The Doree Chronicles

Guys, I totally overcooked the squash tonight! But the steak came out perfectly.

Frank Rich on Balloon Boy’s dad:

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

The NYTBR has published a counterpoint, by Book Review editor Gregory Cowles, to Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City. Cowles writes approvingly, of a passage in the book, that it contains:

a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

Indeed, it seems as though the very things that gall Kakutani—the novel’s pretentiousness, portentousness, and self-importance—are the things that Cowles loves about Chronic City. So then, I suppose, the question becomes, do I want to read Kakutani’s version of literature or Cowles’s? And I suspect, in this case at least, it’s Kakutani’s that I will find more fulfilling.

Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport:

”It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. ”The pilots are saying they were involved in a heated conversation. Well, that was a very long conversation.”

Or a very long blow job.

I love Mary HK Choi. On Ann Taylor (in which she finds she agrees with Cintra Wilson):

They still do some annoyingly LADYDRAG things like unnecessarily shirred collars on otherwise straightforward trenches but they don’t try to make cashmiracles from acrylic. In fact, they don’t DO anything particularly magical except make the trunks on their sweaters longer and make hardware on bags matte and substantial. But the really nice thing about Ann Taylor right now is that while the knits and the bouclé cropped jackets with 3/4 sleeves and lowered arm’s eyes and grosgrainribbondetailblablabla are all HELLA cute if you work in an office where dudes exclusively use Molton Brown toiletries, there are things for the more, ahem, housepants-wearing amongst us.