Say what you will about best-selling author and ESPN columnist Bill Simmons - and I probably shouldn't say anything too critical until I've actually finished The Book of Basketball - but he's been on his game in the past few months (roughly dating back to the piece he wrote embracing sabremetrics) and both his column and his Twitter have been pretty good reads during the Celtics' somewhat unlikely (admit it, C's fans) run to this year's NBA Finals.

This is real. Or at least, at the video's end, seventy-year old Jack Nicholson, in stunning pair of tinted eyeglasses, appears as himself and says, "I'm Jack Nicholson and I approve this message."

TOUGH LOVE
5 years ago
January 31, 2003 | Michael Bronski remembered the tough-as-nails, gay journalist Sarah Pettit.
“I DON’T KNOW that I’d say I enjoyed working with Sarah Pettit. One of my first dealings with her was in 1993, when she was the arts editor for Out magazine. She called me on a Monday to ask for revisions on a piece I’d written.

Holday cheer!

CBS is rolling out the super sexiest/weirdest Chistmas/Holiday(??) schedule ever (see below). A Ricky-Martin-meets-Rudolph-under-the-push-up-bra sort of thing...

A spinning spiral of pouty models, The Bumble, and The Island of Misfit Toys. Who looks better in faux fur? Who is Heidi? Who is Seal? Are they characters? Are they real? Are they Santa's TV elves? Haphazardly scheduled bring us holiday cheer and loathing.

Friend: ... are you for real? you’re really going to a UFO convention?

Me: yeah

Friend: you’re going willingly?

Me: yeah

Friend: with people?

It’s been a secret dream of mine to attend a UFO event. I have long been intrigued by the paranormal.

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications.

Tickets for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s dual Boston shows in November went on sale this morning at 10 A.M., and at about 10:01 A.M., they were sold out.

Normally, I wouldn’t be shocked and appalled, but when I’m one of the huddled, sleep-deprived masses who pulls himself out of bed 10 minutes early to pay my economic tribute to The Boss, you think the gods would smile on me a bit.