It can only truly be Texas red if it walks the thin line just this side of indigestibility: Damning the mouth that eats it and defying the stomach to digest it, the ingredients are hardly willing to lie in the same pot together.

Rice and peas fit into that category of dishes where two ordinary foods, combined together, ignite a pleasure far beyond the capacity of either of its parts alone. Like rhubarb and strawberries, apple pie and cheese, roast pork and sage, the two tastes and textures meld together into the sort of subtle transcendental oneness that we once fantasized would be our experience when we finally found the ideal mate.

Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family's cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of 'Fannie Farmer' or 'The Joy of Cooking'.

Unbuttered toast is a substance half complete, and to be forced to eat it in that state is necessarily to feel deprived.

It's silly, just to the ear. It implies that this team can do what no one else can, which is to be in two places at one time. Especially two places that are 35 miles apart.

Desperate scribes and headline writers were trying to save character counts.

They acquire a kind of patina with age.

The result was very predictable: Nothing. They went back to the Braves.

Baseball is in danger, everyone agrees. Player salaries are skyrocketing while revenues - and soon, perhaps, teams - are contracting.

Baseball is the first of our national team sports. It is the game of memory from when we are children, not only in terms of learning how many home runs Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron hit, but in remembering the score of the game our dads first took us to or where we made that catch in center field that we still can't believe.