When you start waking up to your roommate singing, loudly and off-key, random selections from the catalogues of The Rentals, Nada Surf and the New Pornographers, it's a good sign that either he has lost his mind, or he has recently gotten an iPod shuffle, or both.

Thursday last it took someone else to push me into finally ordering omakase (the chef's choice) at a sushi restaurant. We ordered it for four, and were brought an approximately three-foot diameter plate with huge chunks of salmon, tuna and yellowtail sashimi, many smaller slices of white tuna and sea bass, various nigiri, large christmas roll and tempura roll, smaller salmon roll, and eel hand rolls. Hot sake accompanied. My roommate's later comment was quite true, that one can enjoy this food more when not having to worry about savoring each piece sufficiently.

Two days later I attended a friend's wedding party for the first time ever, at his house in Scarsdale. It was an "ex post facto" affair, as the coworking couple married on their lunch break five months ago without telling almost anyone, and were only now bringing their families together. We were given a tour of his father's recreation room, which houses a collection of DVD's that he estimates at three thousand, as well as some tapes and laserdiscs. A motorized screen and projector display them. He proudly showed me box sets, twenty-one Laurel and Hardy movies, another involving the name "Camillo" that I'd never heard of. Semi-bootleg editions of lesser known Akira Kurosawa films. It was an offbeat assortment, perhaps because he already had more essential titles on earlier formats. The three-disc Criterion edition of "Brazil" was still in shrink-wrap. I'd been thinking of adjourning my collection at around 500, but how can I now, with what I've seen?

After reading about the Unicorn Tapestries in the New Yorker, I went to see them at the Cloisters. They are pretty incredible in many ways. Seeing their threads up close it was easier to understand the trouble one might get into trying to photograph them in smaller sections. But I do wish the NY could have thrown us some kind of technical-detail-bone as to what sort of equations would be used to iron out the discrepancies. Were they physically modeling the movements of the threads, or examining the colors of the threads to see which ones should line up? Instead we get silly lines like "There were at least a hundred billion numbers in the shopping bags." How many atoms were there? That's probably a crazy big number too! Also, I wonder if anyone else has commented on how much the Chudnovsky brothers sound like the inspiration for the movie "Pi:" they built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail order parts with a frame of plastic pipe and closet racks, and used it to compute two billion digits of Pi with the hope of finding a pattern, and they're a bit weird (one of them has debilitating allergies and they think of themselves as one mathematician inhabiting two bodies).