1) I wrote about over-the-top weddings. I wrote about over-the-top bodybuilding.

2) I updated my links.

3) I am doing Caroline Waxler's Le Chuckle Hut in June.

4) I am doing Ritalin Readings on May 24.

5) My sister joined MySpace.

6) I don't think you understand. My sister joined MySpace.

7) I watched that SNL retrospective thing from the '90s last weekend. One of the most fascinating parts was when staff members reminisced about the reporter from New York magazine who came in to do an extensive piece on the struggling show. After weeks of laughing at their jokes, partying with them and even getting welcomed into their homes, he ultimately wrote a hatchet job.

8) So I read the piece (and very cool of New York's Daily Intelligencer to put the PDF online), and wow. Let's get coffee and discuss.

9) For now, though, I'll say it did remind me of one of the most compelling books on journalism I have ever read. "The Journalist and the Murderer" by Janet Malcolm. Read a little, and you'll see.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns--when the article or book appears--his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always come as a shock to the subject.

10) Don't worry, pals. Janet Malcolm wasn't talking about me in that diatribe. I never murmur when I'm being seemly.