Being mentioned with the other writers in this Newsday piece.

None.

Literature, history, and culture; goofy book about screwing up on a game show… goofy book about screwing up on a game show; literature, history and culture… hmm…

One of these things is so not like the other.  Kinda neat, but very weird to see.  I keep expecting to hear one of the, um, actual writers listed shouting at me to get off their lawn.

CuteOverload is suddenly celebrating the dik-dik, which probably makes the poor confused thing feel popular enough to go out in public again:

Dik-diks, as you can see, are the supermodel of the tiny ungulate world, always looking in mirrors to make sure their eyes are still huge and their necks are properly slender, and never really listening to anything the pudus (or anyone else) are saying, and then they wonder at the end of the night why they’re the hottest girl in the room and yet none of the guys want to talk to them.  Poor things.

Pudus usually wind up driving them home, rolling their eyes, wondering how to get the smell of liquor out of the car, and insisting to themselves that this is the last time.

Which of course it isn’t.

Incidentally, here are some wild dik-diks my friend Chris photographed in Kenya last year:

Experts can tell they’re not city dik-diks simply by the lack of false eyelashes.

It’s not online yet, but this week’s Entertainment Weekly has a nice write-up of both Prisoner of Trebekistan and Brainiac, Ken Jennings’sese’ss (man, I hate possessive plurals) book.  Nice picture of us both and everything.

One delightfully odd nitpick: the reviewer, whose writing I generally quite like and respect, strangely claims that I’ve earned "hundreds of thousands in non-televised contests."

Um. 

I have no idea what this writer is imagining — apparently some kind of back-alley trivia competition, perhaps in the style of underground cockfights, where a skeevy host with gold teeth and a scar is surrounded by sweaty bettors waving crumpled lumps of third-world currency, all pressing themselves against a chicken wire enclosure as two desperate and dead-end knowledge geeks face off with buzzers pressed against their heads, Deerhunter-style.

Granted, this is what Jeopardy! itself sometimes feels like when you’re playing.  But no.

My guess is the guy just didn’t read Chapter 18 ("Greed, a Quick Smush, and a Shameful Little Booby"), about other game show experiences I’ve had, very closely.  Probably just got a little confused.  Could happen to anyone.  Lord knows I probably make ten mistakes in every post.

Although if he actually does know about some back-alley trivia somewhere… what the heck, sign me up.

I thought I saw this in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou."

I guess some Aussies are no more rational in grief than anyone else.

And this sort of irrational need for vengeance in no way explains the once-broad support for the invasion of Iraq.  Not one bit.

Hard to say how the numbers were affected by the media firestorm criticizing "The Path to 9-11," but it looks like a good football game may have done as much or more to turn people away from the blame-Clinton series, neutralizing the clear right-wing tilt of the thing, than all the furor about its content.

Not sure what the hell that says or means, but there it is.

So, continuing the endless meme, why does the NFL hate America?