Excuse me while I take a few days of r&r to visit my old friend in LA. I’ll be strolling the palm-lined boulevards in dry 80-degree sunshine while the rest of you are sweating it out in the muggy east. Let’s hope my little jaunt doesn’t get spoiled by wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, or whatever other natural disasters tend to strike southern California. Come to think of it, the muggy east doesn’t look so bad anymore…

Ah, the English. I can always count on them to deliver a good squirrel story, complete with Beatrix Potter details. Harriet Snookes, writing for Aylesbury Today, tells us about a bald squirrel, nicknamed Smoothie, that was recently brought in to the St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital for observation:

Smoothie was rescued after a lady in Amersham noticed the animal running around in her back garden. She called St Tiggywinkles and they told her to bring the creature in. She laid a trap for Smoothie and took him to the hospital in Haddenham, where he has been kept ever since.

Whole article here. Smoothie is under observation while the good people at St. Tiggy’s, as the locals call it, try to determine why the poor guy has no fluff:

It seems like the two main theories are mange or drawing the short straw in the genetics lottery.

On the running front, all went as usual for Week 5, although I shuffled my long run (6 miles) to Saturday instead of Sunday due to social commitments. This week will be a little irregular, as I’m heading out of town to visit a friend and will be on vacation time from Thursday to Sunday. But this is actually sort of an easy week according to the Plan, so I don’t think it’ll set me back too much. I’ll just run like hell for the next two days and hope it carries me through the rest of the week.

I’m running a workout behind on the push-ups, but am at 80+ per session, so that’s good enough for me.

Some longtime readers may remember a post from two summers ago about our impromptu Philly cheesesteak odyssey. We had fun on that trip but were a little disappointed with our sandwiches and still on the lookout for something really authentic. A few months back Will had brunch with a high school friend and some other guys from the Princeton area and got to talking with one of them about where to get the best cheesesteaks and other heart-attack sandwiches in Philadelphia. Ever since then, Will’s been plotting and scheming to make a trip to John’s Roast Pork, a 78-year-old sandwich joint in the industrial hinterlands south of downtown Philly. Trouble is, they’re only open until 3 p.m., and only on weekdays. Our chance came on Friday, as we were en route to a rehearsal dinner on a friend’s family farm. After a few wrong turns, we finally were confronted with this glorious sign:

I spent enough time in the South to know that an anthropomorphized pig on the sign equals good pork. We had been advised to order the Italian roast-pork sandwich with sharp provolone and spinach, plus a classic cheesesteak:

The roast pork had a pastrami-like treatment, with a peppery crust, sliced thin, and piled high on a soft (and frankly sort of brain-like) Kaiser roll. I could see why it had won the James Beard Foundation award for best pork sandwich. The spinach was an inspired if somewhat soggy touch.

The cheesesteak delivered on the hype: not too greasy, just enough cheese and onions, on a sturdy hero studded with sesame seeds. We split the two sandwiches, and those plus the barbecue consumed at Saturday’s wedding supplied all the meat I’ll be wanting for a while. It’s tempeh for dinner tonight…

I’ve decided to implement another new regular feature in addition to Squirrel Wednesday. As any reader of this blog knows, I love to eat and cook, but what may not be apparent is my tendency to fixate on one dish, or even one ingredient. I get this from my dad, who will spend months making batch after batch of one food (chicken stock, fried chicken, baguettes, chocolate-chip cookies, etc.) until he feels he’s achieved the Platonic ideal. I don’t go that far (except for with my fried tofu or attempts to achieve the perfect soft-boiled egg), but my enthusiasm for a certain ingredient will ensure that it sneaks into at least one meal a day until I get sick of it or get distracted by some new deliciousness.

So, to make a long story short, I am inaugurating I Just Can’t Get Enough, my periodic reporting on the food love affair du jour, and will try to include a recipe or two. For the past week, it’s been frozen blueberries, ever since I read the much-discussed 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating list. I’ve been eating almost all the foods on the list, but the blueberries are clear frontrunners. As for a “recipe,” I’m not racing around making pies or anything; frozen blueberries are good just as-is; they’re so small you can eat them without defrosting. So here’s my current favorite breakfast preparation:

1/2 cup plain yogurt
drizzle of honey
sprinkling (a tablespoon or two?) of slivered almonds
1/2 cup of frozen blueberries

Does is get tastier or more nutritious?

Our second installment of Squirrels in the News raises an interesting existential question: if you don’t see where squirrels go to die (other than beneath a car’s wheels), does that mean they live forever? A fellow in Ontario thinks so:

Now that got me thinking about the squirrels. Where do they physically go to die? They live in trees. If they are not in a tree already, they are running toward a tree; we all know this from common observation every time we go for a walk in the park.

Now let me observe that a dead squirrel cannot cling to a tree and keep himself or herself from falling to the ground. That makes sense, too. Only live squirrels can use their little claws to stay up in a tree according to their own will. So one would think that when a squirrel dies it would fall out of the tree and land on the ground right where the tree stands. However, we never see dead squirrels lying on the ground in the park under the very trees where they spend all their lives. So where do they go to die?

I have given it some thought and I think I know the answer — they are immortal.

Rest of the article here. Alas, Walter, although that’s a nice idea, it seems our furry friends live only about three years. My guess is that scavengers like crows, dogs, or birds of prey pick up expired squirrels before you notice them littering the bases of trees.

I got back on track with the running program this week, finally. My toe stopped hurting a few days ago, but I’m a little disturbed by what I think may have caused it…gout?!? I never went to the doctor so can’t be positive, but all the symptoms were there–just one joint affected (75% of flare-ups are in the big toe), swollen and hot, concurrent flu-like symptoms. Problem is, I’m not an obese, steak-eating, alcoholic old man, which is the typical profile of gout sufferers. There is such a thing as pseudo-gout, which is the same symptoms but a different crystal structure in the joint fluid. That mostly affects bedridden nursing-home patients. I guess I’ll go get it tested if it happens again, but for now I’m just glad it doesn’t hurt anymore.

My push-up schedule was a bear this week. As you may recall, I started off at Level 2 and had to do an “exhaustion test” before starting Week 3 to see if I would continue at that level. I needed a minimum of 21 push-ups to maintain my level, which I just barely managed. And the next workout required at that level? Eighty-three push-ups, up from 48 just a few days before. Hell, no. I demoted myself to Level 1, which was still plenty hard, and I finished the week with 78 push-ups, which I think is pretty good, even for the super-weakling level.

By watching people eat hot dogs until they collapse! My friend and I ventured out to Coney Island earlier today to watch the annual Nathan’s Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest. We loitered on the pavement with about 35,000 other spectators while a barker in a straw boater made bad jokes; a guy got up on stage and proposed to his girlfriend (she accepted, and the barker married them on the spot, at which point I heard the girl’s mother’s heart breaking somewhere in Queens); an obese rapper, who was also a contestant and world-champion matzoh eater, did his thing; and faux cheerleaders awkwardly waved their pom-poms. This year was particularly exciting, as it was the rematch of Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut. For those of you who don’t follow these things, Kobayashi was the undefeated champion for six straight years, until Chestnut took him down last year. This year, they finished in a dead heat of 59 dogs each (in 10 minutes); Chestnut barely won in a one-minute eat-off. So exciting! For the stomach-churning visuals, click on the photo below.

It seems that the runaway hit posting of the week was my squirrel report, so, after some discussion with my coeditor, I have decided to inaugurate a regular feature: Squirrel Wednesday. Just as the week starts to be a little too much for you all, stop by here for a dose of squirrel-related current events. If I can’t find a good news story, it seems that my good friend Yuliya possesses a wealth of squirrel arcana (in Russia, these little beasts can only be found in zoos!), so I’ll just ask her for a fun fact. Stay tuned; and if anyone wishes to assign me a post on any other random topic, feel free to submit your request.

For a while now, Will and I have had discussions about how the right has hijacked the notion of patriotism so that liberals are regarded as treasonous malcontents. And liberals look down their noses at patriotic gestures, because, well, that must mean you’re one of them. Will’s been wanting to put a flag sticker on the bumper of his little VW (next to the Obama sticker) as a small gesture of reclaiming national pride (it hasn’t happened because he can’t find one anywhere). This week, Slate has run a two-part feature that does a wonderful job of summarizing the patriotic divide:

Since the end of World War II, the conservative version of patriotism that the Republicans have championed has rested upon a steadfast protectiveness of American values in the face of enemies—proven through a muscular, nationalistic military posture. Impatient with critical perspectives, conservative patriotism advocates an unhesitant participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and even public prayer. McCain, who is fluent with words like valor and sacrifice, firmly belongs to this tradition.

Postwar liberalism has defined love of country differently. It calls for candidly identifying what’s wrong with America in order to improve it. It tends to regard collective gestures like the Pledge of Allegiance as hollow, tokenistic, and even potentially coercive—and thus antithetical to the individualism that lets free thought flourish. To conservative patriotism’s semper fidelis, liberal patriotism counters with e pluribus unum.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I was honestly baffled at the backlash against Michelle Obama’s remarks about finally being proud of her country. When I read her comments, I did a little inward cheer: “Me too!” I view my country sort of like I view my family–I often disagree with it, it sometimes makes me cringe, but I still love it and believe in its inherent worth and would certainly never abandon it. Dissent is what makes me proud to be American–blind acceptance and nationalism is best left to military dictatorships.