Adult Swim is reporting that Billy West told them that they're recording four direct-to-DVD movies. Believe it or don't.

Fox killed the show by putting it on in a time slot where it was getting pre-empted by football a majority of the time; it got to the point where they had a season's backlog of episodes when they shut down production and the writers scattered to different sitcoms. Even so, the show had somewhat run its course, if unnecessarily so. The writers were resorting far too often to repeating tired plotlines and characters rather than inventing new ones (and it's a science-fiction series, for crying out loud), and even The Simpsons has more than four plot-arcs. And the problem with a ninety-minute movie is that a twenty-two minute episode plot for this kind of show is really just a scaffold for the humor, rather than a source for suspense. But if they can sustain ninety-minutes at the level of an average Futurama episode, it will be worth renting.

My grandmother has another grandkid who blogs about earwax.

It's true! So's Tropicana orange-strawberry-banana juice and Tropicana Ruby Red grapefruit juice.

The Google Robots FAQ.

The rumor mill is making up all sorts of promising stories for Arrested Development. Second-hand report from "a grip" on the show:

we're being told the 4th season will start up in July...actually prepping and relighting the sets will start in July...actual shooting will start in Aug.

There's allegedly a one-year offer from ABC (allegedly to be paired with a stolen "Scrubs") and a two-year offer from Showtime (albeit at a reduced budget). Season (series?) finale to be run as a two-hour block February 10 against the Winter Olympics.

I was worried I'd put myself in a corner for the Valentine's Day holiday. There'd already been gifts of an iPod nano and DVDs and books, and we'd already had a romantic weekend getaway. A romantic dinner at a spectacular restaurant wasn't going to be logistically possible until weeks after the holiday; flowers are ephemeral (and, in any event, would hardly distinguish Valentine's Day from multiple other occasions of flowers); chocolate was unwanted; lingerie is presumptuous and too easily tacky. I did (browser-)window-shop some jewelry that I liked, but it was just a touch too extravagant this early and will have to wait for Valentine's Day 2007 or some other special occasion, assuming I remember a thirteen-month old whim. I think I came up with a creative and personalized solution that says how much I think and care about her without being as overwhelming as an expensive accessory, but it will arrive just enough in advance of the fourteenth that I can fix the problem if it turns out to be too creative and insufficiently traditional. But who wouldn't like a helper monkey?

I apparently saw the Las Vegas version of Avenue Q just in time, since just five days later they cut at least two songs. (They were the two songs I would've cut, on the other hand, so.) It's claimed that it's to allow the show to end earlier, but the thirty-minutes shorter coincidentally corresponds to a clause in the standard union contract permitting more shows a week for the same price. Blogger Amber Taylor, in an eerie coincidence, recently posted her own photo of an Avenue Q encounter.

My brother's a big fan of the show, which I had wanted to see in New York before the Tony awards made it an impossible ticket; I liked it, but I didn't love it. I'd perhaps read too many Slate.com pieces where the author lazily introduced the article with a funny anecdote from "Avenue Q," which spoiled some of the better jokes, but I think a larger problem was that, well, I'd already laughed at these jokes when they were done by "Meet the Feebles" and "TV Funhouse." "Isn't Bert gay?" and "Gary Coleman is washed up" are also pretty tired memes if one's versed in pop culture.

The gossip columnist gets gossiped about, but denies everything.

Latest Japanese trend that I'm oddly intrigued by: ear-cleaning parlors.

Alas, speaking of Japanese trends, Sony appears to be shutting down its robot production just as it was starting to get interesting. (More.) On the other hand, if I end up having a couple of cats living with me, it's just as well that I don't get a robot dog.

Via Slim, a story of a sad clown, and the resulting chat with the journalist over the ethical implications of driving a gambling addict to Atlantic City for a story.

I'm a tad peeved that Mozart's 250th is getting so much more attention than Franklin's 300th.

Good news: Matthew Perry signs with "Studio 7". Bad news: only a 13-episode commitment, so without a big opening, it could disappear fast. NBC's schedule is so empty, however, the show will really have to bomb for them not to pick up the back nine.

1. Slim, obviously trying to provoke me, sent me this interview with Opinionista Melissa Lafsky. Oh, you mean Lafsky had to work sixty hours a week at Littler Mendelson? I hadn't realized that she had to work 9-to-8 five days a week, plus every other Saturday, for what must have been fourteen whole months (minus the one month she spent studying for the bar the second time). In a hellish faceless office with fourteen other attorneys! And was writing three blog posts a week on top of that. Well, then, that changes my opinion completely.

2. "Quaker Penn" wants to blame the Blackberry for making associates more summonable and reachable. This naively assumes that law firms didn't expect their attorneys to be available on the weekend before the Blackberry became common. As an attorney who practiced both before and after remote e-mail devices, I can assure you that my weekends got a lot better when I didn't have to be sitting at a computer to check e-mail.

The "Law Professor Blogs Network" blogs are of variable quality, some better than others. But it's especially annoying that they don't provide useful links to things (such as, say, cases) freely available on the Web if it's material that Lexis would otherwise charge someone to look up. It's fascinating to watch posts come up on my Bloglines only to see them edited a few hours or days later, with the useful link sent to the memory hole and replaced with the for-pay Lexis link. It makes me less willing to read them.

I also don't like the "open new window" aspect to their hyperlinks, a growing problem in too many blogs and websites (including the Point of Law sidebar, for some reason). I know how to open a new window if I want to open a new window. Don't hijack my browser.

Update: Network member Bill Childs states that there's no official policy of favoring Lexis links. Upon a query from Childs, I found that the post that had originally caught my attention in Bloglines was replacing a dead free-web link with a Lexis link—though another edited post that also caught my attention did delete a Westlaw link. Both of these modifications do have innocent explanations (though my complaint was not that such a policy would be sinister, but rather that Lexis, if they had such a policy, was being annoying). Still, the site in question does seem to have a Lexis bias: a quick skim of the site finds at least one other post that uses a Lexis link instead of the publicly available web link. The blog in question was not Childs's blog, which has generously linked to Overlawyered, Point of Law, and the Liability Project.

you can order a 100x100 at In'N'Out. Though I can understand why the person who ordered it never wants to go back again. What amazes me is that they seem to have ordered fries on the side.

The Internet has made the secret menu considerably less secret: this blog even has pictures.

For the month down 0.5% (vs. -0.1% for the S&P 500). For the calendar year 2005, I was up 5.9% (vs. 3.0% for the S&P 500 and vs. 5.25% opportunity cost). I beat the market, and even beat my cost of capital, but I feel dissatisfied. The frustrating thing about this year was how many of my decisions were to switch from a stock still in an upswing to a stock (like BBI) that was plummeting or (like EK) that was about to plummet or (like WMT) was just sort of meandering sideways. I missed out on a 50% increase in BFT and a 40% increase in OATS that way; by profit-taking 80% of my PKS holdings at 7.45, I've mostly missed its run-up to nearly 11. In fact, if I had just sat on the portfolio I held on January 1, 2005, and didn't make a single trade, I'd be up over 15% today (instead of up 8%, as I've had a pretty good January 2006 so far).

The BBI hit was the biggest drag on the portfolio. If I had liquidated my BBI position on January 2, 2005 instead of repeatedly investing more into it, my return would've been 10% higher. Of course, with that sort of perfect foresight, I could've put my life's savings into Apple Computer on January 2 and more than doubled my money.

Speaking of investing in stocks that are plummeting, I bought into PIR at 9.27 today, and was rewarded with an immediate one-day decline to 9.03.

My January 2005 return was -7%, so my 12-month number will look a lot better next month, and I'll feel better again.

Lafsky is shocked that people are reacting negatively to her attempt to portray her experience at Littler Mendelson as representative, and reprints a nasty e-mail. Two interesting things:

1) As several people have noted, "X'XXXXXXX & XXXXX LLP" doesn't really hide the name of the firm if it's O'Melveny & Meyers LLP (by coincidence, my former firm). Except OMM doesn't quite compute. It's possible that an attorney there was dumb enough to sign his firm name to a nasty e-mail, and risk it being republished, and suffer a stern talking-to from firm counsel for signing the firm name (or using firm e-mail) to send that sort of note. But it seems unlikely. Then again, people send embarrassing e-mails all the time, so who knows? But there are other unlikely elements: (a) O'Melveny attorneys don't generally view themselves as "Top Ten" except with respect to some subspecialities; and (b) O'Melveny recruiting policy was so absurdly grade-conscious in the 2003 timeframe (dictating to on-campus recruiting interviewers required class rank for various schools with ridiculous specificities of "top 4%" and "top 12%") that it seems unlikely that it would've given Lafsky an offer out of 3L year. But, again, neither of these things are impossible. Other possibilities: Lafsky is actually referring to a different firm; Lafsky made this e-mail up, too.

2) But, assuming the e-mail is real, it was entertaining that Lafsky found it to be a validation of her philosophy that a law-firm career is inherently unrewarding. Presumably, Lafsky also finds positive reinforcement to be a validation of her thesis. In short, any e-mail she receives makes her feel more right, and her thesis can't be falsified, at least in her head.

A lot of writers who heavily rely upon their life-story for their material suffer from inevitable recursive problems that make their writing less interesting: as their life inevitably ceases to be about the real world and more about the internal life of the writer, they don't have a lot to say. Philip Roth somehow worked around the fact that he was so frequently writing about a middle-aged Jewish writer to produce worthwhile material; but a memoirist acquaintance of mine was eventually reduced to writing pieces for Salon.com about how she was surprised and offended that her fans felt they knew about her life on the basis of her memoir. It took less than a week for the main focus of the Opinionista blog to be her in-box. Once she starts posting about e-mails about posts about e-mails about her blog about herself is when we'll know that her writing can no longer extend past the Schwarzschild radius.

Xoxohth thread 1 and 2.

Congratulations to frequent Ethnic Dining attendee and former anony-blogger Trout Almondine for his well-deserved success in this week's Radosh New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.

In case you're an anonymous blogger hoping to quit your real job to write a novel, the Title Scorer has an algorithm to rate the marketability of your title.

in the NY Times. As Amber notes, the author has trouble reconciling Lat's right-wing views with his sense of humor.

Speaking of right-wingers with a sense of humor, Amber's blog has a new tagline that references a famous hoax rather than an Elvis Costello song.

West Wing over May 14 (via ALOTT5MA). The post-Sorkin episodes were pretty bad, and suffered from lack of consistent characterization, dropped plot threads, and an unrealistic presidential primary campaign, which appears to be followed by an unrealistic presidential election.

Cass Sunstein seems to have cleaned up his office since I was there.

in North Vancouver.

I'm amused that Opinionistas Melissa Lafsky, who was on a high horse when a male friend not especially diplomatically suggested that women have a socially-acceptable gender-specific way of dropping out of the rat race that men don't had, at about the same time, chosen to conform to the cultural stereotype of the female princess by quitting Littler Mendelson and moving in with her boyfriend. Of course, she has every right to, and I don't begrudge her her choice, which was the same one my first wife made. I merely find it ironic.

Complaints about mismatched male-female ratios in high-pressure jobs like law-firm partnerships and top-level investment-bankers need to recognize this issue; men have social pressure to conform to a high-achievement career track that women can rationally choose to avoid. That's not to say that there isn't discrimination; I've seen plenty of sexists, including the law firm partner who went away to recruit at his alma mater every fall and somehow came back every summer with a large-breasted blonde 2L. But without a substantial shift in societal attitudes, even the most discrimination-free workplace is never going to hit the 50-50 mark.

Separately, there's been lots of undeserved snark in the blogosphere (and in my comment section) about Lafsky's looks. I'd criticize it as sexist, except that Lafsky is every bit as snarky in her descriptions of men and women, and clearly finds the unattractive as beneath contempt, so let her be judged as she would judge.

WaPo:

Showtime hopes to know in a few weeks whether it can buy "Arrested Development" and move it from Fox to the premium cable network, but creator Mitch Herwitz [sic] has not decided whether he wants to continue the show, Bob Greenblatt, Showtime Networks president of entertainment, told critics Thursday.

"We are, in fact, talking to Twentieth Television about bringing it to Showtime," he told the crowd of mostly pro-"Arrested Development" critics.

"Until [Hurwitz] comes to that definitive decision, we're going to continue to see if there's a deal to be made. . . . If so, and all the stars align, nothing would make us happier than to have it," he said. "If only a small fraction of the loyal audience that's on Fox came to Showtime, it would be one of our highest-rated shows."

One critic asked rhetorically about the pluses and minuses of picking up a show that's been at another network.

"You have an established audience that you can get over to Showtime if they love the show as much as we think that audience does. It's an established name. It's critically acclaimed, it's been deemed one of the best shows ever created for this medium and I think having it with our other shows has a bit of a halo effect," said Greenblatt, a former Fox network exec and independent producer.

"The negatives are that you look somehow creatively bankrupt that you didn't develop it yourself, which is not an issue I have, having produced a show for ABC that moved to UPN, and having developed 'The Sopranos' at Fox and HBO put it on."

Reuters:

Showtime unveiled four new series at the Television Critics Assn.'s winter press tour Thursday -- but "Arrested Development" wasn't one of them.

Showtime president of entertainment Robert Greenblatt confirmed recent reports that Showtime was in negotiations with producer 20th Century Fox Television to pick up the low-rated Fox comedy but warned that no deal has been reached.

"I always thought it was a better fit for a cable network than a broadcast network," Greenblatt said of "Arrested." "It really does fit in with a lot of things that we're doing."

While Greenblatt declined to get into the specifics of the negotiations, he noted that one crucial deal point hinged on the involvement of Mitch Hurwitz, creator and executive producer of "Arrested." Hurwitz has not decided whether he wants to continue working on the show given, as Greenblatt put it, the "emotional roller coaster" the series has been during its three-year run.

Also in Reuters:

Showtime's new original series include "Dexter," a crime drama starring Michael C. Hall ("Six Feet Under") as a serial killer, and "The Tudors," a historical drama with Jonathan Rhys Meyers ("Match Point") starring as a young King Henry VIII.

Greenblatt showed clips of "Dexter," which will be shot on location in Miami, that made ample use of blood-drenched crime scenes. "With all due respect to our new partners at CBS, this is not your father's 'CSI,"' Greenblatt said, alluding to the restructuring at parent company Viacom Inc. that left Showtime under the auspices of CBS Corp. The 12-episode, hourlong series should bow late this year.

Slim and I got talked into joining a focus group for "Dexter," complete with 0-100 dials. Unfortunately, we sat on the end of the room away from the door, so we couldn't escape. My dial hit 0 fairly early, and would've gone to negative digits if it had let me. Maybe it will get retooled, but it was very poorly written, and both the plot and dialogue were wretched, with empty characters, and I doubt they'll completely scrap it. The woman in front of us typed as a suggestion "Have one single plot thread and resolve it," which is why so much television is so stupid these days. My suggestion was "Shoot the screenwriter." I'd watch that. I should've said "Shoot the screenwriter and buy the rights to 'Arrested Development.'" I'd even pay for Showtime for that.

Unannounced, C-SPAN2 broadcast my December 19 panel while I was in Las Vegas Saturday. You can get the videotape or DVD for $29.95, or see the AEI video for free. Alas, no screen-caps of my scowl-free visage.

Four Jobs You've Had
Computer salesman
Supermarket cashier
College tour guide
Law-talking guy

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over
Pulp Fiction
The Princess Bride
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Casablanca

Four Places You've Lived
Houston, Texas
New Orleans, Louisiana
Waltham, Massachusetts
Chicago, Illinois

Four TV Shows You Like to Watch
Arrested Development
The Simpsons
The Sopranos
The Amazing Race

Four Places You've Been on Vacation
Las Vegas
London
Los Angeles, California
Girdwood, Alaska

Four Websites You Visit Daily
Overlawyered
Point of Law
Hooray for Captain Spaulding
Bloglines

Four of My Favorite Foods
Saag paneer from Gate of India in Santa Monica
Murgh makhani from Gate of India in Santa Monica
Crispy duck with basil from the secret Thai restaurant
Giordano's

Four Places I'd Rather Be
No real answer here; I like where I am, though I'm happy to spend a few days in my vacation spots or New York or Chicago.

Four Albums I Can't Live Without
Exile in Guyville
Heaven or Las Vegas
The Hot Rock
Life's Rich Pageant

The girlfriend wanted to take me to a show while we were in Las Vegas, and we agreed upon Cirque du Soleil. But they had substantial brand extensions in the last few years: which one would we attend?

"I looked at all four. I think the one with the synchronized swimmers sounds least appealing. Are you in the mood for an 'adult-themed' performance?" she wrote.

I'd been to two Cirque du Soleil performances, one in Chicago as a summer associate in 1993, and to "Mystere" in Las Vegas in 2001, and enjoyed them both, so I was up for any of the four. "Zumanity" was the one playing and readily available that weekend, so "erotic circus" it was.

Alas, it sucked. And not in a good way. It wasn't that it was offensive, though it probably was; it was that it was boring. The speechless mimes and wordless music of other Soleils were replaced with puerile and predictable patter and insipid lyrics. To work, the unfunny comedy required much more alcohol than we had drank. Performances needed to be shoe-horned into the "erotic" theme, which was limiting, and rarely in a good way. And the performances simply weren't that enthralling. Fortunately, Slim was the first to make the decision that we should walk out in the middle, so I wasn't the one who looked like a fuddy-duddy. If I hadn't walked over to a blackjack table and won $500, the entire visit to the New York, New York casino would've been shot.

In retrospect, there were sound economic reasons why it was inevitable that "Zumanity" would not live up to previous Cirque du Soleil performances.

Imagine the supply and demand curves for circus performers. They're not quite fungible; there's a cardinal ranking out there. But the circus offers an employment package, and that price—reflecting wages, benefits, and working environment—attracts a certain level of quality.

Now the vendor is running an "adult-themed" circus. Working blue—and scantily clad or nude—is a definite change in working conditions. Some performers won't do it at any price. Others will demand a premium. (For an entertaining dramatization of this negotiation, see State and Main. A so-so movie, but it has my favorite non-Lionel-Hutz attorney character of all time, David Paymer as Marty Rossen.) The circus has a choice. It can pay a premium, and try to recoup through higher ticket prices. Unfortunately, making the circus adult-themed does limit the audience. While Las Vegas is generally adult-themed, some people are okay with alcohol and gambling, but not eroticism; and some people do bring their kids to other Soleil shows at the occasional casino that still encourages family visits. So the reduced demand prevents recouping a premium through higher ticket prices. (And, indeed, Zumanity prices were lower than those of other circuses in town, which also should've been a tip-off.) The alternative, then, is to throw a wider net into the talent pool to include lower-quality performers. And lower-quality performers were what we got.

There were exceptions. Some performers had sufficient bargaining leverage to negotiate nudity riders, and it wasn't coincidental that those were the most interesting acts: a conventionally-dressed-for-a-circus woman did impressive acrobatics and spun multiple hula-hoops while swinging from a rope in mid-air; a body-suited woman's gymnastic dance with a male partner would've been entertaining if not accompanied by a wretched ballad. But the topless dancers' performances were strictly meh, even when they were mid-air. (I was awfully curious what the intermediate talent was of the one chorus-girl who had successfully negotiated for spangly pasties, but not a full top, but we left before we found out.)

John Madden Arrested For Possession Of Turhumanheaducken. As always with the Onion, the headline is funnier than the story.

This so-called attorney work-life calculator is completely unrealistic because it only has entries for Monday through Friday.

One ends up billing a lot of hours by having litigation (or deal-closing) emergencies requiring occasional (or, worse, frequent) 18-hour days rather than a constant consistent drumbeat of work. It's those 80-100-hour weeks spent in trial or preparing and taking series of depositions that get one's hours up.

Since I'm getting so many google hits for the Opinionista identity and forthcoming New York Observer story: it's Melissa Lafsky, Dartmouth '00/Virginia '04, who has already quit her job in advance of the book deal about fifteen months in, and less than a year after she took the February 2005 New York bar (did she fail the summer 2004 version?); by the summertime, she had already checked out. Plus she was at a branch office of Littler Mendelson, which is hardly a sweatshop, not to mention only has fourteen attorneys in New York—seven men and seven women. Which makes her blog not much less fictional than the Jeremy Blachman effort, though it had somewhat more verisimilitude. But any especially-entertaining stories about giant summer associate events or office Christmas parties and lecherous senior partners can now be safely dismissed as fictional. And I'd be stunned if Lafsky ever billed 2000 hours in a year, much less the 2400 or so real New York associates do.

It is much easier to give up a six-digit job for a speculative writing career if one's father is a (Dartmouth '71) gastroenterologist. And (if a Gawker comment is to be believed) one's boyfriend's father is a millionaire sports executive. (Update: Gawker commenter not to be believed. You can't believe everything you read on the Internet? Go figure.) And if one paid in-state tuition for law school. It will be interesting to see if the real flesh-and-blood Lafsky can hold the same attention as the imaginary Opinionista. I, for one, find it much less appealing to know that Lafsky seems never to have given a legal career any serious thought; her tale isn't one of disillusionment, but of Generation-Y silver-spoon "It-Sucks-To-Be-Me" shallow cynicism.

It's "creative non-fiction" all over again. I, for one, call shenanigans. (Update: Lafsky appears to have forgotten the power of Google cache. Here's her Ogre and Queen Bee posts, which she told the Observer she deleted because they were too close to reality. Oops.)

There's always a poll out that show "Unnamed Democratic Candidate" beating some specific Republican incumbent; that's because people project onto the tabula rasa their own preferences for what the candidate will look like, with the hard-lefties imagining a Dean while others fantasize about a Clinton or Gore or Lieberman or Kennedy. So when the real-life candidate is named, it's inevitable that some percentage of those people are going to be disappointed that the candidate differs from their projections. The comments section of Opinionistas always assumed some top-tier firm and an Ivy League law schooler telling true (or only slightly modified) stories. That fantasy got a lot more attention than "first-year labor lawyer with no meaningful legal experience writing fiction" would have. How many readers are going to follow Lafsky to the new URL?

In contrast, Article III Groupie was always an obvious caricature, and had underlying entertainment and informational value that would've survived David Lat's unmasking (had he been allowed to moonlight). The fictional entity has value beyond the suspension of disbelief in the narrator's existence, which isn't the case for a poorly-written "Million Little Pieces."

(Update: Confidential to W.: I knew I wasn't the only one who made the James Frey connection.)

I had a run of success at the blackjack tables; combined with wandering through the MGM Grand and seeing the Craftsteak menu, it was easy to decide to replace the idea of dinner at In-N-Out with a pricy Craftsteak experience Sunday, as I had mused about in October.

My verdict? $11/ounce Snake River Farms Kobe/Black-Angus cross, misleadingly labelled Kobe, isn't worth it in the slightest. Above average, but not much better (if at all) than a good Ray's the Steak filet at a third of the price. Perhaps my "meh" reaction was because it suffered in comparison to the $20/ounce Australian wagyu filet (with the distasteful name of "Kobe Platinum" on the menu), which was remarkable both in the deep red of its interior and its tremendous taste, and made me regret that I didn't also spring for the tartare appetizer. Still, I busted my Maestro record for dinner-for-two: $374 with tip, and we would've crossed $400 if we hadn't been taking Tylenol Cold and felt okay ordering wine. (Here's a reprint of the LA Times article.)

We had sushi Saturday night at Okada (Wynn). The restaurant has pleasant interior decorating, with a beautiful view of the waterfall from most seats (if not the booth they tried and failed to stick us in at first). Unfortunately, the experience validated Frank's Third Rule of Sushi, which I had forgotten: Saturday-night sushi is worse than Friday-night sushi. Good-for-DC, mediocre by Los Angeles standards, and overpriced in either event; luckily, it was a meal that the hotel comped.

Friday night was the disappointing Little Buddha (Palms). Despite its Paris providence, the place is more of a trendy bar than an artisanal restaurant. The menu is interesting, but the dishes don't live up to it; the food was greasy, lacking in picante heat, and otherwise unworthwhile.

The Wynn Buffet is an entertaining and overwhelming incarnation of the Las Vegas standard, and a paean to free-market competition, as it tries to top the previous efforts at the Bellagio, Paris, and Rio, and mostly succeeds, with tremendous variety and relatively good quality. At about $25/head, it's not a great bargain, though, unless you plan to use it for pure gluttony. The service doesn't measure up; both times I went, I saw the waitress maybe a total of twice, and was thus relatively beverage-less.

One of many traits I like about my girlfriend is that, during our walk down the Strip, she countenanced my side-trip into the filthy food court near the Gameworks and Coca-Cola store, where I had half of a Del Taco Del Meat Burrito, presumably made from real Del. Not recommended except for nostalgia reasons.

Contrary to Tyler Cowen's first maxim of American restaurant-going, which I generally agree with, the higher-priced Las Vegas restaurants seemed to do a relatively poor job with "composition-intensive" dishes, which came across as bland or too sweet. The three best plates we had in Las Vegas this weekend were all ingredients-intensive: the Australian Wagyu filet (which was just touched with oregano and kosher salt); an order of shiro maguro sashimi at Little Buddha; and a charcuterie appetizer at Craftsteak, which was a well-selected plate of Italian cuts, each of which was excellent. It could be an issue of tourist-trappism, but then why not cut corners across the board? I suspect that it's more an attempt to Americanize the food for a mostly middle-aged target audience.

"Edna is with Comic Book Guy?! Oh, God, she's on the rebound! And you meet the worst guys on the rebound! It's how Jackie got her O!"

From Salinger v. Random House:

Salinger, distressed that [the 18-year-old] Oona O'Neill, whom he had dated, had married [the 54-year-old] Charlie Chaplin, expressed his disapproval of the marriage in this satirical invention of his imagination:

I can see them at home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom. Agnes (her mother) in a Jantzen bathing suit, passing between them with cocktails. I'm facetious, but I'm sorry. Sorry for anyone with a profile as young and lovely as Oona's.

This seems ironic, given Salinger's later affair with the teenage Joyce Maynard.

[JT] Leroy's tale was harrowing in its details and uplifting in its arc. He was a young truck-stop prostitute who had escaped rural West Virginia for the dismal life of a homeless San Francisco drug addict. Rescued as a young teenager by a couple named Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop and treated by a psychologist, he was able to turn his terrible youth into a thriving career as a writer. JT Leroy has published three critically acclaimed works of fiction noted for their stark portrayal of child prostitution and drug use.

Along the way Mr. Leroy gained the friendship and trust of celebrities and noted writers, who supported his career financially and offered him emotional support when he declared that he was infected with H.I.V. Sales were good, and his books were published around the world. Shy and reclusive, Mr. Leroy, now 25, appeared in public often disguised beneath a wig and sunglasses.

But the young man in the wig and sunglasses, it turns out, is not a man at all. The public role of JT Leroy is played by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop's half sister, who is in her mid-20's.

Of course, if one values fiction for its sensational relationship to the "real life" of its author rather than for the quality of its writing, this is a natural consequence. (Those who signed "Anonymous Lawyer" to a book deal made the mistake of confusing interest in the former with interest in the latter. Now that we know (as oppose to suspect) Anonymous Lawyer is neither anonymous nor a lawyer, there's no point to the blog. Blachman's book might work, but it will have to do so on its own merit, which the original blog gave no evidence of. Opinionista will suffer the same problem when she admits that most of her stories are composites at best.)

Speaking both of David Lat and romans à clef, Christopher Buckley's flirtatious review of "Dog Days" (the first good review I've seen) features a picture of Wonkette in a nice stripy shirt.

"There is an indescribable feeling of euphoria which comes when finding another member of the modal set"—from the comments section to Tyler Cowen's post on the economics of marriage search strategies.

E-mail from "friend":

From: R.
Date: January 5, 2006
Subject: NPR

Was that your neo-conservative dogma ranting that invaded my morning sleep today?

That was me, alright. A half-hour interview distilled to twenty seconds, but I was impressed that the reporter, Kathleen Schalch, chose a fairly nuanced quote that conveyed a complex concept, and took care to characterize it accurately. I really peeved the engineer; it was my first experience with a radio studio, and I kept gesticulating my arms into the microphone as I spoke.

Don't open a coffee-shop (via Palmer). Which seemed like a pretty obvious truism to me, as is the concept that "If you work at a coffee-shop to save yourself the cost of hiring an $8/hour employee, you're saying your time is worth $8/hour." (OK, because of the X factor of principal-agent friction, slightly higher. But.) If you are still inclined to open a coffee-shop, read The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, which my cousin Ben got me for Hanukkah, and which does a nice job of applying David Ricardo to the theory of coffee-shops, and on my Orange Line commuting route to Farrugut West, to boot. You can get some sense of it from this cannibalizing essay on Slate.

...I just found out that there's no more WordsWorth or Wursthaus in Harvard Square. Also, the Brattle's shutting down, though they'd been threatening that since I was in college. I'm plainly more nostalgic than Amber, but I'm probably carrying some vestigial memory of my grandfather closing his bookstore before I was born.

Joss Whedon on the future of TV. (via Marcotte)

Scott Adams confuses the third and fourth walls.

The Wall Street Journal is expanding its legal section, including a law blog. Looks promising, and they start with a scoop pickup from the New York Observer, claiming that the newly returned A3G is expected to become the next Wonkette. If true, good for Lat, though that's a scarier paycut than I'd want to take. If true, good also for Nick Denton for hiring someone relatively sympathetic to the right wing. (Reports make him "co-editor," which suggest a left-wing companion.)

Meanwhile, the original Wonkette gets tepid reviews from the Times and Publishers Weekly for her attempt at a breakout novel; Time Out New York skewers it.

The success of Defamer shows that the Denton blog model can succeed without a pretty face, so congratulations to David Lat for parlaying A3G into the next rung up the status-anxiety ladder. (If only he knew how many journalists envy Wachtel salaries!)

A free on-line server offering versions of Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, and even Set.

Since I last updated the weblog with the status of my weight-loss, I lost five pounds, gained eight, lost three, gained eight, and lost six, for a net of plus-two in the last three-and-a-half months, plus-seven in the last two-and-a-half, though minus-five in the last couple of weeks. And well short of losing two pounds a week. One hopes the shaming effect of admitting the temporary setback provides incentive to get back on the wagon: stop buying sweets, stop ordering queso dip, stay away from the AEI cookies, go to the gym more regularly.