What's Making Me Happy This Week

// Five minutes of Michael Kors' best zingers on Project Runway. Let's view them as wordsmithy little wonders instead of barbed insults and lauuuugh, shall we?

via GIPHY

// An Insta friend put me on to a new Chinese place and we're going on Friday.

// Speaking of plans, I made a massage appointment and that's making me very happy.

// Speaking of Instagram, this brief interview with the co-founder is interesting (as is the rest of the podcast - I'm loving the New Yorker Radio Hour).

// Speaking of plans and podcasts, this segment of Good Food featured three friends who based their half marathon training runs around restaurants they wanted to try. This is a running plan I'd be interested in!

// Ok one more podcast: the thought-provoking segment on On the Media: Is This Food Racist? Why is the most famous chef of Mexican cuisine in the US a white dude from Oklahoma (Rick Bayless)? At the end of the episode Dan Pashman says he thinks even a superficial understanding of another culture through food is better than no understanding at all. I thought about my last cab ride home from the airport when I asked the driver where he was from: Ethiopia. I've never been to Ethiopia, don't know anyone from Ethiopia, don't know anything about its history, but I did have dinner in an Ethiopian place ages ago and I brought this up: the flat sourdough-y pancake that was so delicious. "The injera!" he said and we had a fascinating conversation about Ethiopian food culture and coffee culture and how he opened and closed a restaurant here in San Antonio. All because I mentioned one long-ago dining experience.

[Part of a multipart series on the podcast The Sporkful, Other People's Food.]

// We watched a few episodes of Last Week Tonight and it's uproariously funny and incisive. I about died laughing when John Oliver described himself as looking like "a near-sighted parrot who works at a bank."