The parents of an eight-year-old girl who found a bag of marijuana, a pipe, and a lighter in a McDonald's Happy Meal have threatened to sue.

To their credit as parents, it appears the child did not understand what she had found.

According to her mother, she said, "Mom, I have a lighter in my Happy Meal." Later she told her father she found two other "toys" in the box.

The parents were unhappy, as they should have been.

Then the mother went too far. She said, "That could have changed our entire lives."

They said they were bothered by having to deal with their daughter's confusion, and with the possibility of getting pulled over by the police while they carried the drug in their car to school.

What nonsense.

Here's what they should have done, step by step. (Sometimes parents need help with the difficult business of child-rearing.)

1. They should have said to their seemingly darling child, "Oh, that shouldn't be in there, sweetie. Let me get you another Happy Meal."

2. Either tossed the whole Happy Meal in the garbage or taken it to the manager and quietly turned it over to him.

Instead, the police and television stations got involved. And their lives indeed were changed.

It seems the paraphernalia was placed in the box by 17-year-old Brandon Scott, an employee. He admitted that he had done something wrong.

There's a kid whose parents brought him up right.

The people who make wine have all sorts of euphemisms for really bad years. They say they're "useful," which means they can sell them to restaurants, which in turn dump them on customers who don't know any better. In particular, you hear a lot of off-year Bordeaux referred to as "restaurant wine." Supposedly, this means the wines are ready to drink, but what it really means is that the wines have no chance of aging.

There's another kind of year that isn't of interest to collectors. It's a year that isn't quite good enough, but isn't really so bad. If you know your years, or if you occasionally check out vintage charts, you'll see certain years that are well-regarded but somehow overlooked.

For years, I drank 1983 Ports, which were cheap and absolutely first-rate. I think they were overlooked because the 1985 vintage got everybody's attention. I suspect 1996 and 1999 California Cabernets, excellent wines, are thought of as very last century and aren't particularly coveted. But my favorite find these days are 1997 red Burgundies. The wines are seldom great, but they are soft, sweet, and early maturing—that means, drink them right now. Because the dollar was high and the growing conditions suspect, they didn't cost too much.

Nothing is better than a perfectly mature red Burgundy. Nothing. None of my okay-year Burgundies will approach the power or profundity of, say, a well-stored 1985 Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche, but they might have similar characteristics: sweet fruit, pleasing acidity, hints of glorious decay in the nose. And the prices will be remarkable. I went off to Cru, a Manhattan restaurant with one of the best wine lists in America, in search of some '97's, in this case the least expensive ones. I have to warn you, though: Red Burgundy is almost never cheap.

I had two '97's I loved, a Volnay "Vendages Selectionees" from Michel Lafarge for $140 and a Nuit Saint Georges premier cru Clos des Forets St. George for $90. The Volnay, which in theory should have been the lesser wine, was not, simply because Lafarge is the greatest of all producers in that appellation. It had such wonderful structure I suspect it will last another 10 years. The Nuit St. George, from an excellent but less heralded producer, was more typical of the vintage—soft and round with a light body, but the sweet, slightly oaky, cherry-like bouquet was an absolute delight. If you liked those, in a few years start looking for the 1999 red Burgundies. It was an even better vintage, and it might be nicely forgotten by then.

Sam is a 17-year old kid I've known forever, at least as far as he's concerned. He's the rarest of all human beings, a rational teenager, and he works summers as a supermarket clerk, an occupation that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, which is what I consider most of them. I would never patronize supermarkets, except that I have this nagging need to eat.

Sam and I sit around now and then, swapping supermarket stories, like a couple of coots around a pot-bellied stove in Maine. Just last week he was telling me about the guy who made him go outside three times because he needed help with a balky bottle-redemption machine. After he finally got his 15 cents, he drove away in a Jaguar.

I live in New York's Westchester Country, where the two supermarkets closest to me are an A&P and a Stop & Shop. My latest moments of supermarket torment came at the so-called courtesy desks of these emporiums of evil.

At the A&P, the Entenmann's loaf cakes were on sale. High up was a sign that gave the sale price and an indication that it referred to "assorted" varieties. Under the sign was a shelf of loaf cakes, including the Ultimate Sour Cream Chocolate Chunk Loaf. The Entenmann's Company refers to this as an "ultimate delight." How could anyone in the mood for junk food resist?

I took one. At the check-out line, it rang up full price. I took it to the "courtesy desk," where the fellow in charge insisted this particular loaf cake didn't qualify. He said "assorted" meant that only some of them were on sale. It was such a stupid comment I stupidly got into an argument with him. I couldn't help myself.

I asked the manager what he thought. He stood there dumbfounded, this leader of men, unable to come to a decision. I gave up and left the Ultimate Sour Cream Chocolate Chunk Loaf behind. At least my cardiologist would have been pleased.

A few days later I was in Stop & Shop. Strip steaks were on sale, but there were no strip steaks. I bought something in their place, and stopped at the courtesy desk on the way out for one of those so-called rain checks. In theory, I'd get the steaks another day at the sale price.

The clerk called the meat department. She was told the strip steaks were now in the meat case. She refused to give me a rain check, saying that rules prohibited giving a rain check for an item that was available. I told her I'd already checked out and purchased something else. No good. She refused to give me a rain check.

Again I talked to the manager. This guy at least agreed with me that his rule was dumb, although I never did get the rain check.

I asked Sam, defender of supermarkets, what he thought.

He took my side, although he thought the problem was about people, not the places where they work.

He said, wisely, "I don't think people want to admit that other people are right."

I've given up on the A&P, which is a pretty crummy store, anyway. I admit I still go there now and then to pick up Tastykakes, the ultimate treat of my Philadelphia childhood. I now shop at Stop & Shop, where the odds are 50-50 that I won't have to deal with an idiot, instead of at A&P, where it's guaranteed.

In the old days, one of the pleasures of a Vegas vacation was sitting in your hotel coffee shop, reading a newspaper.

The coffee shops were the centers of hotel life. Everybody stopped by. These days, hotel coffee shops aren't really coffee shops. They're fast-paced casual restaurants. Nobody hangs around. Nobody looks in to see who's there.

I had an inspiration. I wanted to see what would happen if I went into one of those notorious hotel breakfast buffets and acted as though it were a place to relax, not a place to eat as much as you can, as fast as you can.

I went to the Bellagio. Paid $14.95 as I walked in. The charge slip had a space for a tip—kind of weird to be tipping before you eat. I added a couple of bucks.

I got a big table. Juice and coffee came right away. I read the sports section while I waited to see if anybody was going to come by and ask me when I would be getting going with my eating. Nobody did. Overall, breakfast at the Bellagio was pretty close to perfect.

I went to the buffet line four times: (1) Fresh fruit and yogurt—plenty good. (2) Smoked salmon and toast—plenty good, although a bagel option would have been appreciated. (3) Eggs benedict—the worst the world has ever known. (4) Danish pastry—plenty good.

Every time I got up to get more food, my used plate was whisked away. My coffee cup was refilled at least a dozen times. And the coffee wasn't bad.

I hung around for more than a hour. Read a couple of newspapers. On the way out I found the lady who kept bringing me coffee and slipped her three bucks. Okay, it could have been more, but I had already tipped once, and I'm not that big a sport.

While I was in Vegas, I found myself in a table game.

No, not poker or craps. Lunch.

The place: Mario Batali's Enoteca San Marco, a casual restaurant located in the Venetian hotel's attractive rendition of a Venice piazza.

I told the sommelier I was looking for a fresh, fruity wine with lunch, but also that I was intrigued by the 1997 Sandrone Valmaggiore, a wine made from the nebbiolo grape, as are all of Sandrone's great and wildly expensive 1997 Barolos.

At $75, the Valmaggiore had to be a steal, right?

So wrong. It was quite bad.

Reddish-brown, dark, brooding, well over the hill. A barely drinkable wine, totally without fruit or charm. On the other hand, it wasn't technically flawed. It was just no good.

I told the sommelier—anyway, she said she was a sommelier, even if she didn't act like one—that it was unpleasant, everything I didn't want in a luncheon wine. In fact, it was nothing anybody would want in a wine, regardless of the time of day.

She looked at me as though I was making no sense.

I invited her to taste it and tell me what she thought. She said she would take it to the wine director of the restaurant to get his opinion.

She returned 10 or 15 minutes later, after we all were well into our appetizers, and said, "He tasted it and said it showed the way a '97 of this varietal should show now."

She stood there, waiting for me to make the next move.

This is where matters stood at this very dumb restaurant: I was angry. The guests at my table were unhappy because they had expected wine with their food and were without any. Basically, the sommelier's boss had called for a confrontation over a wine I would guess cost him no more than $25 wholesale. Had she taken it away and brought something else, the restaurant would have had a happy table of customers and he would easily have made up the $25 loss on the substitute wine.

Instead, it was showdown at the gondola canal.

I told her we'd pay for the wine we didn't like. I told her to take it away. I ordered a different wine—a cheaper one, since I no longer had respect for the wine program of the restaurant. And since the place was billing itself as an "enoteca," a term used to designate a wine bar with food, that meant I had no use for Enoteca San Marco at all.

We finished the lunch. The waiter brought the bill. We did not get charged for the rejected wine. At the end, the restaurant did the right thing.

Still, it shouldn't have been that difficult. And the lesson wine drinkers should take away from my experience is: Stick by your beliefs. I don't like having to pay $75 for a wine I know should have been taken back without complaint, but I would have. Had we ended up drinking the '97 Sandrone, as the wine director wanted us to do, it would have ruined our lunch. That's too high a price to pay.

The price the restaurant paid for its rigidness? It lost three customers. (Actually, that's not such a fatal error in Vegas, since few people have an opportunity to come back anyway.)

By the way, there was a bonus. As my friends and I left the restaurant, a gaggle of strolling entertainers entered the simulated piazza. Not only had I won the game, the fat lady started to sing.

You admire Las Vegas restaurants more than I do. Most people do. These days they consist mostly of oversized emporiums run by celebrity chefs who are almost never around. I don't blame the chefs. I'd love to be paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year not to work.

I was talking to a former executive at the Flamingo hotel who is still active in the Vegas restaurant business. (The Flamingo was famously built by Bugsy Siegel.)

The top restaurant there was the Candlelight Room (click here for their classic menu). Everybody remembers that. Nobody remembers the chef there. Except for my friend, the executive.

"The chef was a little guy we called Yosemite Sam because he looked like him, but boy, could he cook. He lived in a bungalow behind the hotel and didn't make much money, so once in a while they'd fix the slot machines so he'd win. You couldn't do that today."

Now you know why I can't reveal his name. Fixing slot machines isn't something a man who wants to keep working in Vegas is supposed to discuss.

He told me another story I liked, about the practice of giving free meals to gamblers. He remembers Howard Hughes taking over the Sands and instructing his general manager to put an end to the practice of comping everybody at the Regency Room, the top restaurant of the Sands.

"The whole reservation chart was in red, comped," he said. "The GM walked in and said to the maître d', 'Give everybody a check.' He did. After that, they all went to Caesars Palace to gamble."