If Chinatown is a bit of a mystery apart from restaurants, here’s a website to check out.

On her “Gods of Chinatown”:http://gods.tenement.org website, Isabel Chang introduces you to some of the neighborhood’s temples and fortune-telling shops. You drag photographs of her and her dog, Chewie, along Lower Manhattan’s streets to often inconspicuous storefronts (shown by a series of snapshots.) Once there, Chang explains the etiquette for the temple and describes the religious practices.

Take the Fulai Temple at 279 Broome Street, sitting between a bodega and a seafood wholesalers. It houses both Daoist and Buddhist deities under one roof, she writes, with the Laughing Buddha or Mi Le Fo in Mandarin facing the entrance. He’s depicted with a big smile and belly, and represents happiness, plentitude and luck.

Two of the others: White Door Temple and The Temple of the Great Yellow Immortal.

Chang is a web artist who was born in Taipei, moved first to Bolivia and then to Texas when she was 13. She now lives on the Lower East Side.

Gods of Chinatown is part of a program sponsored by The Lower East Side Tenement Museum called the Digital Artist in Residence Project. Its goal is to explore the experiences of today’s immigrants.

You can also download a year-long Lucky Calendar. When is the luckiest day to get engaged, open a business? Consult your calendar.

Are you worried about PCBs in fish? Pesticides in shellfish? Are we overfishing the oceans? What are the drawbacks to fish farms?

Environmental Defense’s “Oceans Program”:http://www.oceansalive.org offers a list of smart seafood picks — ones that are good for you and good for the environment.

Salmon, for example. Here’s what you find on the webpage:

Wild salmon from Alaska comes from well-managed fisheries and is low in contaminants, according to the non-profit group.

But most salmon found in supermarkets is farmed Atlantic salmon. And salmon farming poses many problems — water pollution, chemical use, parasites and disease. You should limit how much you eat, the group advises.

On Nov. 14, a panel discussion “Eating Green” will look at the popularity of seafood and the health of the oceans, how consumers are changing the way they eat and what effect they are having on the environment, and what projects are under way to improve fish farming and develop organic standards for fish.

It will take place at the “Strand Bookstore”:http://www.strandbooks.com in Manhattan, at 828 Broadway at the corner of 12th Avenue. Time: 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Included on the panel: Tim Fitzgerald, a scientist with Environmental Defense, and Samuel Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew.

Environmental Defense is a national, nonprofit organization that looks for solutions for environmental concerns.

Wendy’s has promoted ridding its food of almost all transfats.

The amount in its fries has supposedly dropped from 5 to 7 grams to only 0.5 grams.

But now Consumer Reports is casting doubt on that claim.

The non-profit organization bought large fries from three Wendy’s restaurants in Westchester County — it won’t say which ones — and had them tested at an independent lab. What did it find? Significantly more transfats than claimed, it says.

To double-check, it bought more fries, had them retested and found an average per serving of 2.5 grams, it says.

Wendy’s disputes the findings. It is confident in its results and stands by them, says spokesman, Denny Lynch.

“Their side says this, our side says that,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out why.”

Stay tuned.

It wasn’t just the usual rag-tag crowd exercising in Central Park this morning.

The marathoners are in town and everywhere there were groups of runners in sleek gear.

The road that loops around the lower part of the park was closed to traffic in front of Tavern on the Green for the preparations for Sunday. The finish line is up, and everything is in a festive blue and orange.

“The ING New York City Marathon,”:http://www.nycmarathon.org its formal name, begins at 9:35 a.m. for professional women and 10:10 a.m. for the open field, including professional men.

Here’s some marathon trivia, from the official website.
— The first one was run in 1970, four-plus times around the park. One hundred and twenty-seven runners paid the $1 entry to participate. Fifty-five crossed the finish line.
— Six years later, the marathon’s co-founder Fred Lebow redrew the course through the five boroughs. That year, 2,090 runners started the race.
— The official wheelchair division was added in 2000.
— Last year, 36,856 people finished the race, making it the largest marathon of all time.

The other night I walked by two men who had just broken into an SUV.

I wouldn’t have noticed them at all if one hadn’t been half way through the smashed window on the driver’s side. All I could see were his legs hanging out.

I walked fast, fumbled for my cell phone, crossed the street — and when I started shouting at them, they took off on their bicycles.

Here’s the humbling part. When the police arrived — two patrol cars and an undercover officer on a bicycle — I couldn’t describe them at all. I knew that one man was black, one man was white, and that was it. I couldn’t even tell them what kind of pants were on those legs. Was the white man Hispanic? they asked. I didn’t know. Type of bikes. Adult-sized but nothing more. Facial hair? Caps? Color of their jackets? I was no help.

The experience made me appreciate how difficult it is to describe someone accurately. Granted it was dark, I didn’t see them for very long and I was intent on getting away, but still….You would think that I would have noticed what kind of pants the man was wearing.

The “Innocence Project,”:http://www.innocenceproject.org which works to overturn wrongful convictions through DNA, says that mistaken identities were a factor in 101 of its first 130 exonerations. The next most prevalent reasons were false confessions at 35 and informants and microscopic hair comparison matches, both 21.

Try it sometime. The man next to you on the street, what did he look like? You might be surprised. I know I was.