My sentence at the car dealer’s yesterday ran through lunchtime, but without wheels the options were a) vending machines; or b) walk two dealerships down to Fuddrucker’s. I chose B. One thing I’ll say about Grosse Pointe — it’s generally free of these sorts of places, the chain food-stravaganza. We’ve got bagel joints, Panera and a number of utterly mediocre locally owned restaurants, but hardly anything with a drive-through window and even fewer of these big-box grease pits.

The idea of Fuddrucker’s — and yes, every time I see it, I think of “Idiocracy,” in which one of the visual jokes is the evolution of the name into its logical obscenity — is to build your own burger. Giant burgers, all the condiments you could think of. I chose a 1/3-pound burger, the “small” size. Remember when McDonald’s introduced the quarter-pounder? My God, man, now that’s a hungry man’s meal! A quarter-pound burger? That’ll fill a tummy, ain’a?

That was a long time ago.

OK, so a 1/3-pound burger. What the hell, I’ll get what I usually put on it at home — grilled onions and crumbled blue cheese.

“We don’t have that kind of blue cheese.”

That kind? What kind do you have?

“Blue cheese dressing.”

Oh. OK, then. Grilled onions, blue cheese dressing on the side, and let’s try to get out of here at under a million calories. Fries? Sure. Something from the fountain to drink. Nine bucks and change.

The burger came piled high with grilled onions. Now there’s a menu phrase — “piled high.” When you’re cooking at home, how often do you pile anything high? I could have stuck my finger into this onion pile down to the second knuckle. Onions are a low-cost item, so it pays to stack ’em deep. It gives the customer the sense of getting a bargain for his food dollar. Judging from the other customers in the place, these are folks who drive a hard bargain. Only in the Midwest, witty Jim Harrison once wrote, is overeating seen as heroic.

I picked off seven-eights of the onions and added an experimental dab of blue-cheese dressing, wondering if it would sub for my beloved crumbled Stilton. It did not. The fries were thick-cut slabs of potatoes, no doubt sliced, seasoned and prepped at a processing factory far, far away. They were speckled with a seasoning blend that is probably “secret.” Fries like this frequently disappoint me, and so did these. I ate a few, left the rest.

I once asked a short-order cook why I couldn’t make a hamburger as good as his. “Because you wouldn’t fucking believe how much salt I put in it,” he said. (He’d been drinking.) “Almost a tablespoon. And then I add butter to the grill.”

I can’t speak for the butter, but they surely didn’t skimp on the salt in my lunch. If salt was the bass note, it was blasting out the windows of the car. I sat and did the L.A. Times crossword — too easy — waiting for the clamor in my mouth to subside. It didn’t. I grabbed a cookie on my way out for the relief of sugar. Mission accomplished, Fuddrucker’s! Customer carpet-bombed with sodium chloride and grease, upsold dessert upon exit. Well-done.

Maybe this is a good sign. There was a time in my life when I would have happily cleaned my plate, but lately I’m working toward, what’s the word? Mindfulness. Nothing prohibited, just carefully considered. Maybe I should have fallen happily into the Fuddrucker embrace and gone whole-hog with the cheese, which would have been the yang to the yin of salt. Or maybe I should have had another glass of water and some yogic breathing, and just put off lunch another 90 minutes.

Lately I’ve been reading about David Kessler’s new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” in which the former FDA chief takes a look at so-called food engineering, in which chemists seek to find just the right layers of salt, fat and sugar to find the “bliss point” that gets us cleaning our plates and ordering more:

Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” Dr. Kessler noted. “It’s been part of their business plans.”

But this book is less an exposé about the food industry and more an exploration of us. “My real goal is, How do you explain to people what’s going on with them?” Dr. Kessler said. “Nobody has ever explained to people how their brains have been captured.”

My brain has been captured. Lately, I’ve been trying to take it back.

You know what I had for lunch the other day? A kale smoothie. I’m not kidding. Alan has this pasta dish he likes, with Italian sausage and peppers and kale, and it always leaves me with a lot of leftover kale. I found this recipe online: Put two cups of chopped kale in a blender with a frozen ripe banana, half a cup of orange juice and a quarter-cup of skim milk. Blend and serve. It looks like grass clippings, but it’s actually quite tasty. Those of you who make smoothies a lot know the ingredients are utterly malleable — one person said to try it with pineapple juice instead, and I’ll probably substitute a dollop of vanilla yogurt for the skim milk next time. And when you’ve drained your glass, you’ve eaten kale instead of chocolate ice cream, and you’re not so very deprived at all.

Maybe I’ll open a kale smoothie shack in retirement. Call it Buttpuckers. “So good, it’ll make you clench your cheeks.”

OK, maybe not.

Some bloggage:

Life is strange in Oklahoma. A state legislator blames the economic crisis on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Well, that’s one way to look at it.

One thing I did yesterday while I waited on $600 worth of repairs on a car that was running fine: Read the Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Nothing really new, except the obligatory Olbermann dog-whistle item about writing in the voice of God, but it was nice to see it all in one place.

I swore I’d have nothing more to say on it, and I really don’t, but here’s something that bugs me about the blacks-take-pride-in-Michael-Jackson stories popping up here and there: How much racial pride can you project upon a man who, when he had the choice, chose to have WHITE CHILDREN?

I ask you. And now I head to the shower, and another day too full of obligation, but hey — work’s work.

You know what the world needs? More choreography like this:

And like this:

(Every year at my all-white junior high and high school, there was a talent show, and there were always two lip-synch acts, always Motown, always the most popular kids in school — the cheerleader girls did a Supremes/Martha & the Vandellas/Marvelettes, etc. number, and the jock boys did a Temptations/Four Tops, etc. song. I wonder how they learned the choreography, this being before YouTube and even videotape. No one ever noted the oddity of white kids dressed in matching orange tuxedos and/or sequined fishtail gowns, imitating black music acts. Berry Gordy really did bring the races together, didn’t he?)

I’m posting those clips because, as promised, I spent the weekend trying to ignore M.J., but a few nice pieces cut through the static, and one was written by Alistair Macaulay, the NYT dance critic, who looked at nothing but Jackson the dancer. Whenever someone names this or that MTV phenom as a great dancer, I always wonder how you could tell, as the quick-cut editing that defines music videos can make anyone look like a great dancer. Move, cut, move, cut, etc. — I always thought dancing was how you put the moves together. Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” is a pretty good example, and now that I watch it again I notice that the sustained shot at the beginning is a pretty long one, and could have been a stand-in. I take her word it’s really her, but music video, more than any other medium, took dance and chopped it up into a series of tricks. (Two-left-footed me could probably be made graceful with a good editor.) So it’s nice to watch these old J-5 performance clips and be reminded that in his case, it was real, and in that, I can start to find a little empathy with the departed.

Dancers and athletes thrill us with a few years of amazing physical feats, and too many spend the rest of their lives paying for it. A few years back, our late pal Ashley Morris tipped me to a story on a Hall of Fame running back, a man who once had thighs of an outrageous, fearsome circumference, who now cannot climb the stadium stairs to watch his own son play college ball, and I’m sorry but I can’t remember who it was. I once read an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who talked about the constant pain that dancers live with, even young ones. He was in his 40s by then, long retired, but still took class when he could. One quote stuck with me: “A dancer knows what kind of day he’s going to have the moment he gets out of bed.” (Misha in “Giselle.”)

Anyway, Macaulay notes:

But to watch “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979) is to be amazed at just how much charm the 20-year-old Mr. Jackson had, and the charm gets more infectious as the dancing proceeds. You begin by noticing the pelvis, doing its characteristic pulsation, and you recognize how close you are to the world of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” Fairly soon, you take in the heels, or rather the action of the insteps that keeps rhythmically lifting the heels off the floor, and then, in various ways, you see the ripple of motion between feet and those very slender hips.

But Mr. Jackson was an upper-body dancer too: there’s a marvelous moment here when he tilts back and stays there. Now go to “Billie Jean” in Motown’s 25th-anniversary celebration (1983). You can see that already everything is much more choreographed, both in the bad sense of unspontaneous and the good sense of dance structure. Most of the time his dancing is so aflame you don’t feel any lack of freshness, and he’s so alert that you hardly have time to laugh — though I think you ought, happily — at the way his busy pelvis keeps hoisting his pants up and revealing his off-white socks. (The changing expanse of socks becomes part of the rhythm.)

“Busy pelvis” — now there’s a great name for a band. (Video HT: Hank.)

How was your weekend? We spent part of it traveling for the wrong reasons — Alan’s 94-year-old Aunt Martha, the last of the Smith sisters, his mom’s side, went to her reward last week, and the funeral was Saturday. “Reward” is literal when you’ve lived that long; we all agreed that the wind really went out of her sails when Alan’s mom died, followed by her last sibling, Dorothy, a few months later. The circle is closed, and the organist was instructed to dial back the mournful tone by 30 percent or so. The lunch and fellowship afterward took place among the still-standing structures of Vacation Bible School, which evidently had a class in Roman history — there were draped tents, plastic swords and CLOSED BY ORDER OF CAESAR AUGUSTUS signs here and there. They even had a little aqueduct made of shipping tubes sawed in half lengthwise.

Alan reports VBS is where he learned to sing, “Oh I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart,” etc. VBS is a real Protestant tradition, ain’a, JeffTMMO? I had no such experience, although after years of CCD classes they’d have had to take me there in leg irons.

Oh, and we had a collective eye-roll over the last hours of Martha’s life: After her heart attack, she was taken to the local hospital, where, even though she had a DNR order, etc., they insisted on transporting her, BY HELICOPTER, to Toledo. They did the same thing to Alan’s mom, even though all agreed her case was hopeless and she would end her life in hospice care within a few days. The Toledo hospital is like the Atlanta airport — you can’t go anywhere without passing through their ER first. And we wonder why health-care costs are staggering.

Even though it’s Monday, it’s a fine and sunny day and I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart. I think this is due to me getting more sleep, however. Off to bicycle through my weekly cop-shop rounds and find out where the bodies are buried. (Like they’d tell us. Hah.)

Jesus Christ, my brain is going to explode before MJ gets planted. This will be like Princess Diana with three-quarters of the IQ points sucked out, worse accents, bigger phonies and more baldly obvious money-grubbing. Who ARE these mutants? Do I share a country with them? How soon can we move to Denmark or Uruguay?

Even with the TV only murmuring in the background, the stupidity seeped through the room like a toxic gas. After a while I started jotting down the lines that penetrated my concentration. Entirely out of context, of course:

He’s credited with changing the way music videos were done…with changing how artists were marketed. …These people have come here to recognize this.

…And I was wearing these beaded socks by Bob Mackie, and he kept telling me, “Cher, I just love your socks.”

Larry King was really in a class of his own, running what he called “this special, sad edition of Larry King Live.” He asked one guest, a doctor: “What could be done to bring someone back from cardiac arrest?” (The doc replied: “Resuscitation.”)

He pushed his celebrity guests through the mill like sports-talk radio callers the night a big coach gets fired. Disco icon Donna Summer. Donna, you knew Michael, did you not? What are your thoughts, Donna? Donna, what was his greatness? His greatness was perfection, Larry. Will you be doing a tribute song tonight? I will, Larry. Thank you, Donna. Joining us now is Sheryl Crow, who knew him well. Sheryl, how are you feeling tonight?

Randy Jackson called it “one of the biggest shocks of my lifetime.” The helicopter took off from the hospital, bound for the coroner’s office. Where is this helicopter going? You wouldn’t happen to know, Randy? Randy didn’t know.

Madonna “couldn’t stop crying.” Maybe she can draw on this memory the next time she’s called upon to act.

Write it down: Drug overdose. In true Hollywood fashion, his stomach contents will consist of brown rice, organic vegetables and Fiji water, while his bloodstream coursed with more industrial-strength opiates and tranquilizers than you could find in 10 hard-case mental hospitals.

I’m turning off the TV, and I won’t turn it back on until Elizabeth Taylor has been wheeled home from the funeral service. You all carry on, but like Forrest Gump, I think this is all I have to say about that.

Jeez, Farrah Fawcett was 62? Groan. How the time do fly. For the record, I was young when she was young (but older!), and I lived through the era of the Poster. This poster, of course:

In about five minutes, Farrah’s poster replaced Carly Simon’s cover photo on “No Secrets” as the erect-nippled fantasy queen of the dorm room. It was time. American boys might go for a brunette from time to time, but sooner or later they always come back to the archetype of the California blonde. (Fawcett was from Texas, but then, many of the blondes in California are from elsewhere.) I argued over that poster many a night, always met by the same implacable male shit-eating grin: But I like it. OK, fine. Farrah was blot-out-the-sun beautiful and sold a million blow dryers to a million women who aped her haircut, but she was never really threatening. Take note, Angelina. It’s possible to be a sex symbol without making other women want to put a tack on your chair.

It was the smile, of course. And the fact that nothing but the hair looked excessively fussed-over. Since every woman fusses over her hair, it bound her to us, instead of pushing us away, the way breast implants and see-through blouses do. She isn’t showing an acre of skin, only the results of a healthy, athletic lifestyle and the sort of thoroughbred good looks that some people get through the luck of the genetic draw. You know what that poster says? Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. It wasn’t something she could help.

Farrah also wasn’t a man-eater. There was that unfortunate early marriage, after which she dropped the -Majors from her name and apparently swore off matrimony forever, even as she settled down with one man, Ryan O’Neal, for nearly 20 years. And while she had many ups and more downs, most apparently of her own making, she always seemed to be carrying her own weight. She worked in crap and quality, she went off the rails for a while, she had too much plastic surgery, but she was writing her own story, not depending on others to take care of her. Is it possible the girl in the poster, who angered so many feminists, turned out to be one herself?

I am thinking of another picture of Farrah, which you probably won’t see in the obit roundups. It was from a book I bought from a remainder table, “Cheap Chic,” by the editors of Rags magazine, now defunct. The picture looks like it dates from her pre-famous, modeling days, and features her in plain old Levis, white sneakers and a man’s white shirt, tails knotted at the waist. She’s posing on a skateboard, showing evidence of skateboard competence and the customary sunny smile. She looks great, of course, the essence of the American blonde beauty but warm, not Grace Kelly cool, fresh and clean and scrubbed. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful. She was just one of the lucky ones.

I suppose you guys will want to discuss the latest GOP flameout, and I can’t blame you. This is good because I have morning obligations and won’t be able to sit down and think until lunchtime. So come back then.

In the hours since all this broke, I’m finding my position toward Gov. Sanford softening, if only a bit. Nothing in his constricted morality prepared him for this, and while you can’t excuse the betrayal of his family, I can’t help but empathize with him — he really did look half-poleaxed yesterday. Whatever else this thing was, it does appear to have been a love affair, and not just another tawdry mistress-boffing. If nothing else, the e-mails confirm that.

I guess what I’m saying is, this was a nervous breakdown as much as it was an explanation. I think Roy got it right in the first half of this post.

OK, then. Off to cycle and sweat, and back in a few hours.

I really don’t want to be a pill about this, but here goes: I keep running into the World’s Loudest Lawn Service. No matter where I go, they are my neighbor’s choice for lawn care, lawn treatment and especially running a goddamn gas-powered edger — talk about the world’s stupidest lawn chore — around the perimeter of the lawn, preferably twice, getting right up next to the pavement so sparks fly from the blade and the sound goes SCREE SCREE SCREE for 30 minutes or so.

After which they will fire up the gas-powered blower.

The blower is always last. I am accustomed to working in newsrooms, and I like to believe there’s no noise I can’t tune out if it’s just consistent. Teletype machines, phones, colleagues with droning nasal voices explaining tax policy to their editors — all of these can become white noise with a little mind yoga. (In fact, I’ve often thought teletypes are even soothing, that chugging sound they make, occasionally punctuated by bells. New lede! Writethru! Fixes Burns’ title, adds spokesman comment, background!) But people operating gas-powered lawn equipment are like the sorts of people who own motorcycles — they don’t know this thing we call “idle.” The sound of a motor just going put-put-put doesn’t satisfy. And so they must throw in little revs every 12 seconds or so, goose the throttle a little, just to show all the other bitches out there how we roll.

Ann Arbor wasn’t lawn-crazy. You found shaggy, weedy lawns in the nicest neighborhoods in town; leggy saplings, little more than lignifying (look it up) weeds, sprouted in every park strip. Tree Town always looks a little scruffy and mossy, the sign of a populace preoccupied with grading papers or translating ancient Greek or arguing over Hugo Chavez, and far too bohemian to worry about something as stupid as crabgrass. Also, quiet.

Ah, well. The owner of my gym says his aches and pains remind him he’s alive. I suppose, when you open windows, you have to listen to your neighbors from time to time. I just wish they’d let me finish my goddamn coffee before they start.

The New York Times has a pretty good package today on the Steve Jobs liver transplant, and the question it’s raising. Looking for justice in American health-care resource allocation is a fool’s errand, but I am interested in the investors’ angle, i.e., can a CEO with this high a profile get away with claiming privacy when he’s obviously gravely ill? This is a publicly traded company and Jobs is hardly another cog in the Apple wheel. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts about this. I’m equally amused by how quickly Jobs abandoned the alternative therapies he was said to be trying after his diagnosis. Nothing like an organ transplant to make one a believer in the miracles of western medicine. Which is one way of saying one reason American health care is so expensive is because, hello, you can get a liver transplant. You can take statins. You can replace your damn knee when it falls apart. I’m old enough to remember ads in magazines for trusses. I’m sure Jobs had great insurance, but still.

OK, off to the gym. Speaking of achy knees. Back later, but not for long, because hello? Eighty-six degrees and sunny? I’m going to the pool.

Sometimes I think the reason so much fuss is made over places like Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear Dunes is because they’re parts of the Great Lakes shoreline that look different from all the other parts. Kidding. But all of my northern-Michigan pictures feature the same low line of conifers on the horizon, like they’re following me around.

The backpacks are the tell in this week’s Embarrassing Photos — that’s Isle Royale, August 1991. Ten days or so in the backcountry in northern Lake Superior, one of the prettiest and least-visited National Parks in the country. Saw: Moose, pileated woodpeckers, miscellaneous eagles, a snake swallowing a toad, a load of canine poop shot through with hair, which is about as close to one of the island’s wolves as one should ever get. Heard: Loons, the wind whipping across a series of corduroy ridges like ocean waves. Did not hear: Internal combustion engines. Allowed: Nerves to relax, leg hair to grow. The shower when we came out of the country was one of the best of my life. The rest was unsettling, to learn that while we’d been gone there’d been rioting between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, a coup in the Soviet Union and a tree that fell on J.C. and Sam’s house, nearly cutting it in two.

It sort of made us want to turn around and go back in.

[Pause.] Well, “error establishing database connection” just ate the bottom half of this post. I’m taking that as a sign that it was worthless and weak and starting my Friday chores on schedule, instead of trying to recreate it. Bloggage? Sure:

Roy disposes of the Andrew Sullivan-led Twitter revolution, plus a video. (I actually own that record. Even as a callow youth, I wondered if anyone had actually asked seven-eighths of these people to even play Sun City, so they could refuse.)

Well, now we know why her husband’s staff code-named her “Ghetto:” Monica Conyers can be bought with a pawn-shop shopping spree. Allegedly. In fairness, she also has more upmarket tastes.

And with that, another half-assed effort limps to a close! A few more like this and I may beat this blogging jones after all.

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.

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.