I spend a lot of time these days thinking about work. Not specific concepts, mind you, but the idea of work. If Edwin Starr was standing behind me, he’d be singing, “Work, huh! What is it good for? Absolutely somethin’.”

This is what working for nothing will get you: Existential conflict.

Because so much of what I do these days is unpaid, I find myself on long bike rides, trying to content myself with a stupid Socratic dialogue about it:

Why do you work?

Oh, you know, the usual reasons: sense of purpose, payin’ the bills, beats television.

But your husband is payin’ most of the bills, isn’t he?

I do my part. I contribute.

Would those dust bunnies blowing through the family room count as contribution? What about the refrigerator, that empty space you’re paying to keep nice and cold?

La la la la I can’t hear you la la la la.

So what do you have planned for this summer?

Well, I’m teaching…

How does that pay?

Not so great, but it’s something.

Anything else?

Writing, as usual.

Writing where?

The blog, of course.

How’s that Google Ads thing working out for you?

Year to date? Two hundred sixty-seven dollars.

Get OUT.

And 54 cents.

Where else?

Oh, freelancing here and there. Just finished an assignment the other day. I’ll be billing $400. And the night-shift editing stuff; pays well, keeps me reading the British papers, where you can learn all kinds of stuff. Did you know that Brits call vaccines “jabs?” On first reference? “Chickenpox jabs are available on the NHS.” Seriously.

How are you doing vis-a-vis your last year of gainful employment in newspapers?

I’m in the ballpark, but not quite to home plate. On the other hand, I no longer work for vindictive power-mad psychos, either. It’s a tradeoff.

So that’s it? So you spend huge amounts of time on two websites that pay, literally, pennies per hour? And retirement is on the horizon?

I have something else. Faith.

Faith in what?

Faith that some day my ship will come in.

Is that also on the horizon?

If you look very hard, you can see the tip of the mast. But really, isn’t work worth something in and of itself?

Tell that to the aides at the Medicaid nursing home where you’ll be spending your golden years.

I heard this thing on NPR last year.

Do tell.

It was about a retirement center for artists in New York. I can’t remember the details, but it was about a city-subsidized building where artists can live extremely cheaply, and some of them had been there for decades and were very old. These people were poorer than poor, lived in no more room than a wino could buy at a flophouse, but they were so incredibly happy. They were artists. They could make a walk to the corner store sound like a stroll along the Seine. The way the light hit a building at a particular hour of the day could fill them with joy. It’s all in how you look at the world. Do you ever listen to these Wall Street jerkoffs and their horrible wives? Do you think all their gold toilets and Bentleys and plastic surgery and private jets made them happy?

Did flying commercial the last time you traveled make you happy?

That’s not the point. My point is, work is its own reward, and the best work I do is on my stupid websites, and even if they aren’t monetized — there’s a real Wall Street word — they give me a certain satisfaction, and you can’t really put a price tag on that.

Whenever someone says, “You can’t put a price tag on that,” it means the price tag would read SUPER CLEARANCE! TAKE HALF OFF LOWEST MARKED PRICE.

As the Terminator would say…

What does the Terminator say?

Fuck you, asshole.

Do you have bloggage today?

Sure:

I hope whatever Sandra Tsing Loh got paid for her piece in the current Atlantic, it was a whole hell of a lot, because in the last 24 hours I’ve heard others describe her as everything from self-absorbed to smug to a narcissist to a bitch and — this is never far behind when you’ve got two X chromosomes — ugly and unattractive. On the other hand, the piece, about the breakup of Loh’s marriage, wasn’t so great, either, but am I the only person in the world who thinks “pleasing everyone” should never be on a writer’s to-do list? Also, because I read the British rags, I have learned to appreciate the bomb-throwing essay, which is designed purely to rattle windows and make the world a little less boring and predictable. (This is a stock feature of the London dailies: I hate kids and they should all be quarantined! Fat people are a plague and a pox and should wear burkas! And so on. They’re not policy statements, they’re conversation-starters. Deal.) Also, I met Loh once at a conference and really liked her, so foo.

I also hope FiveThirtyEight takes a look at this NYT poll, which says people a) approve of the job the president’s doing, but b) don’t approve of the job the president’s doing. On the other hand, I heard a local councilperson’s vote on a particular issue criticized as being for “political reasons,” as though elected officials voting on the public’s business isn’t, somehow, political. I ask you.

A baby beaten to death is not classified as a homicide: Jukin’ the stats, Detroit-style.

Off to the gym.

My Russian teacher and I have been talking about having lunch at St. Sabbas Monastery for months now, and finally put it on the calendar a few weeks ago. Naturally this week is one of the busiest ever, but part of the point of a monastery is to slow down and shut the world out for a while, so what the hell, even if making it there on time required a speed shower after the gym and leaving the house with my hair still wet. Yes, friends, I was rushin’.

I’m glad I went, if only for the essential weirdness of finding the place, which is on a residential street in Harper Woods. And I mean, right on the street. They have six acres, which appears to have come from clearing a few houses, because as you’re driving down Old Homestead Road, it’s house house house house house house ONION DOMES house house house:

It’s a Russian Orthodox monastery, obviously. I wish their website had more information about how they ended up there — it’s only been at that address for a decade.

I’m not sure precisely what their work is, but they sell a few trinkets and, twice a week, open a small restaurant to the public — one lunch and one dinner. The price is right and the lunch is long (two hours), but the food is only meh. We went hoping for a Russian meal, but the seven small courses included pasta salad, and pasta salad from a supermarket deli, I suspect. But you couldn’t beat the atmosphere. We ate outdoors, overlooking the gardens:

They did serve a nice tea, and in Russian glasses, and there was borscht. Afterward, one of the monks told a little group about the rules of the church: Women must wear head coverings. OK, no biggie, lots of churches have that rule, but he felt the need to say why, and got into St. Paul and how we arouse demons with our hair, and all I could do was sigh. It’s always something, isn’t it? Thanks for the lunch, brothers, but I’ll pass on the prayer.

Bloggage:

Hey, Sarah Palin! Real America exists in New York, too. (While we’re at NYMag.com, what is it about Donald Trump’s wife? Is this her only facial expression? She dropped out of top-model class before they got to smiling, I guess.)

Maureen Dowd is insane; why do I even bother reading her? I’m glad someone from Jezebel was up to the task of taking apart today’s column, because I have better things to do.

Lately I’ve been disappointed by the Lolcats, but every time I think I’ll drop the bookmark, one like this turns up:

Oops, it’s past 10 and I have copy to edit. Rain is pitter-pattering on the leaves — finally! leaves! — outside and the weather is perfect for a little word surgery. Enjoy your day, as I hope to enjoy mine.

The Free Press ran a picture of the new mayor’s new house, and as soon as I saw it I knew exactly where it was, without even reading the story. That almost never happens; this city is still largely unknown to me, which is one reason I drive through it whenever possible.

In this case I knew it from the other direction. I took a rowing clinic a couple summers ago, and we rowed on the canals behind the Shore Pointe subdivision, a little slice of buppie heaven built on a landfill peninsula on the Detroit River. Afterward, I tried to drive back there to see the front side of the houses I’d admired from the back, but no dice, it was gated. Not surprisingly, the site has history to burn:

Bing’s subdivision sits on the site of the former Gar Wood mansion, legendary home of the famous race-boat driver that four decades ago became a communal residence for young people and, later, as it decayed, a biker hangout and party place.

This is what the rowing-clinic instructor said, too. A big abandoned house right on the river, barely bothered with by the police? What biker could resist?

It is just down a canal from the Lawrence Fisher home, which the Fisher family donated to the Hare Krishna movement.

I think this is not quite true; I seem to recall a hop-skip-jump between the Fishers and the Hare Krishnas that involved two scions of the industry, a Ford and a Reuther, both of whom were HKs, probably disappointing their parents terribly. The Detroit Women’s Rowing Association boathouse is on the grounds of this place, in a new building the Hare Krishnas used as a preschool. They’re still there, and have a big free vegetarian meal every Sunday. We took a tour of the mansion after we came off the water. There were several wax figures of the head H.K., whose name I won’t even attempt to find. It was startling to walk into an empty room and find him there:

A couple stopped by after their wedding, to take pictures:

I wonder if they’re still married.

On my way back out to Jefferson after being turned away by the gate, I passed the customary boarded-up squalor. It’s never far away in Detroit. But of course, that’s what makes the place so interesting, that one day you can be riding your bike down a crummy street and all of a sudden come across a bunch of people in saffron robes and shaved heads, feeding their flock of peacocks. Hi, neighbor!

My next thought was wondering if I could write a short story about a crime in the neighborhood, where the bad guys make their getaway by water. One of these days when I stop wasting my time on my stupid blog, maybe.

So, a little bloggage:

My patience with Sarah Palin and her sense of entitlement grows fades by the minute. Am I the only one who not only didn’t think CHILD RAPE over the Letterman joke, but barely noticed the offense? Granted, I am old and grizzled and a subscriber to premium cable, but it really didn’t seem beyond the pale for late-night monologue humor. And now he has apologized again. I’m still waiting for an apology from Governor Sensitivity and her real-America cracks, her silent witness to the “kill him” shouts from her audiences, etc. I think I’ll be waiting a while.

Oh, and look: Other party members are real sensitive, too. Caught red-handed, the excuse is still, “I sent it to the wrong mailing list.”

OK, that’s it for now. I’m off to the gym. The other day I was idly scratching my arm and came across a lump below my shoulder. It was a tricep! How the hell did that happen? I better try to keep things going.

Back later.

Two movies this weekend, both old and banished to cable, one a pleasant surprise, the other its opposite. Why? Because it’s Monday, I have to finish a story for money and do the customary work for no money, and why else? Because it’s quarterly tax day, the little fountains of joy for all self-employed lucky devils like me.

First, “The Wrestler.” I’d been resisting it for what I considered perfectly good reasons, primarily an allergy to Mickey Rourke and a question I could honestly answer no way, i.e., do I really care about professional wrestling’s permanent undercard? Friends, was I wrong.

Honestly, Rourke is nearly unrecognizable as Randy “the Ram” Robinson. No, he is Robinson. Whatever ’80s buzz he had as an actor, the stuff he squandered so readily with the usual vanity projects, bad relationships and worse behavior, lurks behind every shot of his ruined face. The fact the actor’s was ruined by plastic surgery and the wrestler’s by bad behavior and work is just serendipity. Rourke can barely move his mouth, but it plays as suppressed pain instead of Botox. But he’s not the best thing about “The Wrestler.” The details are, and I wished we’d gotten an extra 24 hours of pay-per-view, because I wanted to watch it again and just look at the products on the dressing-room counters, the set dressing in his crappy trailer, the way Randy and his stripper girlfriend exult over ’80s hair bands before “that Cobain pussy came around and ruined it all.”

And, I should add, the ending was absolutely perfect. So go rent the DVD.

Next up: “Feast of Love,” a two-star disappointment that only gets the second star because of the costumes and set design — everybody and everything looks real good. Otherwise, bleh. The novel was one of the great discoveries of my year in Ann Arbor, recommended by one of my writing teachers, who’d chosen Michigan’s MFA program over Iowa’s solely so she could study with Charles Baxter, the author. It’s a wonderful book, a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” of relationships romantic and familial, old and young, and the movie is just pretty actresses getting naked. I know what you’re thinking, but seriously: All those lovely breasts can’t save it.

One of my old screenwriting profs mentioned the film last January, at a panel discussion about Michigan’s tax incentives for moviemaking, and suggested relocating the story from Ann Arbor to Portland was a great mistake and insult. I can’t agree 100 percent, but there is one scene that left me sneering, in which a medical emergency mires a car trying to make its way to an ER; in the book they’re stuck in gridlocked traffic on Stadium Boulevard, just as the Ohio State-Michigan game is ending. The characters’ cries for help blend in with the exultation of the crowd — the Wolverines pulled out another one — and it’s just a wonderful scene of tragedy and absurdity, the individual buried in a sea of humanity. Robert Benton tries to duplicate it, but there’s something about seeing these wan Oregonians waving their stupid thunder sticks that was just ridiculous. It might have helped if they could have wrangled more than 30 extras to pretend to be Big 10 football fans, too, but I guess they blew the budget on body makeup.

Also, if we give Morgan Freeman a sizable sum of money, can we get it in writing that he will never play a wise old man again? I know, I know — the voice, it’s Morgan Freeman, but all he’s required to do anymore is stare over the top of his reading glasses and be wise.

Bleh.

Can’t stay long today; see the usual excuses. A bit of bloggage:

The Detroit dailies may be on life support, but they’re going down swinging. Yesterday in the Freep, yet another tale of official misconduct — a pension board that travels the world on tax dollars, leaving two days early, coming home five days late, etc. What a bunch of weasels.

Best new boat name in our neck of the lake: Amy’s Wine House. I’ll try to get a picture next time I’m out in the kayak.

OK, off to the bakery and to start the Monday sprint. Good times!

I was killing a few minutes yesterday, taking empty hangers out of the closet to make a little room, when I ran across an old manila envelope on Alan’s shelf. It was part of the things he brought home from his mother’s house. I knew it contained some of the family’s World War II ephemera, and I knew there were some V-mails and old telegrams in there; did you know that if your son was wounded, the Army would send you periodic check-the-box postcards assuring you he was “recovering normally?” Now you do.

I knew there were letters in there, too, but I hadn’t read one. Thought I’d dig one out. It’s from Alan’s dad, Roger, to his mom, back home in Defiance:

Dec. 17 ’43
Italy

Love, Bud

Well. As Peter Riegert said in “Crossing Delancey” — “Your bubbie is giving you diamonds. You should write them down.”

When I first transcribed this, I puzzled over one word. I asked Alan when he got home, “Did your dad ever mention ‘dagars’ or ‘dogars’? I can’t find them on Google, at least not in Italy. There is a Pakistani tribe called the Dogars, but he seems to be describing some sort of, I dunno, maybe an Italian subculture? Could it be ‘drovers’?”

He looked at me like I was the stupidest person in the world and said, “Dagos.”

Oh.

Yes, that was Gen. Mark Clark. He served in World War I, too. According to Wikipedia, he was only a lieutenant general at the time, but I guess he had enough stars to get a few salutes.

Isn’t that a great letter? Sometimes I’ll have to dig out some of my brother’s letters to me from Germany when he was in the service. Different time entirely.

Today’s Embarrassing Photo isn’t, just an old picture from our first weeks in our new house with our first baby:

Both his ears stick straight up now. How did that happen?

Not much bloggage today; I’m thinking I’m going to have to do some disk maintenance this weekend — my Mac is a draggy, beachballing fool of late and could probably use a hard-drive massage. I’m hoping for a happy ending.

But there’s this. This is one of those stories I studiously avoid, until the day I find the story or blog post that explains everything. I think this link tells you all you need to know about Miss California USA, and if you don’t care, don’t click.

Have a good weekend, all. I’ll mainly be working.

Ebony and ivoreeee live together in perfect har-mo-neeeee side by side on my formica kitchen table, oh lord, why don’t weeeeee?

For the record, I thought the grilled-cheese sandwich thread was hilarious. Tacos. Ha. Otherwise I didn’t keep up with much news yesterday. My day was full to the brim with activity and hostessing, so I didn’t really learn about the Holocaust Museum shooting until this morning, not to mention the David Letterman kerfuffle among the rightbloggers, and you know what? There’s nothing like a day away from the news to let you know what’s important. Of course, any day that begins with a trip to one of the automotives is always well-spent, especially when they take you driving on one of their proving grounds. You learn the most amusing things, like the names of certain stretches of test pavement — “sine wave,” for instance, and “pitch and jounce.”

But the best thing was the entrance and exit ramps, which were banked. Seriously banked. Nothing like flying through a banked turn to make you say wheeee.

Then it was lunch in Mexicantown and a stop at the Honeybee Market for mangos, and home to make agua fresca and wait for John and Sam. The New York Times featured agua fresca in its Recipes for Health column a few days back, Laura Lippman Facebooked it and credited it with all sort of miracle-working powers, so I thought, OK, I’ll bite. I even made two pitchers — one mango, one watermelon. And both were fabulous, but the mango went dry first. I’m old enough to have relatives who think a mango is a green pepper, and here they are, years later, readily available in any old Kroger. I think, how long did Latin America keep these fruits to themselves, and can we bring action for this in some sort of international court?

I also think: You know what would go well with this? A shot of vodka.

Tip: Make it with the smaller, yellow mangoes. They’re sweeter. Although I’m sure the big red ones would work splendidly, too. You really can’t go wrong with mangoes.

Agua fresca was only one thing on the menu, however. The other beverage was wine, which may explain why I forgot to make a salad. Also, one of my students stopped by — long story, not interesting — and when he left, his clutch failed, so there was 10 minutes spend bleeding the air out of something under the hood, and long story short, dinner was sort of a blur. But a fun blur! Who cares when your friends are in your kitchen?

Oh, and for all you Detroit haters? The car with the bum clutch was a Honda.

After dinner we ate ice cream and watched the first two episodes of “Nurse Jackie.” Edie Falco is great, isn’t she? They really worked to wash the Carmela off of her — that frosted-tips haircut is just inspired — although her scrub tops looks suspiciously…fitted. But she transcends the costume, I’d say. Our one-year arrangement with Comcast expires in August, at which time I figured I’d boot Showtime and Starz, the two premium channels they threw in gratis when we switched our phone service. Not being a fan of either “Dexter” or “Weeds,” I thought this would be easy to do. Now? Damn.

So what happened in your neck of the woods yesterday?

If you didn’t see Connie’s husband’s heron pictures, you are missing a treat. Big file, long download even in broadband, absolutely worth the wait.

Look, the museum shooter thinks the president isn’t a natural-born citizen. How shocked I am to learn this.

And now I am off. But I’ll be back.

I’m out to Dearborn early on assignment, then back here to greet J.C. and Sammy, passing through en route home from the U.P. We have this inside joke when they come through. John says, “Now don’t go to no trouble,” but when people sleep under your roof, you sort of have to clean the bathroom. You have to go to that much trouble. But as crazed as I’ve been of late, I can’t go to much more trouble than that. The kitchen floor could stand a mopping, but it’s going unmopped.

This visit may be the ultimate no-trouble visit. Clean sheets, a clean bathroom, but that’s it. I expect we’ll go to Trader Joe’s and spend a million dollars on wine and nibbles. I’m taking the night off. It’ll be awesome.

All this by way of saying you guys are on your own today. Maybe we can kick off the discussion with Coozledad’s letter to the editor:

I’ve been to many places in the United States, and I’ve also been to Lynchburg, VA. I assume Mr. Roberts has done some traveling, when he presumes to speak for American values, because Lynchburg may as well be Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran. It’s one of the least American places on the planet. Pork-barbecue theocracy with a dash of scuba-suit kink and compulsory inbreeding is by no means a plan for the rest of this nation.

“Scuba-suit kink” — I wonder if, somewhere in wingnut heaven, that guy knows the gift he left behind, just by being his own sweet self.

Also, Dexter someone who sent an e-mail to Dexter saved a turtle. And paid the price.

I’ll check in sometime Wednesday. You all stay classy.

One of my local Twitter follows has established a coyote-sighting Google map. He rendered it in Earth, which gives it that CIA-surveillance flava:

Of course I tweeted it to GrossePointeToday.com, and with that I conclude today’s edition of Sentences That Wouldn’t Have Made a Lick of Sense a Decade Ago.

No, one more: Shopping with Kate the other day, I heard a song I liked on the store’s playlist, so I Shazam’d it, but waited until we got home to buy it.

(It was “Rock & Roll Queen” by the Subways. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve always had a weakness for a tight little single that can reach the finish line in under three minutes.)

I was making my cop-shop rounds yesterday in sandals and a T-shirt, freezing to death, when I glanced at the dashboard thermometer and read an appalling figure: 56 degrees. I began an R-rated sort of gibbering rant not unlike the father’s battles with the furnace in “A Christmas Story.” School is out in two days, summer swimming programs begin the following Monday, and the pool is about as appealing as, well, a pool on a 56-degree day. I’m all for a little character-building weather, but my character feels fully constructed at the moment, thanks very much.

When I took responsibility for collecting the public-safety reports for the new website, I anticipated handing this chore off to one of my students, but now that I’ve done it a while? No way. It’s too much fun for a storyteller to examine these little tragedies and comedies, rendered so succinctly in the passive-voice poetry of Copspeak:

A traffic stop was effected…I detected an odor commonly associated with intoxicants…Suspect was confrontagious…

Some of these accounts could be entered in a short-short story contest. Disputes between neighbors are the most interesting, because I have the advantage the involved parties do not: Distance. In my god’s-eye view of things, I can look down with a cool head and only marvel that all these hard feelings, all this yelling, all this paperwork was over…a barking dog. (On the other hand, there is nothing like being awakened at a too-early hour by a gas-powered leaf blower to send the blood pressure off the charts; I have experienced this myself.) Two weeks ago there was an account of a gutter-cleaning job that nearly came to fisticuffs. My takeaway lesson: Do not spray gunky gutter debris on a freshly washed car. In the Motor City, people take these things very, very seriously.

As you can see, I’m short on material today. Fortunately, I have an excess of bloggage:

I hope Kym Worthy sends Kwame Kilpatrick back to jail, and this time she throws away the key.

Jon Stewart, national treasure: Make sure you watch the embedded clip.

The Pope was “visibly upset” over details of abuse in Irish penal institutions church-run homes for wayward children, but the report doesn’t say what, exactly, he was upset about. My money’s on: “that the rest of the world heard our secret.” Count me among those with more than two working brain cells who believe the idea that Rome didn’t know about this vast national network of sadism academies as, well, bullshit. Maybe he didn’t have “The Magdalene Sisters” in his Netflix queue.

But because we like to end on an up note: Sex With Ducks, the music-video response to Pat Robertson’s concerns what legalizing gay marriage may lead to. Safe for work, at least with headphones.

I have so much work to do it’s not funny. So I’m off to do it.

Gourmet magazine has a recipe this month for homemade ketchup, and Alan asked if I’d be making any. Short answer: No. But it reminded me I already have a cookbook with a homemade-ketchup recipe, and for the first time in years, I dug out the Southside Farmers Market cookbook, published as a fundraiser for Fort Wayne’s market in 2001.

When I left town, the market wasn’t exactly dying, but every year it got a little sadder to visit. The old stalwarts who kept it going were well past retirement age, and the locavore movement hadn’t caught on yet. When I asked people whether they visited, most said they didn’t, citing the usual reasons — convenience, distance. Sometimes they said they wouldn’t buy lettuce fresh from the farm when you could get it cheaper at the Wal-Mart Super Center; these folks I wrote off as missing the point. A few talked vaguely about it being “so far away,” and sometimes they were and sometimes I sensed what they were really saying is, “But it’s in a black neighborhood!” These folks I also wrote off. But I told everyone they were missing something, that you could find the best tomatoes and corn and melons and all the rest of it. I still miss Cherry Day in June, when a guy drove a truckload of frozen cherries up from southern Indiana. He sold one unit — 25 pounds of pitted tart cherries mixed with five pounds of sugar and frozen in a five-gallon bucket. I waited until it thawed enough to handle, then broke everything down into one-quart bags and put it all back into the freezer, and had enough to eat cherry pie all year long. There’s nothing like that in Detroit. Dammit.

Anyway, the cookbook had not one but three ketchup recipes, all aimed at the home canner; one calls for 15 pounds of tomatoes, which suggests you’ll be giving the condiments aisle a pass for a good long while. But I spent some time going over the rest of it as well, and realized it was a mistake to leave it on the shelf so long.

Cookbooks are all products of their time. Auguste Escoffier may have been the modern father of French cuisine, but who makes his recipes anymore? Who has time? Even Julia Child’s original recipes seem slightly ridiculous; in “My Kitchen Wars” I remember Betty Fussell talking about making a roast encrusted in Swiss cheese or something. Veal Prince Orloff is mostly remembered as a punchline in a Mary Tyler Moore episode.

Times change, technologies change, one day you look up and you can get fresh lemongrass and Mexican tomatillas in your local supermarket, spring mix year-round, so you know, you have to have ideas on how to use them that match.

But these sorts of cookbooks aren’t getting perused by Ruth Reichl, which is why I love them. They’re the collected wisdom of hundreds of Hoosier cooks handed down to their daughters, who might change them a little or a lot, and hand them down some more.

Face it, some should have been dropped along the way, like the Braunschweiger Ball, which is you-know-what mixed with onion soup mix (I guess because a soft, subtle flavor like Braunschweiger needs a little kick in the pants) and formed into a ball, after which it’s covered with a mixture of cream cheese and Miracle Whip (I guess because, you know, there’s just not enough fat in it to make it satisfying otherwise).

But there’s also a recipe for dandelion wine, although where I might find a quart of dandelion blossoms I’m not sure. Beyond that, the ingredients are one orange, three pounds of sugar, one sliced lemon and one cake of yeast. Hmm. There’s also something called Russian Tea, which calls for Tang, powdered instant tea, powdered lemonade mix, cinnamon, cloves and sugar. Mix all the powders and make it one cup at a time. Again: Hmm.

There’s a fair amount of the sort of country cooking that would disappoint Alice Waters, food like the Amish make, with canned this and dehydrated that, and if you don’t like it, see what you feel like making after you’ve spent an entire day in back-breaking labor, either in the field or at the factory. Dump Cake, Oreos layered with Cool Whip, that sort of thing. But there’s also a beet-apple puree that looks worthy of “The Splendid Table” if not Chez Panisse, and I may make it myself in the fall. There are quite a lot of cabbage recipes, which remind me I like cabbage and should do more with it. I wasn’t surprised to find the fish chapter is very short, only six recipes, five of which call for canned tuna or salmon. Indiana is far from any ocean.

And then there’s Impossible Pie:

I cup sugar
4 eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup coconut

Put all ingredients into blender for 30 seconds. Pour into 9 inch pie pan and bake for one hour at 375 degrees. Makes its own crust, filling and topping. Easy! Enjoy!

I’m tempted.

What’s your favorite countrified recipe?

And how was your weekend? We saw “Up,” in 3D. Once again, I’m reminded there are two ways to make “family” entertainment. One is the Rugrats/Dreamworks way, which is to sprinkle the script with pop-culture references that kids don’t get and adults do, which I’ve always thought was cheap and snarky and ultimately reminds you how much you don’t want to be there.

The other is the Pixar way — to write outstanding stories that appeal to every person in the audience, to tug the adults toward their children and children toward their parents, and then do them completely sincerely, without irony, and with the highest possible technical standards. That’s “Up,” in a nutshell. Not my favorite (that would be “Ratatouille,” which had me in tears at the reading of Anton Ego’s restaurant review), but they are all so uniformly wonderful trying to rank them is just a waste of time.

This is also the first movie I’ve seen to use 3D as a way to enhance the visual experience, rather than as a gimmick. Nothing is flung toward the viewer, there are no gotcha shots, there’s nothing that, when you see it on your own TV in six months, will make you think, “What were they going for with that one?” It’s just visual artistry, pure and simple. My kind of guys.

Manic Monday commences in five, four, three, etc. Have a good one.

How did I manage to schedule a 9 a.m. meeting and a 10 a.m. haircut on the one day of the week that usually belongs entirely to me? God knows. Anyway, because time is fleeting, a quick hop to this week’s Embarrassing Photo. Me, nervous on a mountain:

I don’t trust these damn things. This is in Wyoming, Brokeback Mountain country, 1992. We were trying to get into Yellowstone Park, but the east entrance was closed. Why? Because — and this is where the mistrust comes in — rain and 70 degrees in Cody translated to snow up to your butt in the mountains between us and the park. This photo was taken a few days before the summer solstice. What you can’t see in the picture: I’m wearing shorts.

But that’s not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is the curly perm. Thirty-four years old, and I still hadn’t learned.

I’ve been a flatlander all my life. I don’t care how pretty it is; I can’t get comfortable in a place where you can fall off the earth and die.

Off to my meeting. Sorry for the big file size. One of these days I’m going to get another copy of Photoshop and its fabulous “save for web” setting. Have a great weekend.