Embarassingly, it took a bunch of stuffed animals magicked into a cartoon by the creative mind of none other than Chris Onstad to make me (and my bad-ass-bread-making-self) feel a little more masculine, whatever that means.

As a side note: although Cornelius's ability to make pasta out of the ingredients provided is impressive (I agree that he should have won, especially given Lyle and Téodor's creations, and even then probably without them), he could not possibly have made a bona fide malloreddus pasta with the ingredients that Ray and Roast Beef provided. By all accounts, malloreddus requires saffron for flavoring.

When I first read this Trib story about people who live in downtown Chicago buying second homes in downtown Milwaukee to take in the arts-scene and downtown life, I was deeply amused. It seemed like living in New York but buying season tickets to the opera in D.C.

Then again, people live in New York but vacation in Paris, live in D.C. but vacation in Boston, and so on, so perhaps living a double-urban life is not as weird as it seems. And apparently lakefront and dockside real estate in Milwaukee is affordable, so what we are talking about is not choosing Milwaukee over Paris but having a second home versus not having one at all.

I'm a long way personally and financially from being in a situation where such things are any sort of serious consideration. But I can't imagine how people with two homes decide where to keep all of their books. I had a hard enough time deciding which books I could keep in my carrel at the law school and which ones should remain in the shelves at my apartment.