First, the movie reviews: “Intolerable Cruelty” started out so promising, it was doubly disappointing when the whole thing collapsed into incoherence about two-thirds through. So many amusing details — Geoffrey Rush singing “The Boxer,” George Clooney’s UV-light teeth-whitening treatments, and especially the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys National. Yes, NOMAN, as in, “Let NOMAN put asunder…”

Ah, but it wasn’t to be. By the time the guy with the inhaler came along, I was looking up bad reviews on the laptop.

“Winged Migration” was better.

Truth to tell, though, when it comes to entertainment spending, HBO dollars up on the hoof a lot better than the cineplex. At least, if you’re not a Jesus fan. Where else can you see Gina Gershon playing a Hasidic Jew with hot pants?

I wish I’d had a more exciting weekend to assemble the scraps of tonight. With spring on its way, I started taking the dog on longer walks — we ventured off into some unexplored neighborhoods north of here, and learned again that every block has a homeowner who just doesn’t get it. That’s the house with the untrimmed shrubbery (at best) or trash-strewn yard (far more common), the visual f-you to the rest of the bourgeois world: Hey, jerkoffs, just because you call yours a compost heap doesn’t mean I can’t throw my garbage out the front door! In AA, I’ve noticed, a disproportionate number of these yards have signs in the yard reading, “Another family for PEACE.” Ha. Make of that what you will. I say it begins at home.

Now that I think of it, in AA, virtually every third home has such a sign. It’s like living in a photo-negative version of Fort Wayne. I love it.

I started wading into the hell of our taxes, too. This is a complicated year — the F’ship makes it so — but nothing TurboTax can’t handle, from what I’ve seen so far. TurboTax makes tax preparation so painless, I expect one of these years a little hand will reach out of the CD drive and hand me a glass of champagne upon completion. Nevertheless, the garbage-in-garbage-out rule always applies, and that’s a hell of a garbage pile I’ve got working at the far end of the dining room table. I already decreed: He who touches it or rearranges it in any way dies.

Because it looks — at this preliminary stage — as though we’re not getting hammered, I thought I’d celebrate with an expensive lunch today. I was meeting a fF for an all-afternoon project, so what the hell? Shall we split an $11 Zingerman’s sandwich? Why the hell not? It was delicious — an $11 chicken sandwich had better be nothing but — and even though the price is chest-clutchingly high, as always I left with more than grudging respect for the joint. They make a fairly simple promise: The food will be great and the service will be great and you will go home saying, that was a pricey sandwich, but you know, that’s what an $11 sandwich should taste like. The owner was in there today, too, standing in line with everyone else, and if the staff was inspired to be extra-helpful due to the boss’s presence, all I can say is, they weren’t obvious about it. He wrote a book last year. I got it for Christmas. If you want to know everything there is to know about olives, you should get it, too.