Lunch at Zingerman’s Roadhouse

We hadn’t been to Zingerman’s Roadhouse for around six years, and decided to give it another try.
In the past, we’ve felt that it wasn’t as good as it claims to be, and the prices are high.

Len’s Montreal Reuben sandwich: price $22.
The smoked meat was cut very thick, which is odd for a deli sandwich. Fries OK, not great.

My lunch: fried Pierogis and a spinach and citrus salad ($16 and $12).
The pierogis had been fried quite a long time before they were served, so I found them somewhat soggy.

Some T-shirt designs. Zingerman’s businesses sell lots of swag.
Our verdict: we will try again in another six years.

 Photos © 2025 mae sander.

Coffee Cups and Art

New in my Living Room

Recently, I haven’t had any drink-centered photos to share with Elizabeth’s Tuesday Drink blog party, but today is different. First, in my living room, a new way to hold a cup of tea or coffee.

This is my new coffee and tea cup holder that fits over the arm of the couch.
Len made it for me last week.

Also a good place to leave my iPad…

… or snacks like this jar of goldfish crackers.

In the Museum Shop: Mugs

Cat mugs in the gift shop at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

At the Museum

Dark Presence III (1971) by Louise Nevelson

La Raza Art and Media Collective 1975 – Today
Mural by George Vargas.

Blog post and all photos © 2025 mae sander

Pinky and the Brain

 

Dislocations

My Country’s Capitol: Photos Over the Years

Departing on a plane…from the Washington Monument to the Capitol Building.

At a kite festival…

Walking by the Capitol on a beautiful autumn day.

Photos © 2007-2015 mae sander.

A Horror Show In Washington

Good things about our government: I read about a recall of canned tuna that was issued a few days ago. “Canned tuna sold at grocery stores in 26 states and in Washington, D.C., was recalled because of botulism risks, the Food and Drug Administration and Tri-Union Seafoods said on Friday.” I had a can of tuna from Trader Joe’s that I was worried about, so I looked on the FDA website. (“Canned Tuna Sold at Trader Joe’s and Costco Is Recalled Over Botulism Risks,” New York Times, Feb 12, 2025) 

My tuna wasn’t involved in this recall, but in retrospect, I started to worry about a much bigger issue: what’s going to happen to the FDA? Thousands of jobs in the Federal Government are being discontinued, and many services that I would say are vital are being “thrown in the wood chipper” (as Elon Musk himself describes it). I began thinking of all the ways the government contributes to my well-being and my life style. So many agencies do good things that I depend on: the FDA, the NIH, law enforcement, farm support and on and on. 

Will all inspection of food be discontinued, so that we have to accept whatever we get from the food processing industry? Will we have to trust slaughter houses to keep meat sanitary and safe? Who will track down the cause of a cluster of salmonella cases or e-coli outbreaks? Will auto safety measures and regulation be abandoned? Will drug manufacturers be allowed to release any drugs the choose, without even the limited testing that’s been done up to now? It’s been easy in the past to dismiss the benefits of government regulation in our lives, but if you think about it, we really depend on it. Do you trust the big food processors? Do you trust big pharma? 

Regulation of food and agriculture has been a response to public concern for over a century, with many emerging issues in the last few decades. I’ve been reading a book about the development of attitudes in the US about processed food, healthy eating, and the development of many ideas about what is safe and desirable. Specifically: 

“Concerns about the purity  and safety of the food supply had been around for a very long time,  but technological changes that accompanied twentieth-century  industrialization, such as the growing use of chemicals in food  production and the industrialization of agriculture, raised new concerns about risks related to everything from chemical additives, preservatives, and packaging to the use of antibiotics in  animal agriculture.” (Charlotte Bilekoff. Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge, p.55)

There are many valuable services at risk. I love to travel. The government supports the interstate highway system, the National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Seashores. The government enables the functioning of air travel through airports, air traffic control, and more. Like almost every senior in the US, I depend on Social Security and Medicare. If you live here, you can probably think of quite a few government programs that benefit you. What’s in jeopardy? We don’t know yet. The acquiescence of the Republican majority in congress to anything the President and his minions demand is a horror show in and of itself.

We are helpless, destabilized, and  bewildered, when confronted with so many attacks on government programs and the Constitutional rule of law in such a short time. In less than a month, we’ve seen the demolition of  cultural institutions; for example, the Kennedy Center (see Ann Telnaes cartoon left, from her Substack). International programs, particularly USAID, have been gutted. Support for assimilation of legal immigrants has been discontinued through defunding of welfare agencies, not to mention cancelling citizenship for American-born children. We’ve heard false accusations of fraud in many agencies and disruption of law enforcement  such as firings at the FBI and showdown at Justice. Alarming trends include cuts in funds for medical research supported by the NIH, ending fights against corruption such as shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and cancelling other protections, and placing incompetent appointees in high positions (the anti-vax Kennedy for health is the most extreme) …and on and on — every newspaper has numerous articles about the destruction of organizations that were put in place by acts of Congress but are being destroyed by unprecedented fiat from the Executive branch.

We are also helpless in view of some extreme acts of cruelty towards immigrants, even if they are here illegally. We may have a bad conscience when we think about the knock on the door in the middle of the night, and the flights full of shackled people. Echoes of roundups of the Jews in Nazi Germany? I fear so.

I feel more helpless than ever as I watch this nightmare emerging —

“The pandemic reduced normal human interactions. Severed from one another, Americans deepened their parasocial attachment to social-media platforms, which foment alienation and rage. Hundreds of thousands of people plunged into an alternate mental universe during COVID‑19 lockdowns. When their doors reopened, the mania did not recede. Conspiracies and mistrust of the establishment—never strangers to the American mind—had been nourished, and they grew.” (Source: The Atlantic)

Did I miss anything? YES, absolutely. Every time I read the headlines there’s another outrage. A final quote:

“R.F.K. Jr. is now in charge of the F.D.A., N.I.H. and C.D.C., to which Americans said, ‘OMG,’ ‘WTF’ and ‘FML.’” — JIMMY FALLON

Blog post © 2025 mae sander, 

Images of Birds by Japanese Artist Hokusai

 

Some happy thoughts to distract from today’s travesty on the American dream.

From “Pictures after Nature” (Hokusai shashin gafu) 北斎写真画譜

Bird pictures from web searching 

Remembering an exhibit about Hokusai’s life and art.

Shared with Saturday Critters at Eileen’s blog and Sami’s Murals

Catching up on the Classics

 Reading

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a brutal and powerful book. I felt as if it was providing a deep look into past prejudices and how they destroyed their targets: namely, gay men. Published in 1956, it must have been a shock to readers — or perhaps the readers of that time held such negative views of gay men that they were insensitive to the impact of the self-hatred experienced by the narrator. Baldwin is brilliant in describing his character’s clear consciousness of how his peers must have detested him. I wonder if some readers were indifferent to the way the character bows to society’s cruel judgement of him, a judgement that he internalized. I chose this book because I wanted to read about Paris in the 1950s, and of course there is plenty of Paris atmosphere in the book, but it’s the ugly atmosphere of low-life bars and poverty.

In a 1956 review in the New York Times, I found little sympathy for the suffering of the narrator: “Much of the novel is laid in scenes of squalor, with a background of characters as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust's ‘Cities of the Plain.’ But even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin's materials, one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.” (Granville Hicks, “Tormented Triangle,” NYT October 14, 1956)

The Dream is one of the twenty novels in Zola’s series titled Les Rougon-Macquart, published between 1871 and 1893. Each volume in the series highlights a character or a family that typify some aspect of French society in the second half of the 19th century in France. I’m enjoying The Dream, which is about the life of a young girl — an adopted orphan — in a town around 2 hours outside Paris: that is, two hours by the transportation that was available in the 19th century. The plot is slightly exaggerated with the angelic nature of the girl and her extreme religiosity, despite Zola’s famous antipathy to religion. She has a dream to marry a wealthy prince, and the book follows this as if it’s a fairy tale, not a story about an orphan taken in by a middle class couple. It’s lyrical (as the reviews all note) but I also feel a sense of irony in the much-too-happy plot.

I’ve only read a few of the novels in this amazing and fascinating series (maybe I’ve read six of them), and my ambition is to read more, as well as to read some of Zola’s other novels. I think I like his brutal realism better than this maybe fake idyl. 

And Watching…

Hitchcock Classic (1938)

Another Hitchcock classic but not quite as wonderful.  (1936)

All-around classic with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon,
directed by Billy Wilder (1959)

…and my Favorite Classic

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Far Away in Trinidad

This is a retrospective post, looking back at our December trip.

On our birding trip to Trinidad, we spent the last two days in a remote part of the island looking for a rare bird, the piping guan.  In this post I am showing a few scenes from our stay at a beautiful seaside hotel where people go to relax, to watch the turtles that breed on the beaches (but not in December), and to watch birds. 

First, a mural on the local elementary school.

A hotel on the far side of the island

We stayed here, far from the populated areas of the island, because we wanted to 
see the very rare bird, the piping guan. This is a follow up to show the hotel.
I’ve shown this image before.

Beautiful tropical wood on the door of the hotel reception.

More wood.

Our hotel room and its balcony

The Rare Piping Guan

Shared with Sami’s murals

Photos © 2024 mae sander

At My House

 Cooking 

Dinner for Guests

We hadn’t cooked any recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking lately, so when we started planning a meal for friends, we thought about an old favorite: casserole-roasted chicken with tarragon. If you want to get amazing results you have to do every step the way that Julia Child says to do it. So in addition to the recipe in the old favorite book, we watched the 60-year-old TV episode where Julia Child showed American cooks how to make this dish. Back then, it was revolutionary!

These original episodes of The French Chef are of course in black-and-white.
As you may know, Julia Child’s cooking show pretty much invented Food TV.

Julia Child’s recipe  recommends roasted potatoes and peas with mushrooms as side dishes. OK.

Unbelievably delicious!

Our guests.

Best Breakfast

 Another great bake by Len.

Reading

A bit of reading about Tokyo for a change of scene. Tokyo on Foot is a delightful collection of images.
Thanks to Emma at Words and Peace for recommending these books.

Reading next: classic haiku.

This is not one of the best novels by Patricia Highsmith.
I didn’t like any of the tediously portrayed characters and they weren’t
quirky enough to be interesting. 

Watching Peter Ustinov’s Poirot

We wondered why we hadn’t seen these Agatha Christie films before. Each one has an all-star cast.
They have a delightful light touch. We also watched Kenneth Branagh’s Orient Express: very heavy-handed.

The Weather is Grim

Woody, the Michigan Groundhog saw no shadow and (as superstition has it) said no to more winter.
I agree that winter should end, but unfortunately, Woody is only right 35% of the time. (Photo Credit)
The “weather” in our nation isn’t so great either.

What I was doing two years ago

Whale watching in Baja California, February, 2023.

Photos © 2023, 2025 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and Eileen’s Critters.