Random synapse firing

How long must we endure the ducking, prevaricating, self-justification and nonsensical blather of Howell Raines? Every time he strikes a keyboard, he's just digging that hole deeper. And because he refuses to take responsibility for his failure, it becomes easier, at least, to understand how the Jayson Blair mess happened. If Raines is this delusional about how that happened ("it was the culture at the paper . . . it was the rush for deadline scoops . . . it was 9/11 . . . it definitely wasn't some cracker moron asleep at the switch and dreaming of righting the wrongs of 400 years of poor race relations by relying on a drunk lying crackhead") it isn't surprising it did.

And now, we have yet more plafoodoo to endure wherein he tries to somehow connect his slamming the good ship New York Times into an iceberg with the help of Jayson Blair with fly-fishing; that's right, Raines is writing a book for people who weren't infuriated enough by his many thousand words' worth of "it-was-everybody's-fault-but-mine" in The Atlantic Monthly. Yet again, "Caught In My Fly" seems like the most appropriate title for his forthcoming book, which we can only hope suffers exactly the same fate as Jayson Blair's Burning Down My Master's House, now languishing in 99-cent remainder bins everywhere.

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Madonna would now like to be known as Esther. Yet she still lives a good part of the time in England. She used to spend a lot of time in Miami. Maybe she'll be spending even more time there . . . although probably in a different part of Miami than she used to haunt. Guy Ritchie has announced he will now be called "Myron Lefkowitz," and will shortly stop making feature films in order to concentrate on retiring from his new career in the pants business.