“Stephen Baldwin has sued fellow actor Kevin Costner over their investments in a device that BP PLC used in trying to clean up the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.”
 — Wake me in 2011.

“Elie Wiesel: Holocaust Winner”

Sad day for crime aficionados: a fake maid who cleaned out houses has been mopped up by the cops. The overly dry, largely literate report: “Jesenia Lopez-Gavilan, 22, of Hialeah, was charged with first-degree grand theft, third-degree grand theft and petit theft. Her boyfriend, Ray L. Valdes, 26, of West Dade, was charged with third-degree grand theft for allegedly driving the getaway car…. According to police, she allegedly advertised herself as a maid named Maria or Vanessa on Craig’s list, a website.” Haha, a website.

Diamond is an Atlanta rapper who came to fame six years ago as a part of Crime Mob, a group of high school kids who signed to Lil John’s label, BME Records. (So you know they were crunk, because Lil John, he always tells the truth.) They made a couple good records with Lil Scrappy, who will always have a place in my heart because of his song “No Problem,” which is one of the most crunk songs I know, a great favorite of mine. Diamond, who is now Lil Scrappy’s girlfriend (and, unfortunately, suffering some recession-related problems with him), has left Crime Mob and started a solo career. Her new mixtape is called Cocaine Waitress. The music, from what I’ve heard, is less remarkable than that title — and the cover, which pretty much speaks for itself, I think. Here it is large-scale, to better appreciate the details.

“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me an STD. On the second day debt, on the third day, rape, the fourth teenage pregnancies and then there was abortion, raves, claiming God has a son, blasphemy, exploitation, promiscuity, night clubs, crime, paedophilia, paganism, domestic violence, homelessness, violence, vandalism, alcohol, drugs.”

15. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

14. The Ladykillers

13. The Big Lebowski

12. No Country for Old Men

11. Miller’s Crossing

10. Raising Arizona

9. Blood Simple

8. Barton Fink

7. The Man Who Wasn’t There

6. Fargo

5. Intolerable Cruelty

4. True Grit

3. The Hudsucker Proxy

2. Burn After Reading

1. A Serious Man

Uh huh. They’re in “space.” Saying “Happy Holidays.” Maybe they’ll bring some “moon rocks” “back” with them.

Five months in the brig, with no certain date for a hearing, in “maximum custody”: a report on visiting Bradley Manning: “In my visit to see Bradley at the Quantico brig, it became clear that the Pentagon’s public spin from last week sharply contradicts the reality of Bradley Manning’s detainment. In his five months of detention, it has become obvious to me that Manning’s physical and mental well-being are deteriorating.”

The other night, I ate at JoJo, on 64th Street. It’s a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant, but one of those on the less fancy, more affordable side of his 14-restaurant empire. It’s small and quiet, too, and so it was that much more noticeable when, about halfway through our meal, a man in a powder-blue fleece pullover walked into the dining room talking loudly into the earphone attachment thing of his cell-phone and — without ending his conversation — told the hostess who’d led him to his table, right next to ours, to bring him “the most expensive bottle of wine” she had. She looked embarrassed and opened the menu and showed him what that would be. “No, no, no,” he said, “You know what you do? You tell Stephen” — Steven? — “to find something three times that much and order that, and I’ll come buy it.” The hostess giggled nervously. The guy said, “All right, bring me two bottles then. I hope you’re thirsty. Because I’m not going to drink them all by myself. Bring two glasses, one of them’s for you.”

I exchanged glances with my wife with which we agreed that neither of us would be paying attention to anything the other said for the rest of the evening. We’ve been married for a long time. The scene unfolding a foot-and-a-half to my right was obviously going to be much more interesting.

The guy ended his phone conversation, loudly announcing, “All right, I love you,” twice before hanging up. The two bottles of wine arrived, and two glasses. The hostess opened a bottle and poured only one glass but stayed standing at his table with an uncomfortable smile fixed on her face. The guy took a sip and looked up at her unctuously and asked, “So what’s going on?”

Not much, she told him. Her shift has actually ended an hour ago. The restaurant was busy, though, and the staff needed more hands, so she’d stayed on to help.

“I haven’t seen you in a while. What’ve you been up to?”

Not much, she told him again. Busy with work. Then, in what seemed like a defensive measure, “I’ve been hanging out with a new boy.”

The guy was not happy to hear to hear this. His tone changed and his face reddened. Apparently, there had been a previous conversation, on the phone, during which, to hear the guy complain about it, the hostess had misrepresented herself. “So for that whole time, while we were talking for twenty minutes, you let me think you were the general manager.” (Did he mean Trisha?)

It got very tense. The hostess’s fixed smile looked even more uncomfortable. The guy had an ugly sneer. “And you said yes when I invited you down to Panama. When I was going to fly you down on the private jet.”

It was confusing. (And a little difficult to hear. My wife and I would sporadically say something, in a half-hearted attempt to disguise our eavesdropping. But not really. One time when I said, “The decor is nice in here,” my wife said, “Shhh!”) But from what we could understand, the guy had thought the hostess, who’d he’d had a twenty minute conversation, was another person who worked at the restaurant, a general manager. Apparently, yes, there was also someone named Stephen; at least, the guy knew Stephen well, and threatened to have the hostess fired. “No, no, it’s fine,” he said, upon her apologizing for her part in the confusion. “When I talk to Stephen, when he asks me how my meal was, I’ll just tell him you pretended to be someone you weren’t. And you tricked me into thinking you’d accepted my invitation to come to Panama with me on my private jet.” That was one thing that we could be very sure about: He had definitely invited this woman, who he didn’t even know well enough to know who he was talking to, to fly down to Panama on his private jet. He repeated that part a lot.

Another woman came over to his table. This new woman, who was tall and red-headed, smiled at the guy the same way the first woman had — familiarly, it seemed that he was a regular customer, but also sort of forcedly. He was blatantly unpleasant, and no one in his presence for more than a couple minutes would be smiling without effort.

“You know ____?” the man asked this other woman, about the first woman, and she smiled and said yes. “I got nothing nice to say about her,” he said.

The second woman did her best to agree with him, replacing her frozen smile with an expression of concerned sympathy on her face, while also offering diplomatic defense of her colleague. She noted that everybody had been working hard.

She also stood with him for most of the next hour. As the man ordered his dinner and drank not very much of his wine and ate alone (finishing only half of each of two entrees), there was never not a member of the restaurant’s staff standing at his table. She would step aside when a waitperson brought food, and when the guy was finished with something, he’d beckon a busboy by saying, “Hey, boss, take this.” He was chummy and glib and trashed the first woman to each of the staff, telling the story of how she “lied” to him again and again. He also talked a lot about the big business his company was doing with the government of one of the Carolinas, and offered people investment tips. For example: if you’re thinking of buying real estate, find a place with a low tax base. You know it’s going to go up in the future and you’ll make lots of money or something.

At one point, he swirled the wine in his glass and looked up at this second woman and said, “So what’s going on? Tell me something.”

Not much, she said. She was tired, she’d been working hard, that kind of thing.

“No, no, no,” he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “See, that’s the wrong attitude. You got all this going for you — you’re tall, you got red hair. But that’s the wrong attitude. No one wants to hear that you’re tired!”

“An organism on your back that’s about the size of a dinner plate, which creates a hole through which it can feed and through which its family can feed. The hole doesn’t seal up — they drink blood through it and inject viruses into it.”
 — Dr. Giles Budge from the National Bee Unit in Yorkshire, describing the human equivalent of the Varroa destructor, the parasitic mite that has been a major factor in the worldwide decline of the European honeybee over the past decade (often referred to as “colony collapse disorder.”) Scientists have developed a methodology called RNA interference to combat the mites, introducing genetic material that will cause their immune system to attack itself. I think Dr. Budge’s description, and what we’ve learned from sci-fi horror movies, tells us all we need to know about why we should be VERY CAREFUL about introducing genetic material into Varroa destructor mites.