Talking Points

* Sure, go ahead. Arrest Cindy Sheehan for wearing a t-shirt. Because THAT will make her go away. We'll never hear from her ever again now. Way to go. It would have been nice to have her reactions from the front row. Those Supreme Court guys don't do standing o's? And no mention of Alan Greenspan's retirement? The low interest rates are have been the only things propping up Bush's entire failed economic policy. I'm just saying. Interest rates were always high during Clinton.

* I keep failing to mention the song "Higher" by Soft which is amazing pop by the way.

* 31 people found my amazon review of Legitimate Dangers unhelpful (there were 6 unhelpful votes 45 minutes after I posted it!) I am hoping for thousands of unhelpful votes. Please do your part. I want to be the least helpful reviewer in amazon history. I take the other reviewers' points: I am insanely jealous, I desperately wanted to be in this anthology and this compulsion keeps me up late at night making stickers punch through pages of the anthology. I mean obviously. How could *I* have been overlooked?

* Welcome to our new game: Let's Compare Stock Levels. Visits to 4 different lower Manhattan bookstores (3 chains, 1 indy) revealed plenty of copies of David Lehman's new "fiercely independent" Soft Skull Sestina Circlejerk but 3 of 4 had no copies of the remarkable first books of Danielle Pafunda (not pictured above), Jennifer L. Knox (not pictured above) and Jen Benka (not pictured above and nothing is printed on the spine so who would even know if it was there if they weren't looking for it?). Plenty of onsold Lehman, though. Lehman on display at indy (I hope Lehman is still "telling everyone he knows" about Pafunda's and these other Soft Skull books. His door to door campaign might be their only hope. Mainly because his vanity project is taking shelf space away from them.). Only the indy had single copies of Knox, Benka and Pafunda. Actual fierce independent Ugly Duckling Presse had much better stock levels in indy. Thanks for playing our game.

* Is it just me or does James Frey's author's note to A MILLION LITTLE PIECES posted at the Random House site, seem like it was written while he was a little distracted. As if he were playing "Grand Theft Auto" at the time. It is 100% Vett with none of the spiky flourishes of the poseur toughguy we have come to know and love. Don't let the Schadenfreude get you down, my man. You're still rich and almost completely off the hook.