Can you see how cool my Dad thought I was from day 1? And every day since, weirdly. In the time-honored 60s photo tradition (another of which is no flash fill-in, as you see), there are several of these, then the ol switcheroo, "now you stand under the tree, honey" one with my mom. In another timeless family tradition, there are a zillion pix of me, a bunch of Leo, and only a few archaeological specimens of Laurie. Thanks to my brother for scanning some of Dad's old slides. (Any "Mad Men" fans out there? Ah, the Kodak Carousel...)

I just ate my first, well, half of my first, Park Slope Five Guys hamburger, and it was as good as I remember. I fear for the shop, though. It's a big space, like the one across from Howard U, and although it's right across the street from Methodist Hospital, the employees perceive it as being expensive. That's our rents for you. I just hope the constant wafting of the Guys' meat will lure them in.

That was a weird sentence. It reminds me of an HBO doc you can see OnDemand right now, about Heidi Fleiss's efforts to open a "stud farm", house of male prostitution, in Pahlump, Nevada. She's a piece of work, that Heidi, and I wish I had a tenth of her gumption. At the end of a year's time, she'd opened a Laundromat called, natch, Dirty Laundry. I heard once when I was in business school that if you want to be a self-made millionaire, go into the laundry business. Like George Jefferson.

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Note the new category for this entry, wherein I solve the various problems humans have dealing with one another.

Lined up at security at MSP on my way to Vegas, a woman asked the person at the front of the line if she could go ahead, because "I'm meeting an unaccompanied minor whose flight gets in in 5 minutes and I got stuck in traffic." That person said yes, causing Angry Young Man in front of me to grumble to the guy ahead of him, "If she'd left five minutes earlier, she wouldn't have to butt in line." "I left ten minutes early," replied that guy, "and I ran into traffic and was glad I left early." When I met AYM at the metal detector, it all became clear to me. "Here's the solution to the line problem," I said, "rather than asking 'may I get in line in front of you?' which doesn't cost that person anything, you should have to find someone to agree to trade places with you--they have to go to the end of the line. That way, no one else suffers." AYM saw the beauty of it instantly. An alternative would be to start at the end of the line and asking each person individually for consent to move ahead of him or her. The way we do it now, the person who lets you in line in front of them gives away waiting time they don't have a right to. Now, how do we implement my solution?

After the metal detector, AYM left behind a bag of text books behind, which I called his attention to. All in all, I'd say I turned his frown upside down!

Oh, biggy news in the Slope--our very own Five Guys is opening Friday!!!

Another Freedomfest is history. Here's are two Q's and an A that give you an idea of what the crowd is like. In a panel about several people who might be liberators or tyrants which focused in on a debate about Augusto Pinochet, a woman asked, "Do you think the contrast between Allende and Pinochet comes down to a sort of Platonic ideal versus Aristotilian pragmatism?" A: "Yes, that's a good way of putting it. The South American idea of the caudillo is very like a philosopher king." Q2: "Could you explain the last question? I don't even know what a plutonialism is."

And this'll give you a picture of me in Vegas. One day I'd had a bagel at the morning break so I wasn't hungry for lunch, so I walked over to Fake Paris and had a glass of wine at the bar. "Do you know you're in a bar in Las Vegas and you're reading a book?" a blowsy bottle blonde asked me, as she placed her own order. "And I'm forty-one goddam years old. What are you reading?" I showed her Atlas Shrugged. "That's one of those smart people books," she said.

"Forty-one's nothing," I said. "You're entering the best years of your life."

"Please explain to me how that's true."

"You're now free to be who you are. It's hard to change a 25 year-old, it's impossible to change a 41 year old. You are now free to read a book in a bar in Vegas if that's what you're inclined to do."

"You're right," she said. Then she told me she would like to have sex again, but "her man" has a bad back, and I couldn't really offer her any comfort on that score. "I'm going back to the roulette tables," she said finally, "and thanks for your wisdom!"

You're welcome, skanky lady, you're welcome.

So I'm in MN because my mom's in a rehab facility (she's doing well), called The Colony, right? Here are a few classics from the past few days for those of you who don't know my mom:

"One of the memory questions they asked me when I first got here was 'What's the name of this place?' 'The Colonial?' I said. 'No, but you're close.' 'I know it has something to do with ants,'" she said.

I was trying to print maps of local walking trails when her color inkjet cartridge ran out. She told me where her spare was, and I said I'd buy her some more, because they're cheap on ebay, but very expensive in the store. "That printer is so old, I don't think you can buy cartridges for it any more," she said. "If I can't, I won't." (I could, and did.)

Finally, I asked her where there's a pencil sharpener. (She has pencils about the place.) "Well, there's one on the little desk, but that's broken." "I saw that one," I said. "Then there's the electric one." "Good, where's that?" "I think I threw it away."

In her defense, she was probably on a bypass machine during her surgery, which means we're all in for another year of "pump head" where she's confused, but doesn't know she's confused. In my defense, these stories aren't too unusual for her. For example, we used to have a ping pong table in the basement which we wound up only using as a holiday dinner table. One time I came to visit and it was gone, and I had a vague memory that some guy she used to work with wanted it. "Oh, that's right," I said, "you gave the ping pong table away, didn't you?" "I must have," she said.

It's 7:45 in Minnesota, and I've already baked corn bread, mixed up an extra batch of coleslaw dressing because I made such a vast amount of slaw that it was dry last night, and assembled an egg salad kit for my mother--one container of eggs, s&p, and pickle relish, and another of sauce, so she can get it just the way she wants it. Last night I tried frying walleye, but fried fish, like steak, is something that's better gotten in the outside world. You have to have the good grease, at the right temperature, and know exactly how long to fry it so it's still moist inside. Mine was okay, but probably the oil wasn't hot enough.

Mom'll be in the rehab facility for a while longer. She looks and sounds really good when you talk to her, but she still has no stamina. My sister-in-law Harriet told me to tell her, "Stay there until the kick you out." She gets therapy three times a day and all the oxygen she can inhale.

Speaking of food, a while back, I had pickled okra in a restaurant and it was really good. This is coming from a gal who doesn't hold okra in much regard, mind you. But it wasn't until I came here, of all places, that I found pickled okra in the grocery store. In Minnesota? There shouldn't be any okra north of Missouri.

Finally, does anyone have a system for keeping track of the buttons you get in a little baggie with more expensive clothes than the kind I usually buy? I used to throw them into this thing on my dresser, but buttons seem to rarely fall off, and I can't remember ever looking for a particular button and finding it. I'm thinking maybe some kind of war-room type wall-sized bulletin board with pictures of each article of clothing and the spare button push-pinned to it. Does anyone have anything like that?

Happy anniversary of the best thing that ever happened on this continent!