The best food writing isn't about snooty reactions to snooty cooking, but is like a personal conversation with someone you care about. A.J. Liebling's <I>Between Meqls: An appetite For Paris</I>, Jim Harrison's <I>The Raw and the Cooked</I>, and just about anything by Ruth Reichl all come to mind. And then there's <I>The Great British Crisp Challenge</I>, which is lively and entertaining as all get out.

I like Andy Ward's illustration style, especially some of these recreations of classic album covers. Of course, in his "Fantasy League Allstars 1," he <I>does</I> have Hendrix playing guitar right-handed, but maybe in his fantasy Jimi plays rightside up.

Already tired of the James Frey and JT LeRoy scandals? Actually, that sounds like a <I>Jeopardy</I> question: Two writers Wes never heard of before they got outed as fakes.

I'm pretty happy with the way <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/011006mothers/">yesterday's entry</a> came out, but it didn't go the way I meant it to.

Jon Iverson, Stephen Mejias, and I were sitting in the Venetian's food court after the Primedia cocktail party on Saturday night with Mo-Fi's Coleman Brice and Music Direct's Bes Nievera, Jr. We'd wanted to grab some sushi, but Tsunami (what an unfortunate name) didn't have a reservation for five for another two hours and our second choice, an Italian restaurant (what else?) had just laughed when we asked. So we wound up eating pizza slices off of vinyl tables rather than sashimi off of bamboo.

Climb the AP's stairs day by day, <BR>
Push on through the screaming fray,<BR>
Get those pictures anyway.

Hansen is a new line of ultra high-end speakers from Canada, using proprietary drivers and said to feature extremely dense, non-resonant enclosures. The company is headed by Lars Hansen, who, as former president of the Dahlquist Corporation, is no stranger to the world of high-end speakers. The sound of the Prince ($27,000/pair, third model from the top) was simply excellent&mdash;an auspicious debut, I felt.