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1. My favorite Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto closed last weekend. I've been eating at Jing Jing since they opened in 1986, and it's where I took the traveling Tolkien scholars on their last visit here. Fortunately - purely by luck, because I hadn't known they were closing - I stopped in just last week for a final taste of my favorite lunch special, the braised shrimp.

1a. On the other hand, the long-empty restaurant space just opposite the San Jose State University library has finally reopened, and as a Chinese restaurant. That means I can have lunch there when I visit the library, as I often do. I tried that for the first time also last week, and it was pretty good.

2. California is on the verge of banning plastic shopping bags altogether. (The little ones you put around meats or vegetables are still OK.) I don't know how thrilled I'll be with this, because recycled paper bags are often alarmingly flimsy. But when I pick up our weekly grocery order and it comes in up to 15 plastic bags, disposing of the bags is a nuisance. They can't go in regular recycling. I've been stuffing all the rest of the bags inside one, tossing the inflated lump of them in the back seat of my car, and waiting for the next occasion - maybe once a month - when I get to the one grocery which has a recycling bin for plastic bags.

3. I'm not sure I follow all of this. But remember the recount for the local congressional race? The rule in California is that two top finishers in all-party primaries go on to the finals, but there was a tie for second place. A judge ruled that all three go on to the finals, but somebody paid for a recount (which has to be paid for here by a volunteer, usually the losing candidate). And they found a few extra ballots, but the ironies are 1) the tie was broken for the candidate who tried to stop the recount; 2) nobody knows who paid for the recount, but the money appears to be traceable back to the first-place candidate, who evidently thinks he has a better chance of winning against one opponent than against two.

3a. Also: the candidate who was kicked off the ballot, a long-serving local rep whose dreams of Congress are now at an end, quietly accepted the result. He did not send a mob storming the state capitol or anything like that. In short, he behaved like a human being.

4. A correspondent writes that the Ellen Klages episode of Jeopardy, disappeared from YouTube just after I posted a link to it, may be found in chart form on the online Jeopardy Archive. No video, but you can see all the clues and who got them right. Leaving aside brain freezes during the actual game, which I'm sure would slay me were I an actual contestant if I ever did get the buzzer, which I doubt I would, I find that I could solve about half of the 61 clues in the game, including several that none of the contestants got. I knew Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones" finds a poor Gulf coast family riding out this 2005 disaster & its aftermath even though I'd never heard of the book, because "Gulf coast" and "2005 disaster" were enough clue for me. There were two categories where I knew all five clues: "Amadeus" (a Mozart category) and "Treaties" (a historical category), even though each had one clue that flummoxed all three contestants.

5. Sumer is icumen in. Cats shed much.