor Gray Davis)
“All nine members of a panel of outside experts, established by Congress to advise NASA on safety, resigned on Monday, with several citing frustration over their lack of influence.”
“Two federal agencies announced today that they had opened investigations into JetBlue Airways in response to the airline’s admission that it had provided travel records on more than a million passengers to a Pentagon contractor, violating its own privacy rules.”
“The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, report U.S. and Canadian scientists.”
…But some interesting news, too, concerning Stone Age farming at Heathrow, Oetzi’s last battle (DNA testing reveals that the blood on his clothes and body came from at least four other people. Quick, somebody call Grissom at CSI!…), levorotatory amino acids as “bouncers” in the primordial soup, how the birth of fashion “caused” body lice, and mass extinction via methane mega-fart.
“The solar system’s greatest explorer will perish in a kamikaze dive into the solar system’s biggest planet late tomorrow. It detected a salt water ocean under the ice of Europa…and an unexpected magnetic field around the largest [of Jupiter’s satellites], Ganymede. The mission was meant to last a couple of years. Altogether, Galileo spent 14 years away from Earth. It was designed to survive only so much of the fierce radiation from Jupiter before it failed: it absorbed four times the planned amount and kept on sending photographs and data back to mission control at Pasadena, California.
“…It sped past Io as a giant fountain of fire erupted from its volcanic surface, and it detected liquid salt water on Ganymede and Callisto. And it did all this with a temperamental tape recorder, a main communications antenna that failed to deploy, an onboard computer of the kind used to play Pac-man games, and the spare power to light up a 60 watt bulb.”
Once upon a time, a couple of decades ago, there was a terrific notecard / art book / children’s book publisher called “Green Tiger Press”. They specialized in the publication of gorgeous cards and prints of children’s-book art of the late 19th and early 20th century — featuring artists like (for example) Arthur Rackham, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Edmund Dulac, and Johny Gruelle, among many others.
After a while, to my great annoyance, Green Tiger (and its beautiful catalogs) went away. But now the original family involved in the company have reconstituted their business as Laughing Elephant, and have also reacquired the Green Tiger Press imprint, under which they’re once again beginning to bring back into print old children’s books that have fallen by the wayside.
I’m so glad to see them back!
The coolest thing on their site at the moment, to my mind: the book of period luggage labels from the Golden Age of Travel, including forty die-cut, self-adhesive reproduction labels to slap on your own luggage. What better way to set aside your Samsonite from all the others on that luggage carousel…
No matter how many drafts a book goes through, no matter how many times I deal with the manuscript or proofs on the way to press, a book isn’t really real for me until the day I’m holding a bound copy in my hands. Today was that day for Wizard’s Holiday.
It looks nice. To me, anyhow…
Thanks to Dave Barry’s blog for this.