Although I am devoted to my Polaroid camera--it is my m�tier, my joie de fwah fwah, if you will, I am appreciating my camera phone this morning for the simple reason, or raison d'etre that it allowed me to photograph and instantly post the following phenomenon of mystery:

PHENOMENON OF MYSTERY

Please take a moment to process your awe, and then I will return to my explanation, or �tonnement of this phenomenon.

Someone left a bowl of M&Ms on my desk, for reasons unknown. I discovered them when I arrived this morning, and after an initial period of avoidance, during which I witnessed several coworkers eating them without ill effect, or malaise, I reached into the bowl and took two pieces. On opening my hand, I saw the triangular M&M and realized that I was in the presence of a great event.

Immediately, I grabbed my camera phone and, after choosing the most pleasing background, photographed the miracle. I chose a red background (technically a plastic file folder reading RETURN TO COLLEEN!!!! in bright yellow letters) to suggest Christmas, which, while admittedly greater on the lifetime scale of miracles, is still in the same category as this triangular M&M, which clearly represents the Holy Trinity.

Witness and believe!

And now on to my next subject, or soi disant, which is: How irritated I am with the author Gregory Maguire, and how still further irritated I am with myself, for having begun a second of his books after hating the first.

My initial irritation with his novel �Lost� had barely faded before I picked up another of his books, entitled �Mirror Mirror.� I couldn�t help it: I�m house-sitting at a place containing exactly eight books, one of which is a pocket Spanish-to-English dictionary, and another of which is a Jennifer Weiner novel about how hard it is to get a date (I assume). There�s no TV or internet access, the fridge was empty except for a bottle of San Pellegrino, and I quickly became bored playing tug-of-war with the two pugs. Thus, I have illustrated that �Mirror Mirror� was a choice of last resort.

The book, which is set in Italy (or, Italia) started off all right, with a lake and some green pond scum, and various Italians. So far so good, but as I read further, I felt the irritation start�much as you are feeling right now�as I sensed a disturbing trend, which is: the injudicious use of italics to denote foreign words. I am very curious to know who makes the decision, when setting a book in Italia, to italicize the words Mamma and Pappa, presumably to highlight their Italian pronunciation, but not the word loggia, which by all logic should be given the chance to lean over on its side with the rest of the clan.

Injudicious italics give me the uneasy feeling that I should tilt my head each time I encounter one, or that I am required to pause and fake an accent. The trend is just one of the many aspects I hated about reading The DaVinci Code, where some sentences wavered back and forth so dramatically that I wobbled like a bobble-head dachsund. �Alto,� cried the patronella, ripping a shred of la gran� pianissima from lo giandiello of the camerlengo. (I made that up, but it generally approximates the experience.)

I had planned, this morning, to tell the story of The Mystery of the Flaming Idiots at the Shell Station, but my irritazione is so fortissimo that it will have to wait for another giorno.

Star of the day. . .Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist