Looks like the Celebrity Roast of Pamela Anderson is a must-TiVo.

And not because of Pam. Because of Courtney:

With Ms. Love thrashing around, it can be hard to remember that it is Ms. Anderson's night. Smoking cigarettes, Ms. Love heckled the comedians and flipped people off, regularly flashing her underwear and pulling up her top. When not lurching toward center stage in raw bids for attention, she slumped so far down in a white sofa that some of the male comedians - particularly the M.C., Jimmy Kimmel - appeared to prop her up. Toward the end of the roast, she reclined entirely.

"How is it possible that Courtney Love looks worse than Kurt Cobain?" the comic Jeffrey Ross asked. Is that line even legal?

But when people joked about Ms. Love's history of substance abuse, she would respond slurrily, "I've been sober for a year!"

"If you're not on drugs," Mr. Kimmel shot back at one point, "you've got problems."

In other Courtney news. She didn't commit suicide. She failed a drug test. And she's got a new boyfriend, to whom she wrote:

“It’s so weird and wrong and good and sweet and evil being with you…You are beautiful my little baby and by the way, I love you too.”

We love you too, Courtney! Good luck!

For the annals of reality show litigation.

The NYT reports:

In what sounds like a tale by Charles Dickens, warped to fit the 21st century, five orphaned siblings who thought they had found shelter in a nine-bedroom mansion courtesy of the television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" are suing ABC, the company that built the house and the couple who took them in after their parents died, The Associated Press reported. The children, ranging in age from 15 to 22, contend that the couple, Phil and Loki Leomiti, undertook "an orchestrated campaign," including insults and poor treatment, to drive them from the house. The siblings moved out of the Leomitis' home in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles, and are living with friends, said Charles Higgins II, the eldest. "What we're really seeing is the collision between reality TV and the perception reality TV seeks to create in the minds of the general public," said their lawyer, Patrick Mesisca. On Wednesday, when the siblings filed a lawsuit charging fraud and breach of contract and seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, he said that they were never promised a house in writing but that the network's statements and actions could be legally construed as a promise. ABC said in a statement, "It is important to note that the episode was about the rebuilding of the Leomiti family's existing home to accommodate the inclusion of the five Higgins siblings, whom the Leomitis had invited into their lives following the death of their parents."

What a fabulous fact pattern for a Contracts exam!

An ooh, how fiendish of the Leomitis! They made themselves desirable subjects for the show by taking in five orphans and then.... what did they do? I'm sure they have their side of the story. Five young people aged 15 t0 22 are naturally going to clash with their parents. Too bad there weren't reality show cameras to capture the arguments so we'd know whether it was a a big plot to use the kids for the sole purpose of getting the house done or whether the kids used the house makeover as a weapon against the parents whenever they called for discipline.

The cell phone ring as practical joke.

"Instead of a catchy ditty or an electronic symphony, cell phone rings can now be programmed with a recording of a porn actor making sexual noises." And you just know the clown that would do that would also be bad about remembering to silence the ring. Hmmm.... and when it rings near a child, what should happen to you?

They're remaking "Westworld."

With the director Tarsem Singh – who made the "The Cell." "The Cell" was kind of bad as a story but it had beautifully visionary dream sequences. I believe "Westworld" had a good story. (Right? I haven't seen it.) So the remake should be good, I'm going to predict.

Here's my old post on "The Cell":

If you enjoy seeing people suspended from the ceiling in a horizontal position, trekking across sand dunes in glamorous gowns, and watching their own intestines being twirled onto a rotisserie held up by statues of seahorses, this is the film for you.

"The right to be free, the right to own the fruits of your mind and effort now all made sense."

Marc Emery has, by his own admission, sold over $4 million in marijuana seeds. The U.S. government is now seeking his extradition from Canada, and the NYT offers an awfully sympathetic profile – as profiles of criminals go:

Mr. Emery describes himself as "a responsible libertarian, not a hedonist," who extols the virtues of capitalism, low taxes, small government and the right of citizens to bear arms.

He said he grew up a social democrat, influenced by his father, who was active in trade union work. But he said his life changed in 1979 when he began reading the works of Ayn Rand, who championed individual freedom and capitalism.

"The right to be free, the right to own the fruits of your mind and effort now all made sense," he recalled. Only a few months after discovering Rand, his girlfriend at the time offered him a joint and he smoked marijuana for the first time.

IT was an epiphany," he said. "I had a sixth sense added to my five senses. The silence sounded different, smells were more nuanced and the brightness of the moon made it look bigger and more substantial in the sky."

The combination of Rand's philosophy and the marijuana set him on a course of advocacy in which, he said, "I decided to dedicate my whole life to repudiate the state."

Then living in London, Ontario, he sold banned marijuana and pornography books and magazines, contested laws limiting the right of stores to open on Sundays and led a municipal tax revolt. He even resisted a municipal garbage strike, by renting a truck and picking up the garbage himself.

After traveling for a while in Asia, however, he has dedicated his efforts to promoting marijuana and its culture.

"Now the Goliath, now the evil empire has made its move on me," Mr. Emery told his Web site audience. But he promised that his crusade would continue "till liberty or till death."

The Times links to his website, where he appeals for money to fight his extradition. (Supposedly he's spent all the millions he's earned selling seeds to finance his publishing operations.) Excuse me if I don't link there too.

Mental exercises.

An Instapost this morning:

THE WORLD MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP COMPETITION is going on now at Oxford University. The current champion is Ben Pridmore, 28, who can memorize a pack of cards in 32.13 seconds. I wonder if the people who actually have the best memories use their super power to do things like memorizing packs of cards. Shouldn't they want to fill their heads with things that will be beautiful or useful to think about – volumes of great literature or the complete tax code and regulations, perhaps? But no. Competition is intrinsically rewarding. My question is like asking the fastest runner why he competes in the Olympics instead of running around looking at the trees and flowers or traveling back and forth to work.

I'll bet you think that people like Pridmore must be lacking in other mental qualities, like that fellow in "The Mind of a Mnemonist." Most relatively smart people want to be even smarter but are still not all that concerned about not having an extremely strong memory. Yet having a great memory would be awfully useful!

What would you memorize if you had a superpower for memorizing?

Would you perform memorizing stunts for the public's entertainment? Would you enter some line of business (or form of gambling) where memorizing something would give you a great edge? Would you pursue memorizing as matter of pure pleasure or enlightenment?

If you could choose a great mental power – not a supernatural power, but just get into the top 0.0001% of human abillity – would you chose memory? If not, what power would you prefer and would you be worried that extreme memory powers would degrade some other aspect of life?

The NYT picks up the "Six Feet Under" eco-burial theme.

Catering to the Boomers will always be good business:

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall....

Mr. Cassity, a GQ-ish sort with rock-star stubble who wears sunglasses indoors, has cultural feelers well tuned for the business. He previously did an extreme makeover of Hollywood Memorial Park, the formerly bankrupt final resting place of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr. With his brother Brent, 38, he runs Forever Enterprises, a Missouri company with cemeteries, cremation societies and a coffin business.

Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.

As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north.

So are you hankering for an eco-burial to match the other boomerified rituals of your life, like those self-penned wedding vows and videotaped childbirths?

"A Democratic president would have been at most a year behind the Bush Administration’s track in the War on Terror."

So writes Austin Bay. What do you think? If Gore had won in '00, would he not have gone on the offensive the way Bush did? And all you people who despise Bush, what would you be saying now if Gore had been President all these years and had taken the same approach to national security? If you can perform this mental exercise honestly and see that you would approve of the things you now disapprove, you ought to consider yourself too partisan. I'd certainly say you are.

If you think I'm just jerking you around and being a Republican political partisan, remember that I voted for Gore in 2000. I've thought all along that Gore would have done basically the same thing Bush did.

Bay's piece is commenting on this interview with Christopher Hitchens. An excerpt:

Q - Your much-discussed separation from the American left began shortly after the September 11 attacks. What prompted your displeasure with the left?

A - The September 11 attacks were one of those rare historical moments, like 1933 in Germany or 1936 in Spain or 1968, when you are put in a position to take a strong stand for what is right. The left failed this test. Instead of strongly standing against these nihilistic murderers, people on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, began to make excuses for these murderers, openly saying that Bin ladin was, however crude in his methods, in some ways voicing a liberation theology. This is simply a moral and political collapse.

But its not only that. It’s a missed opportunity for the left. Think of it this way: If a group of theocratic nihilists drive planes full of human beings into buildings full of human beings announcing nothing by way of a program except their nihilism and if they turn out to have been sheltered by two regimes favored by the United States and the national security establishment, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to be precise, two of only three countries to recognize the Taliban, and if Republicans were totally taken by surprise by this and if the working class of New York had to step forward and become the shield of society in the person of the fire and police brigades, it seemed to me that this would have been a good opportunity for the left to demand a general revision of all the assumptions we carried about the post cold war world. We were attacked by a religious dictatorship and the working class were pushed into defending elites by the total failure of our leadership and total failure of our intelligence. The attack emanated partly from the failure of regimes supported by that same elite national security establishment– Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. If the left can’t take advantage of a moment like that: whats it for? whats its secularism for? Whats its internationalism, class attitude, democracy for?

That's brilliantly well put. Much more at the link.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 13.

It's Day 13 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

You can see by the ticket stub collaged into the first side of the page that it's August 10, 1993. I go to see the movie "The Piano" and am confused by some things and pleased by others. On the second side of the page, I draw two signs for bookstores: Tweedehands Boekwinkels and Oom Wim. I'm delighted by these words, though I realize they must be perfectly ordinary in Dutch – surely "Tweedehands Boekwinkels" is just "secondhand booksellers" – but irresistibly cute and silly to American ears.

I go into a third store, a big comics shop called Lambiek. I'm utterly under the spell of "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry," as these notebook pages attest, so I ask if he has any Bill Griffith books. He has "Yow!" and I buy it. I also buy "Verre d'Eau" (that is, "Weirdo," R. Crumb's comic), "Understanding Comics" (which had just come out), and two books by Mark Beyer, whom I adore. The two Mark Beyer books are "Amy and Jordan" and "Agony." I'd been searching for "Agony," which I'd read before, but not owned, and was happy enough to find a German-language copy of it. "Amy and Jordan" makes a huge impression on me for the rest of the trip and distinctively influences the drawing that you'll see on Page 22.

The TV houses of your mind.

With the five-year series nearly over, someone at Television Without Pity came up with an idea for a new forum thread about "Six Feet Under." The subject: the house. Why is it so depressing? One topic being discussed is something that just began to puzzle me as I watched the newest episode: Are the kitchen and sunroom upstairs? Another puzzle: Why is Ruth's place so much shabbier than Nate and Brenda's and David and Keith's? Is the business supposed to be doing well or not? Or have they just decided to make the living quarters of the funeral home depressingly dowdy as an expression of Ruth's character?

It's interesting to try to understand the layout of the house of a familiar show and to question whether the house fits the economic situation of the characters. Do we really understand where those doors lead? Do the exterior shots match the interiors? Does the second floor really fit on the first floor?

I remember a book from a few years back that had diagrams for the houses of 60s sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Someone had really tried to figure out where all the closets and bathrooms and so on would need to be – a strange little obsession that produced a pretty cool book. I also remember reading an article about how the characters on various TV shows set in NYC did not have jobs that would pay them enough to afford living in the nice places they had. (Jerry Seinfeld was the exception.)

Then there's the whole subject of TV houses that have been important to you. I think there are a lot of people who deeply bonded with the house on "The Brady Bunch." I'm not one of them. That was never one of my shows. But wasn't there some house you really wanted to live in? Can't you still picture it and take a mental walk through those rooms today? Is there some particular thing in that house that appeals to you: Laura Petrie's kitchen island? The louvered shutters that opened Lucy Ricardo's kitchen to the living area? The spiral stairway in Mork and Mindy's apartment? Samantha Stephens' retro wallpaper?

How many details from old shows are still part of the furniture of your mind?

The geekiest analysis of relationships ever.

The BBC has this:

Richard Ecob adapted a system for modelling atoms in radioactive decay to investigate how we look for partners.

He found that "super daters", people who have many short relationships, have a good effect on others' lives.

This is because they break up weak couples, forcing their victims to find better relationships.

At the root of the system, says Mr Ecob, is the similarity between the probability of the nucleus of an atom decaying and that of a couple breaking up.

The decay of a nucleus is described in terms of "transit states": the series of change it has been through to get to its current situation.

The probability of someone having been in two relationships, for example, is the same as that of a nucleus decaying twice....

To model the phenomenon, he wrote a computer program which placed "software singles", people seeking partners, in an imaginary social network.

Each single had a set of interests, which they also looked for in potential partners.

The research suggested that multiple daters, those who form many relationships, were less effective at finding the right partner than those who remained in one place and let others come to them.

"If you have a complex network and you stay in one site you see more traffic coming through," he said. "It's a denser network, so there are more possible matches."

I'm guessing Ecob is remaining in one place waiting another to come to him.

I can see why they went out of their way to give the new Apple mouse a masculine name – Mighty Mouse.

They were hoping somehow they could keep you from noticing how terribly clitoris-like it is. I'm really enjoying mine – my new mouse!

"Are you Christian?"

I just walked over to a perfect stranger in a café and said that to him. I was supposed to meet someone named Kristian for an interview. He was late, and I walked over to a guy who had the rectangular glasses my interviewer said he'd be wearing, said "Are you Kristian?" – he wasn't – and only afterwards realized I'd made myself sound like a religious proselytizer.

Preview of a podcast team.

I'm working on a podcasting project with two of my colleagues. We had a trial run the other day, testing out the equipment and the style of interaction. We're not going to post our overlong first attempt, but here's a sample:

A: Are we interested in the fact that the Rolling Stones are writing a song that's insulting Condi Rice?

G: I saw that.

A: I think they’re just trying to get their tour going.

G: You think it’s just publicity?

A: The Rolling Stones and political songs? Some of their songs were political, weren’t they? Anything come to mind as being a distinctive Rolling Stones political song?

G: I don’t remember the Rolling Stones being particularly political. Jumpin’ Jack Flash? No. “I can’t get no satisfaction.” I don’t know.

A: Yeah. “Crossfire hurricane” – is that a military term? What is that, anyway?

G: So you think they’re just trying to sell records?... They’ve got a new album coming out too. [To X:] Are you a Rolling Stones fan?

X: Not particularly. But if there’s money to be made in insulting Condi Rice, I’d like to, uh, get in on some of that.

"They put stickies on the face of Mohammed Atta."

I wrote this over on Instapundit:

"MAKES YOU WONDER WHAT ELSE THEY TOSSED OUT." Betsy Newmark on the 9/11 report, commenting on the news of omissions about Mohammed Atta. Here's the very harsh Investor's Business Daily editorial:

[Curt Weldon, R-Pa. said] "They put stickies on the face of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed, and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here on a green card."

Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9-11 commission, said the commission "did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9-11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell . . . Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

But they did learn of it. The New York Times reports that the 9-11 commission staff had the Able Danger data but decided not to share it with the panel members because the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.

Commission staffers plan a trip to the National Archives to retrieve their notes on Able Danger's findings. Yes, the same National Archives where Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught stuffing classified documents about terrorist threats down his pants, presumably to remove them from public scrutiny.

And this is the same commission that included one Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department. She's also architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

Are these not truly shocking revelations?

The 9/11 recordings.

Are you listening to them?