I've been waiting 20 years for this post. You grow up down the street from Blessed Sacrament, go to grade school there, go to church there, and you're eventually gonna hear about the other Blessed Sacrament.

At a young age, you know such a place exists in Virginia, the land on the other side of the river where people get lost. You don't know this directly, but the confusion of all the people who hear where you go to school and think you live in Virginia has told you it exists. Somewhere in Virginia, there is a school with the same name as yours. Somewhere out in Virginia, there is a bizarro school with a bizarro Patrick Cooper.

ELAINE: Bizarro Jerry?

JERRY: Yeah. Like Bizarro Superman. Superman's exact opposite, who lives in the backwards bizarro world. Up is Down. Down is Up. He says "Hello" when he leaves, "Good bye" when he arrives.

ELAINE: Shouldn't he say "Bad bye"? Isn't that the, opposite of "Good bye"?

Tonight, I went there. I finally went to the other Blessed Sacrament. In Virginia! Blew my freakin' 10-year-old mind. Great friend Jen (ever the reporter, in the parking lot afterward, "Damn, I just said 'fucked up' in the church parking lot") goes to church there sometimes, so we went for Ash Wednesday. The church in my neighborhood has led to parking disasters and thus not-going disasters the last two Ash Wednesdays, and the promise of seeing bizarro Blessed Sacrament sealed the deal.

The report: Bizzaro Blessed Sacrament is bizzaro Blessed Sacrament.

The District version, mine, is all about themes. The Virginia version is straight plot. (The homily featured promos for confession and Mass times.) The District version keeps the lights low. Virginia keeps all the lights on. District nave is smaller than it looks. Virginia nave is bigger than it looks. District has obstructed views. Virginia, everyone in the whole church turns around to look at you when you walk in. District, minimal tasty heritage Latin everyone knows. Virginia, deep-cut Latin. (If four years of high school Latin didn't learn me on the Sanctus, the Archdiocese of Arlington sure isn't going to. The Our Father, Holy Mary, Aeneid, Roman Robert Frost and horny Catullus were good, thanks.) District, music whenever possible. Virginia, whenever was necessary.

So glad I went. Good to be back for the ashes, good to know Blessed Sacrament D.C. still rocks and Virginia is still the land on the other side of the river where people get lost, good to have a friend and bizarro.

Claire Keegan's "Foster" is what you read leaning against the handle of the refrigerator as the water boils and your wine glass gets lonely on the counter. You continue to read the story through the meal and, returning the plate to the sink, as your clothes washer spins off in the hall, then the dryer. Most of the sentences in the story gaze outward but every fourth or so looks in. A line looking in? "I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be."

Right now… I'm in search of awesome. That's what I've decided.

Colliding with the above story about a little Irish girl, I've posted this similarly (seriously) themed Wilco song before but never this version.

I'm trying, I'm trying. New York Times "Year in Ideas," December 2001.

Next spring, General Mills is expected to introduce www.mycereal.com, a Web site that allows users to mix and match more than 100 different ingredients to create and name their own breakfast cereals, delivered to their homes in single-serving portions.

You want Cheerios to come with the marshmallows from Lucky Charms? Done. Mix Cinnamon Toast Crunch with French Toast Crunch? Sure. Wheaties with blueberries, almonds and grains? No problem. Add a tropical touch to your Cocoa Puffs? Have them throw in some coconut shreds and dried mango.

Via Mediaite's 2009 review of the '01 ideas list. The site's comment on cereal: "My Honey Nut Cap’n Crunch Choculas never really caught on."

Mycereal.com remains under General Mills control, sadly unused.

When I had the opportunity last month to talk to MacArthur Fellow and Gannett colleague Jerry Mitchell, I jumped at it. It wasn't everyday you got to talk to a genius grantee.  A long-time investigative reporter at the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell was starting a blog about civil rights cold cases, part of a new, larger Gannett civil rights project. He was looking for blogging tips, and I was just happy to talk to him.

On the phone, he mentioned hanging around a recent New Yorker visit and photo shoot with civil rights heroes, bound for a coming issue. We got to talking for a minute about the mag's photography — the Platon U.N. portfolio had just come out — and I no doubt sounded awestruck.

Platon's civil rights portfolio arrived in the most recent issue. The most powerful page for me was Chris and Maxine McNair embracing in front of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where the 1963 Klan bombing killed their daughter Denise. The photo grabbed me twice as hard as the rest. His resolved face, her sad face, surely traded often.

Your online viewing options for the photo aren't great. An audio gallery has the shot in the bottom-right corner, but the presentation is limited in size and and disappears quickly. Better is the digital edition page, if you're a New Yorker subscriber or sign for a free trial. Conde Nast and Remnick, you can do better, especially on public-service work like this.

If you can't get into the digital edition, you can get more satisfaction from Mitchell's two blog posts about the photo shoot. In the first post, he writes about the photo bringing Medgar Evers' widow and brother together after years of issues between them. In the second, Mitchell notes the portfolio's publication but also adds a personal thought:

I have said it before in speeches, and I’ll say it again here: Getting to know these families who played a role in the civil rights movement has been truly inspiring.

And getting to know them means more than any award.

As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “One day the South will recognize its real heroes.”

Read all of Mitchell's new blog here.

WordPress told me this blog was approaching 4,000 posts. I was at a loss for what to do until discovering this James Brown video days ago.

In the nearly eight years since post #1, I've given different reasons for starting the blog and continuing to write it: to have a need to code, to keep in touch with friends, to keep my writing in shape, to make some use — any gentle use at all — of a domain name I'd bought for a dollar.

Wasn't until recently I remembered a moment a month or two before the blog's start and realized what was likely the biggest reason for it. In the middle of senior year, I had outlets for words (journo friends, a writerly girlfriend and a magazine writing class) but still had too many of them. I wasn't use to having that problem. Childhood creativity had turned into adolescent reticence and structured attempts to hit word counts. But with the end of school now in sight, or restraint timing out, a simple catch-up letter to a friend one day ran to a thousand words.

The words had to go somewhere. The words had to find a home and an order because there would evidently be more words behind them.

It was all odd but necessary compulsion, and stranger still was what happened next. As I began to put the words in homes and give them order, I found I couldn't stop. I liked finding them places. Sometimes those places were on a page, and sometimes they landed aloud. The talking turned out to be tied to the writing. That was a slow reveal of shock for me. Here I'd spent a couple decades being quiet, one of the more shy kids in any group, watching instead of joining nine times of 10, and a key to breaking through was just finding homes for words.

This blog has never done big traffic or earned great reputation, but if you have any doubt as to what the mystery of expression can do for you, let's talk. I still struggle all the time with words, but here we are — loosed like I never would've hoped. Thanks for reading post 4,000.

Nerve's "Top 43 Sexiest U.S. Presidents" countdown leaves much to be desired, but the highlight is Franklin Pierce at #5. Nerve pic and blurb:

There's not much to say about this obscure president, except that he's gorgeous. He's like Johnny Depp, but without as much to show for himself.

Sounds good, right?

Johnny Depp! People's Sexiest Man Alive!

But — before you go falling in love with dead former President Franklin Pierce, you should know a few things. I present to you everything from Pierce's Wikipedia that suggests things may not work out for you two.

1. Father issues. "Friends recalled that just after he entered the school, he became homesick and returned home barefoot. His father put him in a wagon, drove him half way back to the academy, and left him on the roadside, never saying a word. The boy trudged the remaining seven miles back to school."

2. He's married — and it ain't going well at all. "Born into an aristocratic Whig family, she was extremely shy, often ill, deeply religious, and pro-temperance. … After the gruesome death of her last child, shortly before Pierce's inauguration, she was overcome with melancholia and distanced herself from her husband during his presidency. She became known as 'the shadow of the white house.' "

3. Family death. "They had three children, all of whom died in childhood. The last child, who lived the longest, was killed in a train wreck at the age of 11. … [Wife] Jane Pierce viewed the train accident as a divine punishment for her husband's pursuit and acceptance of high office."

4. Bad decisions and lots of them. "His inoffensive personality caused him to make many friends, but he suffered tragedy in his personal life and as president subsequently made decisions which were widely criticized and divisive in their effects, thus giving him the reputation as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history."

5. Too much wine, not enough roses. "Abandoned by his party, Pierce was not renominated to run in the 1856 presidential election and was replaced by James Buchanan as the Democratic candidate. After losing the Democratic nomination, Pierce continued his lifelong struggle with alcoholism as his marriage to Jane Means Appleton Pierce fell apart.

6. Oh, and… "His reputation was destroyed during the American Civil War when he declared support for the Confederacy, and personal correspondence between Pierce and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was leaked to the press. He died in 1869 from cirrhosis."

TOM
You were great up there.

SUMMER
Thanks. I was hoping to sing Born to Run but they didn't have it.

TOM
I love Born to Run.

MCKENZIE
Tom here's from New Jersey.

SUMMER
Yeah?

TOM
Lived there til I was 12.

SUMMER
I named my cat after Springsteen.

TOM
No kidding? What's his name?

SUMMER
Bruce.

(beat)

TOM
That makes sense.

She laughs. She's really cute when she laughs.

Having just seen 500 Days of Summer (script PDF), I'm mystified by the range of friends' reactions to it. I'm a big sucker, I know, but I think the movie's wonderful. Turning to Ebert, a more proudly romantic film critic:

Tom opens the film by announcing it will not be your typical love story. Are you like me, and when you realize a movie is on autopilot you get impatient with it? How long can the characters pretend they don’t know how the story will end? Here is a rare movie that begins by telling us how it will end and is about how the hero has no idea why.

What did you think of the movie? How much of a sucker am I (and how much is Ebert)? Comment, Facebook message, tweet, e-mail, etc…

Jeff Fb-messaged last month to see if I was going to blog about John Mayer's ridiculous interview with Rolling Stone ("”Blowing me off is the new sucking me off"). This blog has a long and proud history of Mayer Hatin', but I said, no, there was nothing else to be said. John Mayer continued to be a person desperately in need of ego check. No news.

Then the ridiculous Playboy interview broke. There was so much to be said, and the world said it. Everybody published something, and Mayer needed to apologize on stage for being awful and nearly cried. So, not much for me to say. I had just begun to wonder if Heartbreak Warfare was the second Mayer song ever I liked a little. (Here was the first.)

But now I have something worth posting! The Los Angeles Times' Ann Powers has a terrific interview with Mayer's Playboy interviewer, Rob Tannenbaum. Both the questions and answers are good reads.

From Powers, on Kanye West's award-show interruptions:

That was another case of a thirtysomething male artist at the top of his game committing "career suicide" by overstepping a boundary. It was another example of a mediated event that somehow spun out of the control of both the subject (West and Mayer) and those organizing it (MTV, you and Playboy). Both brought up touchy matters of race and gender. In both cases, the artists involved expressed great remorse almost immediately. West still remains in a kind of exile for his "terrible" deed. Will the same thing happen to Mayer? Or will this pass? And if it passes, is it partly because he's white?

From Tannenbaum, on modern content anecdotalization:

Take away his use of the “N-word,” and you have a white musician commenting on the privilege of race, and warning other whites that they can’t ever presume to know racial disadvantage. Harry Allen, an accomplished black writer, described this on Twitter as a "powerful, pointed statement." How many white rock stars understand that, never mind declare it? He found a stupid way to make valuable points. If he’d just left out one forbidden word and an ill-advised reference to a white supremacist (who I don’t want to promote by naming), Mayer might be up for an NAACP Image Award.

The LAT reader comments after the exchange are thoughtful. You may agree with some and not others, but they hit on a number of the half-reactions you may feel while reading the interview about the interview.

Like… Do Powers and Tannenbaum overestimate Mayer's intelligence? "The playboy article reads like the rants of a manic narcissist, not some troubled, misunderstood genius." Does Tannenbaum do right by race? "The first playboy interview was conducted by Alex Haley and was an interview with Miles Davis Tannenbaum has degraded Haley's Playboy legacy." How much does interviewing method matter? "I doubt that Tannenbaum would sound as articulate, or as fatuous, if he had to answer these questions in person or over the phone." All your call.

This week has been good but also bruising and exhausting — to some extent because I don't know to whom I can explain why the week has been good, bruising and exhausting. I'm an explainer. Lacking answers there, you're stuck listening for now to one of the little good parts.

You know my blog post this morning about Dan Neil? I got a text from buddy Nate tonight while I was grocery shopping, "Dan posted on the fb page via his wifes profile!" I got home, and, sure enough, Dan had found my blog and then landed on our Facebook page for the Dan Neil Fan Club. Wrote the man: "Dan Neil here. Quite belatedly I've come to say thank you for being such a wonderful and faithful audience. You've made my job a lot easier and more fun. I truly appreciate it."

Made my day. Realized halfway to home I'd left my case of beer in the rack under my grocery cart in parking lot — this is exactly why I never use my vegetable crispers — and it didn't matter. A random dude who writes great stuff for newspapers had once again proven himself cool.

Which, really, is why Nate and I are fans. It's fun to prop the dude as larger than life on Facebook and in a blog. But by all appearances, Dan is a guy with a regular life who works in a newsroom, just like I do and in many ways analogous to what Nate does. Dan has a creative, cool job in which he invests himself a crazy amount, gets pissed at The Man on a regular basis and wants to do awesome by his audiences every damn day of the week. Nate and I, on our respective coasts, live that and drink to it. In a world where ("In a world where…") we all struggle to break through the information cloud, we salute success in doing so.

Difficult news in the last week on the Dan Neil front. As you may have heard, this blog's favorite columnist is leaving the Los Angeles Times for the pay-walled and increasingly USAT-competing Wall Street Journal.

Jalopnik may have put it best: "Pulitzer-Winning Auto Writer, Explorer of Sexual Positions Heads to WSJ." Friend Nate, a resident of greater Los Angeles and creator of Facebook's Dan Neil Fan Club (44 members and counting, join today), were texting about the news this evening.

The upshot? Don't worry, Dan Neil, we're coming.

Sure, you're headed to Carolina — back home — with the family in tow. The WSJ can also give you play the LAT had begun to lack. Along with, probably, some money. The "Free Dan Neil" movement was likely right. If you love Dan Neil, set him free. If he goes back to Carolina, well…

I don't know how, but we're going to liberate you from that pay wall. Your adjectives, hyphenations and extended ledes yearn for freedom.

Neil's last LAT column is now online. He travels to Italy and drives the 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia. "The effect on the human body," he writes, "is like biting into your neighborhood electrical substation." And the lede, the lede… pardon my quoting at length, but you won't regret reading:

Snow is a beautiful thing.

Snow wraps a pretty white scarf around the sordid and everyday. It's the stuff of Cascade watersheds, the frosting on Kilimanjaro, the secret ingredient in Telluride daiquiris.

Snow is to be cherished.

Yet it's not snowflakes that I see drifting into Ferrari's brick courtyard on the Via Abetone, the Temple Mount in this, the Jerusalem of Red Cars. Instead, I imagine I see tiny, confetti-like news clippings from Corriere della Sera, each one telling of an American journalist who managed to plunge a Ferrari 458 Italia into a snowy mountain suckhole. If I did that, it would be the biggest weather related-accident since Dallas Raines bought his wardrobe.

I kid you not, young lovers. As I turn the red enamel key in the ignition, and the V-8's devils begin to dance on the drumhead – KeWhe-drummmmmmmm — I am genuinely concerned.

Alas, the timing is what it is. I have a chance to drive Ferrari's newest mid-engine V-8 Berlinetta, a car that's quicker than the legendary Enzo (less than 3.4 seconds to 60 mph), with 72 horsepower more than the mind-frying F430, with a top speed in excess of 202 mph. A car with a wicked, scything aerodynamic shape, a bloody knife like never haunted Lady Macbeth.

And so the table is set: pounding snow, icy roads and a 562-hp, mid-engine reptile on stone-cold tires. An Italian hurt locker.

Via Romenesko this morning, Neil's LAT farewell note is here. "It’s been a rough few years here, mainly because of the jackasses in Chicago who own us. To them I say, with as much gusto as I can muster in an email, fuck you. On a happier note, there’s not a person in this building I do not like, if not love. The paper has more greatness ahead of it, and I’ll be watching from the east coast and rooting you on."