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I found this wonderful new site tonight called Clean Scores. You can type in any cafe, restaurant, coffee place, etc. and find out their health inspection record history. This is brilliant. For an anti-germ person like me, I crossed my fingers and put in my favorite bites in SF and found out that the lowest score for my favorite places is a 90 for my favorite Indian buffet - so, it’s not as bad as it could be. The website is currently only for SF places of business, but it says that it is “coming soon to all metropolitan areas”. Stay tuned. And…get online before you make reservations.

Check it out - from the word of the day.

triskaidekaphobia \tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh\, noun: A morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th

I found this article tonight on The New York Times and found it quite lovely. The article is entitled Rain Aside, It’s Clear Skies. This piece speaks about a man who runs a bird business that basically uses hawks, falcons and owls to reduce loitering pigeons in the London area. He has gained attention for his work at Wimbledon that was a haven for pesky pigeons until the falcons showed up! I love this solution. No gadgets, no chemicals, no traps, just an innovative way to use nature to solve this fowl problem. I think San Francisco could use one of these businesses.

StoryCorps airs on Friday mornings on our local NPR radio station. I usually miss it due to oversleeping and running late, however, I can check it out online and still catch this amazing program every week. This week was an unbelievable story called Wisconsin Author Trip: Meeting J.D. Salinger. In the late 1960s, Jim Krawczyk drove to New Hampshire to meet his favorite author, J.D. Salinger. I can’t tell you what happens, you have to go and read it for yourself.

Yay! NPR’s summer reading list can be found at NPR: Summer Books 2007.

I love finding new books to read and usually have too many books for the limited time I have for reading. I have Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in my “to read” pile. I am also actively reading Villette by Charlotte Bronte, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and Grace Eventually by Anne LaMott. I am also trying to frantically catch up with the avalanche of New Yorker magazines that keep arriving in my mailboxes and after a weekend in Portland with one of my friends, another big stack of “to read” novels.

My picks so far this year are The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I LOVE to read and can’t get enough. So, now I have another source of summer reading teases. NPR will keep updating this summer reading page, so keep checking back - there are sure to be more good reads!