On August 7, February Flowers, a lyrical first novel set in southern China was published in the United States, where its author, Fan Wu, makes her home. I know Fan as Cindy, the name she took 10 years ago when she arrived in California for graduate school. After earning a masters from Stanford in Mass Media Studies, Cindy took a job at Yahoo!, and that’s how we met.

In 2000, I was writing and editing Yahoo! Picks and Ask Yahoo!. Cindy wanted to know more about my work. We talked about writing — and reading — in English. Her appetite for literature was wide-ranging and eclectic. I remember a conversation about Raymond Carver’s short stories. At that time, she was attracted to Carver’s lean American prose. We also spoke about Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born storyteller who lived in Britain and wrote brilliant and prolific fiction in English, and Ha Jin, the award-winning contemporary Chinese-American writer.

By 2002, Cindy had begun to write fiction in English. She attended writers’ workshops and found mentors and peers. She read, she wrote — and she kept working. Work at Yahoo! paid the bills, and gave her the freedom to find her own way as a writer.

Fast forward to September 2006. February Flowers by Fan Wu debuts in Asia and Australia, where it receives exultant reviews. The story of two young women students in China in the early nineteen nineties, it explores a friendship that blossoms within the confines of a “restrained” traditional culture during a time of social change. China was beginning to prosper and open up to the west. In the self-reliant, independent-minded characters of the two friends, traditional China is remixed with the new. The girls grow up and drift apart. Years later, Ming, the narrator, recovers memories of their friendship in a new century, on her way to a new continent.

So, where’s Cindy now? Recently Fan Wu left her job at Yahoo! to focus on her second novel. This week, I emailed to ask her about life after Yahoo!. Cindy replied:

“Writing is a lonely pursuit. In my post-Yahoo! life, I, of course, miss getting paid every two weeks, but what I miss the most is not being able to see my Yahoo! friends often, to chat over lunch or coffee…”

In the coming months, you can find her around the Bay Area at a variety of book readings, signings and events. And catch her at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park on Thursday, August 23 at 7:30 pm.

Tell her Yodel Anecdotal sent you!

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

If there’s one thing Yahoo! employees strive for, it’s excellence in the area of innovation. We know this because we recently read the inspiring “Yahoo! We Value…” list, and it’s right there in purple and white: 1. Excellence; 2. Innovation. In fact, those two items beat Customer Fixation down to number 3, and that has the word “fixation” in it. So maybe we’d go so far as to say “obsessively striving for excellence in the area of innovation.”

Having gone to the trouble of writing the “Yahoo! We Value…” list, we’re sure upper management is heartened to see two of Yahoo!’s finest taking their ideas to heart. While some employees waste away their days refining dull search algorithms or trying to save the planet, we (John Allspaw and Dunstan Orchard) instead focused on something a little more real, a little more innovative, and a lot more excellent.

Behold the wonder that is Faceball:

More behind-the-scenes action here.

John Allspaw & Dunstan Orchard
Faceball Founders

Mike Krumboltz has seen a lot of questions over the years.

In fact, since November 2004, his entire role has been to look over questions submitted by users, choose one interesting query each day, and then hunt down the answer. His job was to write for Ask Yahoo!. Haven’t heard of it? That’s probably because Ask Yahoo! is now a thing of the past…

Ask Yahoo! was started in 1998 as a way for Internet users to pose questions to a team of Yahoo! surfers who would then search the Net to find answers. Mike’s tracked down answers on everything from dog saliva to impact of bovine gas on the environment to the order of succession for the office of POTUS. But ever since Yahoo! Answers launched and grew in popularity, Mike has had to deal with a minor identity crisis. Was Ask Yahoo! obsolete? What would Mike do if Ask Yahoo! went away?

A solution arose: give Mike a featured spot in Yahoo! Answers where he can continue to show off his mad cyberspace research skills. That’s the birds and the bees on how “Ask Mike” was born.

To ask Mike a question, you’d have to email him at y_answrs_mikek@yahoo.com, but he was nice enough to grant me some exclusive Q&A time.

You only just moved to Yahoo! Answers a few weeks ago. Do you miss Ask Yahoo!?
I do miss Ask Yahoo!, but writing for Yahoo! Answers is fun because it’s more challenging. I’ve opened myself up to more feedback – sometimes it’s positive, sometimes it’s really negative, and other times, it’s just really weird.

How’d you get this job in the first place?
I went to Miami University in Ohio. When majored in psych at Miami University in Ohio, I knew that I didn’t want to do anything with that. I lived in New York for a while, came back to the Silicon Valley, and got a job in Yahoo! Shopping as a production assistant on Video and DVD shopping. A year later I got moved to surfing, and from the moment I started in surfing I knew I wanted a shot at editorial work. Finally after two years they let me try my hand at Ask Yahoo!.

What’s the most common question you’re asked?
I get sent a lot of really inappropriate questions. People know we’d obviously never use them, but they are pretty funny to read.

Most controversial question you’ve ever answered?
Surprisingly the question about why so many people are afraid of clowns has had huge response.

What’s the toughest question you’ve ever had to research?
I remember one I did about the voice that says “please hang up and try again” on the telephone. That took a long time, but I finally found the woman and it was quite rewarding.

Have you ever been wrong?
Yes, I have been wrong. What comes to mind is a question I answered about Seinfeld. Someone asked what Kramer’s job was. I wrote that he didn’t really have one, but that he did take part in lots of schemes. I got lots of email saying I was wrong, that Kramer actually worked for a bagel shop, but was on strike the entire series. I ended up quietly correcting the answer.

Favorite types of questions to answer?
I really like word origin questions. Also I love researching urban legends and longstanding myths. I like writing about search trends too. I definitely put science as my least favorite question type; I peaked in 8th grade with that subject.

What are your best Internet search tips?
Putting quotes around search terms is really helpful when trying to narrow down search results. Also, use the minus sign.

What does that do?
Say you’re searching for a restaurant and your results are all about a movie with the same name. You can type -movie in your search to help eliminate results that include the movie title.

So if “Ask Mike” is work, what are your hobbies?
Well, I love to sleep. I love movies.

Are you one of those awesome-memory movie buffs who remember every plot detail, actor, trivial quotation?
Yes, yes. I amuse and annoy.

Ever make a movie of your own?
Yes actually! I was a finalist in the Radio Alice’s Three Minute Film Festival in San Francisco inspired by a comic urban legend.

That’s some great Mike Krumboltz trivia right there. Now see if you can go stump him.

Doreen Bloch
Yahoo! Intern

This Sunday, June 10, San Francisco will host the fifth annual Great Gorilla Run. Hundreds of people, including myself and five other Yahoos, will be running in full gorilla suits through Golden Gate Park.

I first got interested in this race because I heard if you donate a small fee to save the last 700 remaining mountain gorillas of Central Africa, you get a free gorilla suit. But really, it’s a great cause, and I’m glad we’ll be there supporting it. In fact, we were so excited that last week when we received our gorilla suits, we immediately put them on and paraded around the Yahoo! campus.

When I started working at Yahoo! almost a year ago, I didn’t expect to find so many people so passionate about so many causes – and we don’t just give money. Many Yahoos donate their time to causes they care about. That’s how I first got involved in racing. A co-worker suggested I join the team called “Yahoo!’s Your Daddy” for a relay competition last month where we ran 199 miles from Calistoga to Santa Cruz to benefit children in need of organ transplants.

If you make it to the race Sunday, keep an eye out for a gorilla wearing a purple Yahoo! cape – that’ll be me. And if you’d like to don your own hairy suit and beat your chest, act fast. There’s still time to join us (registration ends tonight!), or you can donate online to the cause. But whatever you do, don’t call us crazy – we prefer the term bananas.

What sort of incentive do you provide employees to encourage them to reduce their use of non-renewable resources by 20%? A chance to watch your founders sumo wrestle each other.

For the week prior to Earth Day, Yahoos at our Sunnyvale headquarters were challenged to do their part to reduce our impact on the environment. They rose to the challenge and turned off lights in conference rooms, took the stairs, made do with less air conditioning, avoided printing or went double-sided, used mugs, ditched their commutes for public transportation or carpools, and ate a little less meat. And today, we collected our payment.

Why sumo wrestling, you might ask? It goes back to our roots. Co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were graduate exchange students together in Kyoto in 1992 while at Stanford and got addicted to sumo wrestling. They named their first servers after sumo greats Akebono and Konishiki and Jerry’s first collection of web pages was dedicated to the sport. Jerry and David held their first match for employees in 1999 and, with some prodding, agreed to a rematch to mark this impressive achievement.

We’re busy editing the priceless video to post in the next few days. In the meantime, to figure out who won, check out the photos here and here.

UPDATE: As promised, here’s the video.

Jerry watches as David dons his protective wig helmet

Sumo Jerry, appropriately embellished with greenery

Sumo David, flanked by paparazzi

Today we’re launching Underground, presented by Yahoo! News, a new initiative that explores America’s fringe cultures with reporting brought to life with original songs and music. Beginning today, April 1, you can visit underground.yahoo.com to check out videos, photos, slideshows, and blog posts about the world of the weird, the strangely compelling, the land of “who are these people?” Ever heard of “drifting,” “krumping,” or “rocketeering”? “Filkers” and “furries” (see the video below)? Tempted by what goes on at a sci-fi convention? Underground takes quirky to new heights, giving you the chance to duck into cultures and ideas well beyond the beaten path. Some might even leave you asking, “WTF?”

Our host, creator and fearless leader into these unexplored worlds is veteran journalist, Broadway gypsy, and Renaissance man Brad Miskell. Brad embeds himself in fringe cultures so he can share the most outlandish stories of people pursuing their passions. He scours big cities and back waters alike to bring us some incredible tales. With an eye for the unusual and an ear to the ground, Brad shapes stories with a witty and light-hearted compassion for his subjects. In addition to filming, editing, and reporting every Underground segment, Brad also composes original musical pieces with his stories, which is why we call him the “rock-n-raconteur.”

The coolest part about Underground is that we’re looking to you, dear reader, to help us feed the beast. We’ll be scouring the planet and we want your goods — send us your awesome photos and videos as they relate to the subcultures we’re covering. Or contribute media about your own strangely compelling passions. After all, today we’re covering Trekkies, tomorrow could be your Aunt Myrtle’s lawnmower racing and speed-metal club. And if it’s not for you, that’s fine — we call it Underground for a reason.

Go ahead, let your freak flag fly.

Cyrus Krohn
Director of Production
Yahoo! News & Information

I know better than to call my mom on Sundays during football season. This is a woman who spends her time organizing chamber music festivals, laboring over intricate French sauce recipes, raising honeybees, reading Marcel Proust aloud on long car trips and weeding between her delphinium and dianthus. But give her a good NFL match-up and a cold one and even a transcontinental call from her grandchild won’t break her loose from her television.

That’s because my mom learned that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. As Paul Reiser said in “Diner,” “We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.” That’s exactly what Yahoo! Mobile Business Operations Manager Susan Gagnier was after when she decided to write “Putting on the Blitz: The Football Book for Women” (Action Press, $39.95).

Football widows everywhere — sneer from the kitchen no more. With this coffee-table book, you’ll not only know your “button-hooks” from your “crackbacks,” you’ll discover that “eligible receivers” are quite different from “hot men” (defined in the glossary as the only two men allowed to immediately leave the punt formation when the ball is snapped). The book covers the gamut from understanding the psychology of men and sports to basic game strategy (making sense of those Xs and Os) to football history. Susan explains the roles of the seven referees (complete with handy drawings of their signals), provides an overview of each NFL team (covering names, logos and uniforms) and gets into football fashion, dissecting the more than a dozen pieces of gear designed to fortify against collisions of 66,000 pounds. Susan even ultimately added a section on cheerleaders, described as unsung athletes (did you know they earn just 50 bucks a game?).

And what football book is complete without a chapter on “Entertaining with Football Flair?” Susan provides recipes and menu suggestions for each team’s region. Fortunately for you, the Bears and the Colts both hail from the Midwest, so you can confidently serve anything from veal scaloppini to whitefish baked with mashed potatoes to pork roast with prunes.

Susan, who writes under the pen name Suzanna Gagnier, learned football the hard way: running up and down a football field as a high school varsity statistician, which she learned wouldn’t get her much attention from cute guys. She quickly knew as much as the next guy about sweeps, pitch-outs, clipping and shooting the gap. In fact, her inspiration for the book came when she was arguing with a guy about which team had the best Super Bowl chances and he responded, “I wish my girlfriend knew as much about football as you do.”

A die-hard Seahawks fan (mainly because she loves to hate the Raiders), Susan joined Yahoo! in 2005. A single mom working full-time, she spent about two-and-a-half years writing the book. She wears lots of hats in our mobile division, yet has found great support for the 3 television and 10 radio interviews she’s done across the country since word got out about the book (even the Today Show and Ellen DeGeneres’ staff called for a copy).

We’re t-minus three days to the Super Bowl. Thanks to Susan, now that I know my coffin corner from my deep zone, I’ll be too busy to call my mom.

Get your copy here.

Yahoo! PR Director Terra Carmichael makes me tired. She has 19-month-old twins boys. She writes a clever mommy blog. She commutes two-plus hours a day. She works (nearly) full time. And somewhere in there, she’s finding the time to mind her new online baby store, FlyingPeas.

When she handled public relations for Yahoo! Small Business, she watched thousands of individual merchants launch online stores as side projects to their day jobs, and that got her thinking. “They were seeing wild success selling everything from singing garden gnomes to fridge magnets, processing orders after dinner,” she says. “I decided this was something I’d like to do eventually. I’ve always wanted to have my own store but never wanted to leave Yahoo! to do it. This seemed a perfect hybrid.”

After her twins arrived, this hip mama discovered the vast majority of baby boy gear came in a soft powder blue, devoid of attitude or personality. “Whenever I rarely came across products that were both high-quality and hip, I was ecstatic. So, I decided to take it upon myself not only to find these products, but to let the world know about them… and buy them,” she explains.

A month after launching FlyingPeas, Terra is already on a first-name basis with her UPS man. Merchandise includes skull and retro robot baby blankets, sassy baby duds, polka-dotted piggy banks, personalized books and art, mommy jewelry, chic baby furniture, and stuffed animals with attitude. You’ll see from her customer showcase page that I’m a big fan. Hosted on the Yahoo! Store platform and built by Yahoo! partner Solid Cactus, FlyingPeas now eats up Terra’s little remaining spare time (when she’s not scraping mac’n'cheese and veggie burgers off the floor). She’s come a long way from the girl who didn’t know what web hosting was.

Perhaps the best gravy is the connection Terra’s making with customers, particularly those reading her blog. “One woman confessed she’d spent about an hour reading before starting her shopping spree.” A few people even emailed with healthy thoughts when they read that Terra’s son was in the hospital with pneumonia last month. “Dealing with the customers (so far!) has been so rewarding and encouraging. Even though I haven’t sat on my couch to watch TV in weeks and my mail/bills pile is reaching an all-time high, it’s exactly how I’d hoped it would be.”

When I first started at Yahoo! in 2000, the only mothers around here were those who didn’t return from maternity leave. Today, we’re a fast-growing demographic, making the crazy balancing act work. And, in Terra’s case, doing it enviably well.

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal