Let’s all pause for a moment of gratitude that this hellish heat didn’t show up over Yom Kippur.  What kind of mid-October day just decides to cook all of L.A. at 96 degrees?

I think the sun made me hallucinate, because when I crossed Olympic today, I saw a very peculiar bunch: a shirtless middle aged man in long jeans; a “gangsta”-looking dude in sagging long pants, t-shirt, plaid button-down and jacket; and a suited Persian man wearing a kippah and large cross across his chest.

I actually glanced back after I passed all of them to make sure I wasn’t just imagining the three most random people I could think of, all walking together.

Back to Yom Kippur, though—I was thinking: what if we could pick one food item to eat over the entire 26-hour fast?  There’s the instinctive ‘bulk’ approach (an entire pizza pie or roasted turkey) or the more liquid-minded one (a watermelon, for instance).

For some reason, though, I was craving lox through the entire fast.  Don’t ask me why.  There was lox at the break-fast I went to – I cleaned that platter up.  No bagel, no cream cheese.  Just that smoked salmon.

Oh, the places our minds take us when we get that hungry.