… and heading to DC, where tomorrow I’ll speak at what used to be my neighborhood bookstore: Politics and Prose. Yesterday my two daughters amicably divided up the swag from my Google and Facebook appearances. I was briefly tempted to keep the Google cap for myself, but my paternal side won out in the end. 

Larry Mantle is interviewing me live at 11:30 a.m. today on KPCC, a local NPR station in LA.

Yesterday’s talk at Google was a lot of fun—in particular the pre-talk tour of the quasi-utopian Googleplex and my brief encounter with CEO Eric Schmidt. I asked Eric if I could go to work at Google (which gives employees, among other things, free sushi and heavily subsidized massages), and he politely suggested that I lack the requisite engineering skills. Oh, well—there’s more than one fish in the Silicon Valley Sea: This afternoon, I’m giving a talk at Facebook. Plus, I’m having breakfast with some Silicon Valley potentates at the home of the extremely generous Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf and famous connector. (Speaking of generosity: Yesterday The Huffington Post gave very generous play to a little piece I wrote connecting Obama’s Middle East policy to a central theme of The Evolution of God.) I’ll end the day with a talk at 7:30 p.m. at the San Francisco Art Institute. It’s open to the public, and I’m hoping a few Bloggingheads fans will show up….

I’m in one of my favorite parts of the world, northern California, where I’ll give a book talk at Google this afternoon. And in the a.m. I’m doing an interview with Steve Paulson of the excellent public radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” Meanwhile, this week’s Time magazine features an essay by me based on the book. Today is pub date, btw. So I’m about to test one of my favorite aphorisms: that the period before publication of a book is “the calm before the calm.” I’m hoping the aphorism is found wanting.