Tonight is the last Pomona council meeting before the election. The agenda looks quiet but surely something interesting will be said.

Tuesday is the last Ontario council meeting before the election. Ditto and ditto.

Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., “The Maltese Falcon” will screen at the Lewis Family Playhouse in Rancho Cucamonga. It’s free as long as you have a ticket from one of the two libraries. I’ve gotta get one. Like the black bird, it’ll be the stuff dreams are made of.

Thursday was clear until a few minutes ago. A nice man from the Mt. San Antonio Gardens retirement home in Pomona phoned to ask if I’d show up that evening and talk about the Pomona elections. “We’ll give you dinner and $100,” he said. I can always use dinner and $100, so I agreed, on the proviso that I’m through by 8:30 p.m., so I can get home in time to catch “The Office.” He agreed.

Boy, I hope I can keep Friday clear.

The exterior of the virtually indescribable wonderland named City Museum.

St. Louis is one of those cities that few people would travel far to see. It’s flyover territory for those of us on the coasts. But I grew up near there and always idealized it as a big city, as it was the only one I knew.

Well, I hope no one groans at hearing that Sunday’s column is about my recent vacation to St. Louis. I had a great time. The subtext, I guess, is that most places have something going for them, even places you might not expect.

The Santa Anas seem to have died down today, but they’re the subject of Wednesday’s column anyway. I round up some literary quotes about the winds and make a few observations.

One quote I didn’t have room for was pulled from Wikipedia’s entry. Apparently Debby Boone’s 1978 album “Midstream” has a song titled “California” with this lyric: “…California, where the sun is warm, where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong…”

Feel like we belong?? That’s a long way from the “prickly dread” of Joan Didion.

Under a new law, chain restaurants in Calorie-fornia will have to post calorie counts and grams of fat starting in 2011, and provide brochures with that information starting July 1, 2009. But some restaurants are getting a head start.

I ate at a Chick-fil-A in Ontario recently and nutritional information for every menu item was printed on the tray liner. Not that it did me a lot of good, since the liner came under the food I’d already ordered, but it made for good lunchtime reading. If I’d gone for the chargrilled chicken instead of the regular breaded chicken, I’d have saved 130 calories and cut the fat from 16 grams to 3.

Did you know their cole slaw has 32 grams of fat? That’s only one gram less than the Cookies and Cream milk shake, the fattiest item on the menu! Waffle fries, with 13 fat grams, are actually better for you than the slaw. Methinks some tinkering with the recipe is in order.

The same week, I also visited — on the opposite end of the valley, and the fussiness meter — Le Pain Quotidien in Claremont, where they’re now putting calorie counts on the menu. Very helpful, except in the case of beverages. A note explains that calories for beverages range from “5 to 195.” I’d like one closer to 5, please!