Real Mexicans eat real homemade corn tortillas. Pasty white Mexicans eat processed flour tortillas made at the Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque. Then they get food poisoning. DENVER.

Water, like many other things, runs downhill. And North Carolina acts as a sluice, with water running from the highlands out west to the flats east of Raleigh, filtering through every community large and small.

I’ve been trying, when possible, to telecommute a few days a month in an effort to save money and do my share to curb our national jones for gasoline. There are other nice things about it too.

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing are shaping up to be the kind of disaster that will leave us all shaking our heads in wonder, thinking: How could this have happened? It began seven years ago, with intense debate among the interna tional Olympic Committee and comparisons drawn to the 1936 games, hosted in Germany under Nazi rule.

For the uninitiated, Dunkin’ Donuts began in New England around 1950 and quickly spread its brand of sugar-glazed goodness throughout the Northeast. When I was a kid in the 1970s and ’80s, mothers would bring boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts to school for their kids’ birthdays, and anytime you went to a sleepover.

Here we go again. Another e-mail in my inbox with “Fwd: FW: FWD: FWD: Fw:” forming half the subject, sent by some relative to me and about 20 other acquaintances. They started as a trickle — the usual tales of footprints in sand and photos of Jesus on toast, either asking or warning me to forward them to a dozen people by sundown.

But more likely it was because my fish-head vegetarian wife left town with our daughter and I was charged with the care and feeding of our two boys, both of whom have been raised in a household where red meat — and steaks in particular — don’t come around much.