Tuna Piano?

ONCE IN A great while, the fish sandwich enthusiast will run up against a specimen that is just damned perfect.

This is one of those times.

Your basic canned tuna salad sandwich probably doesn't sound like anything all that special, and, most of the time, it probably isn't. This just happened to turn into the prime specimen: the fish isn't anything special in and of itself, but after combining it with mayonaisse, Plochman's yellow mustard, about a tablespoon and a half of minced shallot, and about two tablespoons of dill relish, it turned into . . . Well, just magic. Slightly fishy, tangy, savory, just lovely.

The analog (and again, we're speaking of fish sandwiches here) would be the fried cod sandwich I had in New York a few years back. The Tale is on here somewhere, I am pretty sure, but the point would simply be that the thing was so gaddamned perfect that I have not had a completely satisfying fried fish sandwich since then. Here's hoping that this will not be the case here.

The first beer was the brown lager, and it snuggled up against the fish sandiwch like a suckling pig. The second, the Adirondack lager, was a shade too sparkly, at first almost shrill, but it went along well enough in the long run.

The film of the day was Leatherheads.

Not on purpose, mind you. Prior to lunch I had a couple of minor errands to run, and when I got back, turning on the TV in the office, this was on, about twenty minutes in, and a quick run through the guide verified that there wasn't anything else I wanted to watch on. So I watched it while I made and ate lunch, which is probably the best way to do it.

We saw this in the theater when it first came out, on the grounds that we like George Clooney, we like John Krasinski, and parts of it were filmed in Charlotte. Two hours later, as we emerged, blinking, into the light, I observed "Well, we've often said we would watch George Clooney paint a fence."

And then the wife and I concluded, in a single voice, "Aaaaaaaaaaand we just did."

Not that it's bad. It's a fine little movie. It's plenty of fun. It's closer than anything I can think of in recent times to what you might call a screwball comedy. As such things go, it makes for a simply fine tuna sandwich companion, which would be a great name for a rock band.

On the other hand, HBO 2 West (why 2? Dunno? Why West? I got nothin'.) followed it with Ocean's Thirteen, which is just plain wrong. When it comes down to ensemble fence painting, as Mr. Twain most ably demonstrated, is best kept to a single scene, and ought not to take up the entire narrative.