Delicious insecurities

(New York Times photo)

Prompted by one of Mom's comments on an earlier post, I tracked down this interesting New York Times story today about the art and popularity of grilled cheese sandwiches in Los Angeles. No mention of the fine version I had yesterday in South Pas, but many high-end sandwich spots are listed, including a place on Melrose, down the street from the former M&M domicile.

Here's the story's explanation for the simple sandwich's resurgence:

Buck Down, one of the organizers of the Grilled Cheese Invitational, sees its appeal this way: “It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?”

Elsewise, my solo morning news meeting found a couple of local highlights:

There was a nicely reported murder-for-hire story in this morning's Times by Richard Winton and Andrew Blankstein, the joined-at-the-hip cops reporters who used to sit next to me and were affectionately known around the newsroom as Wintstein (a nod to the "All the President's Men" nickname for Woodward and Bernstein, in a slightly different league).

And Times metro columnist Steve Lopez, for my money the best local columnist in the biz, has a typically excellent piece today on an Iraqi soldier undergoing reconstructive dental work in Beverly Hills by a "dentist to the stars" who is volunteering his services. What Lopez does so well is make his columns entertaining and funny without undercutting their central point, and he drives his points without a hammer. In this one, for example, he never exactly whacks the dentist for being a publicity-seeking opportunist, but you see it anyway. Brilliant. (Read and learn, RJ.)