I think maybe someday we'll look back and see that it was Howell Raines who either hid or detonated the Semtex. Or that he at least created an atmosphere in which the hiding or detonation of Semtex could be seen as just another plausible thing to do.

I don't of course directly blame Howell for Arthur Sulzberger's divorce, or for the Post's firing of Len Downie, but Howell's brief tenure at the Times did seem to coincide with the point at which the nation's most important newspapers drifted off the radar and began meandering aimlessly but definitely downward.

I also clearly remember seeing for the first time a raw goose liver for sale at Key Food. This must have been six years ago. Wasn't it also about that time that the pricy little northern Italian place opened near BAM?

At any rate, the storm clouds had clearly gathered by that point. You could hear the anti-aircraft guns in the distance. Brooklyn's fate was sealed.

My thinking is that Jacobs is directing this aesthetic at the sort of young woman who subsidizes her reproductive rights activism by doing makeup or lighting for experimental theater. She probably has a few suicide attempts in her background, but nothing too serious, and whenever she refers to those attempts, she speaks about them with a heartbreaking jauntiness.

For all the senator's enormous sins, they were committed in the private sector, or on the private sector, or simultaneously both.

When balanced against recent presidential wrong doings committed against the nation, such as Iran-Contra, for example, or that military thing going on in Iraq that left-wing radicals whine about constantly, Teddy's vast fuck-ups don't seem quite so vast.

As for cocksmanship, not even Teddy can hold a candle, large or small, to ever-delightful Strom Thurmond, about whom Senator John Tower once mused, "When ol' Strom dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to get the coffin closed."

Perhaps more disturbing is that you can see Amy's eyes reflexively focus on the tiny organ.

It seems to me somehow significant that people who barely have the neurological wherewithal to stand upright can nonetheless muster what it takes to notice the penis on a baby mouse.

About that sweater -- and I'm sure Nina Hagen will completely back me up on this -- I'm really seeing you looking your best in bespoke crotchless panties with the thinest of neon-yellow piping around the waist.

Also, I'm seeing you wearing your flattering crotchless panties while sitting atop a very warm toaster oven, and you're doing something fun and self-indulgent, like giving yourself a pedicure.

But the toaster oven is not set to the sort of high temperature needed for broiling turkey wings, so you mustn't think of the oven's "warmth" as any kind of punishment.

A word to the wise, as they say!

Yours,

Hamud "My Passion Is Fashion" Ibn Hamud

In a post that finds its leverage in belittling Jewish sensitivity to real or perceived threats, and following any number of comments that find their leverage in same, it's a relief to see someone unselfconsciously use what Jews revere as the sacred name of God as something to be laughed at.

As for Pareene having big ones, well, I've never really noticed that pissing off or offending Jews was something reserved for only the tough and the brave.

On the other hand, were Pareene to say something offensive about the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh), the sahabah, the Qu'ran, or Islam in general, that attracted significant attention from the Muslim world, we'd be able to see whether Pareene needed a pair of Neuticles.

PERSONAL TO BELL COUNTY: Don't worry, Bell. No Jew is going to hack this system in order to track you down, slit your throat, and shove a knife into your chest, or even firebomb your home or place of work. That's part of the reason why it's so much fun to get saucy with us in the first place.

What else would you expect from LuAnn?

The Lesseps family are noblesse de robe trash.

At the risk of sounding like a sour alter kacher with a pineapple-size wad of pedantry shoved up his ass, I'm going to come right out and say that using "data" as a singular noun sounds very goofy to me.

Besides, the most intellectually robust societies have several not altogether unbelievable superstitions that cite the use of "data" as a singular noun as the chief cause of sexual malfunction in men and women.

"I'm the lesbian who speaks on behalf of all the lesbians."

Dear Ms. Someone-Died-and-Made-You-Queen-of-All-Lesbians,

Don't be afraid! I'm not writing to complain to you about one of your subjects such as Rosie O'Donnell who must be a real handful in more ways than one! (Haha!)

I'm writing to complain to you about how Lesbians Are Destroying the American National Holiday of Thanksgiving, probably because you want to destory the AMERICAN family and this is just your first little beachhead albeit one filled with low-cholesterol low-sodium stuffing because the Jew doctors like to boss people around about what they can and cannot eat even down very small details like "Have no more than eight beer drinks per day."

You and all the man-haters in your "Queendom" are all like some kind of dirty joke trying to have babies without a bad evil penis in the picture, and so the price of turkey basters, even the kind made in Communist CHINA, has skyrocketed beyond what American working families can afford and, please, don't tell me that a "self-basting" Butterball turkey is the answer to our prayers because it's not because there's really no such thing as a turkey that bastes itself no matter what the lying Jews on Madison Avenue try to tell people in magazine advertisements that are obviously phony because no normal American family ever looks that happy when they are sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

I just want to tell you that all of you "Lesbians" and your Communist-loving Jew friends are going to LOSE your war against the American family because a lot of us know what you are up to and are definitely switching to a spiral-cut Honeybaked ham for EVERY Thanksgiving because it's ready-to-serve and NEVER needs basting.

I'm praying that God will forgive you and that you will learn to love Him instead of your perverted sins.

Sincerely,

LuAnne Ginger-Phelps (An American and proud!)

I'm just wondering what your personal feelings are about the plans for refurbishing St. Elizabeths Hospital in D.C.

A lot of former patients think it was the nicest hospital for the criminally insane that they ever spent a lot of time in and they really wish people would just leave it alone because they have many very happy memories about it, especially that little storage room off the stairwell leading to the sub-basement where you could take a "special friend" for some private time together, but only if you didn't start smoking cigarettes after your private time because this could trigger the fire alarms and it was honestly not a lot of fun to have to stay for eight months in one of the isolation rooms in locked ward because you could scream for hours and hours but no one would ever call the President of the United States to tell him that you were sorry for everything and just wanted to be released for maybe nine or twelve hours so you could buy some magazines like "Tiger Beat" or "Junior Miss Beauty Queen" so you could read and relax a little and pry the staples from the magazines in order to have something very very sharp to jab into your eyes and lips when the BAD THOUGHTS wouldn't stop feeling like the way your mother's voice felt when you used super glue, which is really a laugh because there's nothing "super" about it like SUPERMAN, to keep your sister from using her ugly poisonous eyes to see all your personal things that in you had hidden for a lot of good reasons that have nothing to do with crime or so-called "DANGER TO OTHERS" in your bedroom closet.

Here's what I get:

1. Shirley Temple Black

2. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani

3. Michelle Kwan

4. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

5. Julio Iglesias

I just want to laugh so hard because I've "dated" four of the five but they don't know about each other, so doing that thing on the Facebook search is like walking into a party and having everyone smirk at you because they know you have an enormous penis that made them have lots of really fantastic orgasms.

And one of the people, who shall remain nameless, is trying to get a loan from me, which I think is also hilarious because you'd think a famous Asian-American athlete could just sell a pair of iceskates or something if he or she needed some money.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Immediately after Miranda says, "There's a literal ringing in my ear," she starts to cough up copious mouthfuls of brilliantly red arterial blood which contain a lethal and highly contagious bacterium she contracted from rats living in the walls of her poorly refurbished Brooklyn brownstone. (Turns out Steve -- no surprises here! -- was skimming the refurb monies to pay for a "dirty bomb" that he and the Muslim terrorist cell he'd joined had planned to detonate somewhere on Staten Island.)

Snipers dispatched by the CDC shoot Miranda and Charlotte many, many times in the face, over and over again, countless times -- sorta like Peckinpah with severe OCD but endlessly more bloodthirsty.

Anyhoo, Carrie manages to escape the CDC snipers, although a stray round from a Heckler & Koch PSG1 blasts her right arm completely out of its socket, leaving the useless limb hanging by a few shreds of muscle and sinew.

Diehard SATC fans will be delighted to learn that Karl Lagerfeld makes a surprise appearance in the movie as the "celebrity designer" who crafts Carrie's prosthetic arm just in time for her glamorous yet bittersweet wedding to Mr. Big.

"Fuckity-fuckity-fuck fuckers!"

You just made me nearly choke to death on my very tasty grapefruit-flavored Absolut and grapefruit juice.

You're pretty goddamn adorable.

"When AIDS came along, it was the valiant and honest gay people who fought the stigma and cared for the dying, not the delusional disco vampires of 54..."

We must not be remembering the same AIDS epidemic.

During the one with which I'm familiar, there were no dependable predictors for who would or wouldn't behave valiantly or honestly.

I saw scared, closeted people who overcame or overlooked their fear and self-disgust in order to engage in public activism and care for complete strangers through illness and death.

I also saw strident advocates for gay rights who, when confronted with the realities of HIV/AIDS and unable to handle the messiness and sorrow, just sort of disappeared.

It was like any other war-type situation. Weak and brave people rose to the challenges. Weak and brave people went AWOL. Normally nice people proved utterly useless. Normally selfish and despicable people proved utterly selfless.

Some of those "delusional disco vampires of 54," by the way, discreetly wrote hefty checks when many people who had a lot more money than the delusional vampires ever had never bothered to contribute a dime.

"Your absolutely circular intellectual tunnel-vision wraps around your universe of perspective and aims right back at your own ass.

Seriously, do you actually kiss your mother with that mouth? Because it seems you're too busy puffing long, academic words out of it in intensely specious ways to even have the time to pucker your lips..."

I think we're progressing rather well, given how very briefly we've been working together.

You're obviously experiencing a number of very distinct emotions all at the same time. Some of these feelings may be painful and confusing and quite difficult to express. But it's important to remember that there's no wrong or right way of expressing them.

Sometimes when we reach a point such as this, to help us both better understand your confusion, I'll ask you to talk a little bit more about certain things you've said that stood out to me.

For example, I'd like to direct your attention, please, to the words I've set in bold in the partial transcript above.

When thinking of me, or when trying to express your thoughts about me, you seem concerned with specific parts of my body -- my ass, for example, or my lips.

Could you please talk a little more about that? When you think about my ass or lips, how does it make you feel?

Word on the street is that Compton has been "talkin' shit" about Salt Lake City for years.

Since Elizabeth seems to have an uncanny knack for disappearing without a trace for months at a time, chances are she'll be able to avoid Suge's wrath until cooler heads prevail.

"To be honest, I could care less about whose actually Jewish. Or any Jewish matters whatsoever. What I do care about is the preponderance of a great big school of writing which takes up a giant slice of the american consciousness, media attention, and bestseller list spots, while providing the world with a kind of reading experience I don't particularly enjoy...."

It's odd that you perceive a dichotomy between Jewish authors and the "American consciousness, media attention, and bestseller list spots," and that you express a prissy dislike for "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectuals."

You very much enjoy announcing your familiarity with Derrida, a Sephardic Jew -- one of your "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectuals" -- who had a rather famous hand in influencing the "American consciousness" with regard to literature.

This is only one contradiction in your three paragraphs above. Had they been well-rehearsed, they couldn't possibly have packed more contradictions into so few sentences.

But your mind's easy way with contradiction and cliche isn't as interesting as its equal ease with parapraxis.

Eventually you'll discover that the world is more forgiving and tolerant than you now assume. But to discover that, you'll first need to be more forgiving and tolerant with yourself. In the meantime, your "secret," if we can call it that, is safe with us.

"But I have to say, the preponderance lately of pinksy, pansy jewy intellectual writers living in and writing about each other in the sweaty-sheeted boroughs of new york sort of make me long for another resurgence of manliness. ..."

Given that Gentiles have had more than 2000 years of intensive Jew-baiting practice, you'd think that even the most callow among them would be able offhand to do better than "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectual."

If a non-Jew has his eye on, for example, Hadassah's Annual Otto Weininger Award for Best Jew-Baiting from a Sexually Confused Hysteric, he really ought hunker down and study the manly pioneers of the form he apparently yearns to master.