Here’s what’s occupying a few brain cells this should-already-be-sleeping night.

Meryl Streep was just on the Colbert Report. She’s playing one of my heros, Julia Child, in a new movie. Once many, many, many, long, long, long years ago, I used to watch Julia and take notes. I fantasized about a well-appointed kitchen and endless hours to let my bread rise and my own fresh patch of herbs to grow.

I now have that kitchen, and most of the time it hosts take-out rice and noodles from various eastern lands. As someone here, surprised that my zucchini bread was respectable enough, pointed out to me — Spending hours to cook in New England weather, sure why not, what else are you going to do? But, here? Here where mild and temperate are a presumed way of life, who the fuck has time for yeast to breed? Why cook when you can buy and then have plenty of sunlight left over to do something else?

I also have the dead basil haunting my every step in the backyard to taunt my desire for a Provence-enspired garden worthy of Julia. I am simply not worthy. Only my rosemary seems to be surviving the concentration camp-like nursery that is life under my green thumb.

But, none of that is why I mentioned Meryl. Meryl, she reminded me of my roots. My non-French Chef roots.

She brought up Peg Bracken and the I Hate to Cook Cookbook. Apparently, my mom, Pat, and Meryl’s mom shopped at the same bookstore and believed in the same notion of 20 minutes to the table after a long day at work. So, we have the same nutritional base, but somehow her vitamins and minerals, no doubt freeze-dried or flash-frozen, crystallized and grew into talent. Mine, they took another path.

Meanwhile, back in the news, despite the obsessive attention to her Puerto Rican roots and the inherent fear of such a woman playing in the major leagues alongside the white, male power base, Sonia Sotomayor did it. The world didn’t end. Justice didn’t stop. White men aren’t being sent to camps in Manzanar.

Congratulations, to a wise Latina, and I mean that in a non-condescending or suspiciously close to racist manner.

Better yet, she did it by a wider margin than Justices Alito or Thomas. By the way, how come if the left is supposedly destroying the country and always has been un-American, how come the presumably liberal judges get wider vote margins, reeling in some folks from the opposition party? We can’t be that horrible over hear behind the socialist left curtain, yeah?

Meanwhile, back in the shitty, sad news, one crazy guy killed himself and shittily brought some others with him, because he couldn’t get a date? Fuck you, madman Sodini. Your failed life was on your shoulders, but now women, gym-goers and bloggers, and most of all the women you killed and their families are now dealing in the wake of your selfishness. Asshole.

And, Lynette Squeaky Fromme is getting out of the pen. The only thing good that ever came from her pathetic life and worship of Charlie Manson is Stephen Sondheim’s duet with Hinckley in Assassins.

Finally, the celebrity deaths just keep piling up this year. Budd Schulberg left the world after a good, long run at 95. “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charlie.”

On the flip side of memorable dialogue, everyone alive and watching youth-targeted movies in the ’80s lost the man responsible for “Farmer Ted” and a resurgence of Danke Schoen. John Hughes was so much a part of more than just pop culture in that decade, kind of uber-pop culture, I remember not just the movies themselves but stories around them.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the news was actually about Pat. In those dark and distant days, technology wasn’t what it is today. “They” had just come out with a magical bit of consumer-level, household electronics that let the moving picture shows be recorded of of the TV. The TV. The VCR it changed our collective relationship with the TV.

Pat had gotten a VCR and, I think, somewhere in the mix of my heading off to college, she got cable television. Once upon a time, television waves floated through the air and got caught by a large antenna placed up on the roof. And, then there was a chunk of co-ax bringing in MTV and the Home Shopping Network.

Anyway, back then, Pat would prepare for my various returns home from school in a modern, electronics rich welcome. I wasn’t prodigal or a son, and I didn’t get a fatted calf. But, I got videos of 16 Candles and Pretty in Pink and the like. She’d store up recordings and present them to me. I don’t think she watched them, just recorded them for me.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Hughes. “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.’

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