Saturday's front pages are where we discover what a thin line indeed there is between the Quirky and Ambitious Story that Elucidates the Zeitgeist and the Quirky and Ambitious Story that Elucidates the Quirk and Ambition of the Guy Who Thought it Up. Happily, the nation's more august dailies have the perfect way to thank writers of less successful think-features for giving it the old college (or J-school) try: a handy slot on Saturday's Page One.

This Saturday, the newsholes were filled fairly fine. The LA Times and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram are the few and the proud with real news or news analysis stories—with the oddity being that the Star-Telegram's TXU utility company story is also ably covered in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times's lead story is datelined from Miami. (The Miami Herald, for its Saturday paper, goes big on, uh, yoga. Face!)

But in feature-land, there was a strong stench of Saturday placement as demotion. Let's look at two of this weekend's coulda-been-a-contenders for a weekday slot.

Family Hands Off Its Business, and its Philosophy, by Jeff Bailey.

This Times front-pager tells the cute story of the Padnoses of Holland, MI, third-gen partners in a $300 million-a-year (!) family scrap-metal company. The Padnoses are "politically liberal, Jewish and, having grown up wealthy enough to travel widely, they are worldly." Regrettably, they're also in their 50s, and so worldly that their kids are only teenagers. Thus, they face the horrifying prospect of handing off the company to "conservative...Protestant...working-class" managers. Enter Michael DeWilde, a philosophy professor hired by the Padnoses to bring culture to the management (a trick he also performs over at the local prison).

Unfortunately for the Times, DeWilde and the Padnoses come off as total douchebags, and the petit-bourgeois "philosophy" forced on the Michigan scrap metalists mostly just serves to make it suddenly obvious why poor people become Republicans.

The managers were assigned readings of Thoreau, Sophocles and a recent essay on Freud. They spent a long weekend in Chicago seeing plays, touring exhibitions of art and architecture and eating at fancy restaurants. And in recent weeks they have debated how to give away $40,000 of the Padnoses' money, an exercise in becoming philanthropists.

Still, it could be worse. At least Bailey is a game writer who knows futility when he sees it. By the middle of the piece, he's smirking too:

"They would tell you, God helps them who help themselves," she said. In her view, though, "that only works if the playing field is level."

"They need to be exposed to the big wide world," Ms. Padnos recalled thinking. (She gave each one a Sunday New York Times subscription.)


Digging for Sin City, Christians Toil In Jordan Desert, by Andrew Higgins.

Is there anything more forlorn on a Saturday morning than Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition, desperately clawing for non-market content like a little philistine anorexic? Luckily, whacked-out evangelical types, led by a "Professor" Steven Collins, are apparently randomly digging in Jordan for the remains of Sodom. (Why no one's looking for Gomorrah is never fully explored.) Like Bailey, Higgins pretty much gives himself over to the predestined quirk from the get-go, padding the word count along the way—did we mention the markets are closed?—with some really quite lovely comic prose poems.

Behold this deeply hilarious common-knowledge paragraph:

Though it would have been destroyed more than 3,500 years ago, Sodom has survived as a symbol of God's wrath—and as an inspiration for high and low art, including a book by the Marquis de Sade, including numerous porn flicks and a German thrash-metal band. The name entered the Latin, French and English languages to describe what in parts of the world is an illegal sex act.

And this wonderful tale of a mom who wanted her boy (and a girl) to experience Sodom firsthand, is followed by probably the best sentence to be read this weekend:

Loretta Worthington, from Ruidoso, N.M. paid more than $8,000 to bring her son and a friend's daughter for a two-week stint. She decided to come after seeing Mr. Collins on a Christian broadcasting channel. "People don't fear God anymore," she says. "Maybe if they see what happen to Sodom, they will say we should watch out."

A handful of skeptics also turned up, including a pair from Australia who said they just like digging.>/blockquote>But there's something serious to be learned too:

Dan Klooster, an Episcopalian digger from El Paso, Texas, described Sodom's sin as "living in plenty and neglecting the poor. As Americans, we should find this very worrying."

Relatedly:

"This is ground zero for wickedness," says Steven Collins.

Whoa. Too soon, people! Too soon.