The Los Angeles Times accelerates its death-spiral into complete irrelevance today by running a front page story in which intrepid reporter Scott Collins… has a private cooking class with Gordon Ramsay. Just in time to promote the season finale of Ramsay’s Fox show Hell’s Kitchen, Collins tries to make pasta with the chef and ends up getting called mean names. But the complete lack of substance isn’t the worst thing here. The front page placement isn’t either, although it comes just hours after the similarly-placed exclusive interview with Farah Fawcett they’ve been sitting on for eight months until her publicist approved publication (or whatever their ludicrous rationalization is). No, the worst part comes in this paragrah:

In the rarefied world of fine dining, the 42-year-old Ramsay is a very big deal. His eponymous restaurant at the London West Hollywood hotel is part of a mini-empire that has vaulted him into the ranks of celebrity chefs. His restaurants have earned a total of 13 of the elusive Michelin stars, a measure of critical acclaim that places Ramsay in the company of Alain Ducasse and Joel Robuchon. His Gordon Ramsay Holdings controls multiple outlets in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Britain’s Sunday Times in 2007 estimated his personal fortune at more than $100 million.

Now I will say I’m a huge fan of Ramsay’s shows — particularly the British ones where he’s two thirds chef and only one third cartoon character.  And everything Collins wrote is or at least once was true… technically. But Ramsay’s restaurant empire has been in serious trouble lately. And on top of the financial, legal, and tax issues, there were British press reports that he’d had an affair for seven years, jeopardizing his image as the loving father to an adorable family. He’s even fallen out of favor with Posh and Becks. And that “eponymous restaurant at the London West Hollywood?” Well, it’s still eponymous… but it’s not his anymore. He sold it months ago. And I happen to know this piece of information that Scott Collins was unable to unearth — because I read it in the Los Angeles Times.

Even if this fluff had run in the food or Calendar section, it would have been appropriate to have a little actual information about the man being fluffed. But to put this on the front page and then ignore a year’s worth of news about its subject is the equivalent of printing press releases. I realize the LA Times doesn’t actually believe in the importance of either writing or reporting these days — if they did, they’d never publish Jonah Goldberg. But is it asking too much that they learn how to use Google?

Much controversy about the infamous, never-to-be Scooby Doo/Diagnosis Murder crossover, all of it so far coming from various members of the Goldberg clan. Over at his blog, my former partner Lee has his own version of our prospective story, which has the dubious virtue of probably being true. It does make more sense that it would have been Jesse who was hallucinating that he was a cartoon character, but I have to say that I’m glad my mind doesn’t work in such a way that I could actually remember which of our actors we wanted to play which member of team Scooby after all these years. 

And then my boss Tod Goldberg was  kind enough to suggest in a phone call that if we had indeed done the cross-over, it would have been the “worst fucking thing in the history of television” and that Lee and I would have been on the front page of the New York Times under the headline “the men who killed TV.” I think he’s just bitter because he was planning on bringing Scrappy Doo into his next Burn Notice book and now he can’t.

All over the media, I keep hearing that Thursday was the “six-year anniversary of the Iraq war.”

It wasn’t.

Yes, it is certainly true that the sun has gone around the earth six times since we invaded. (Or is it the other way around? Note to self — ask that flat-earth lady from The View.)

But it can’t be the “six year anniversary” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING. Because the word anniversary means the yearly recurrence of an event, or the celebration of that recurrence. You know, because the root of the word comes from the Latin for year.

Granted, we’ve been hearing for a decade or two of stupid and hopeful dating couples who would celebrate their “two and a half week anniversary” because this was the longest that any of their relationships had ever lasted. But some reason, it seems that America has collectively decided to follow the lead of those by-now long broken up lovers.

So now we never hear about the first anniversary or the sixth anniversary — it’s the “one-year anniversary” or the “six-year anniversary.”

It’s not like we don’t have other words for celebration or commemoration. Just off the top of my head there’s celebration and commemoration. We only have one word for the yearly remembrance of an event. Or at least we did. Now we don’t have any.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times has been on a roll lately — he also provided the quote about the Witch Mountain aliens in the post below — and is almost at Anthony Lane’s level of pith. In today’s review of Knowing he manages to encapsulate everything wrong with the average Nicolas Cage performance in one sentence:

But the odd thing about Mr. Cage in this movie is that even when he is responding to the threat of complete human extinction, you still can’t help feeling that he’s overreacting.

The whole review is worth reading, especially the paragraphs relating to Cage…

…but I’m going to be doing it anyway at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I’ll be at the Mystery Bookstore’s booth on Sunday, April 26 at 2 pm. And for your extra added entertainment, I’ll be joined by the two kings of USA Network tie-in novels — Lee and Tod Goldberg, authors, respectively, of the Monk and Burn Notice books. Stop on by for the trifecta — or walk right past them and come see me!

During my extended Galting period (see below), my editor sent me a query from Penguin Putnam NAL’s Customer Communications Department:

We have a consumer complaint about pages 210-213.  The consumer states that these are the only pages in the entire book that mention characters by the name of Kent Shambling and Nancy, and he says that there is no mention of these two characters leading up to this point and they seem to have nothing to do with the story.

I have to say I was a little taken aback. Pleased, certainly, that a reader had made it all the way to page 210 — as a writer, you want to know people are still with you into triple digits. And that someone cared enough about the narrative to write or call the publisher with this concern. (For those few of you who haven’t yet read A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Read, let me assure you that the chapter is question is a modernistic leap into a new character’s point of view in order to tell a bit of story that does not directly involve Our Heroes, a technique I filched from either Virginia Woolf or Stephen King.)

But who knew that multi-national publishing houses had Customer Communications Departments? That if I found a bit of a book I didn’t like, there were operators standing by to take my complaints? If I wrote to the CCD at Farar Strauss Giroux and pointed out that after almost a thousand pages of 2666, I still didn’t know who killed all those women in Mexico, would they send me back the name of the murderer? If I suggested to Anchor that I’d be enjoying Enduring Love a lot more if Joe Rose wasn’t such a jerk to his girlfriend, would Ian McEwen zip out a new version where Joe apologizes for not realizing she has feelings too, and her bad day is just as important as his? Could they finally get Thomas Harris to apologize for writing Hannibal?

This has changed the way I approach literature. No more passive reading for me! From now on, I’m going to be an engaged consumer of books. Mr. McEwen, consider yourself warned…

The rumors you’ve heard are all true: I did, indeed, Go Galt.  By which I mean (for those of you who don’t study at the feet of Michelle Malkin) that I took inspiration from the Second Worst Prose Stylyist in the English Language and withdrew my services from society in protest of a threat to return marginal tax rates on top earners to what they were a decade ago. You see, if all the creative, productive people were to simply walk away like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, the theory goes, then the rest of you crumbs would fall into anarchy and chaos while We Chosen Ones would live in Smart People Paradise forever. Or something like that.

For two months I refused the world my creative genius on this blog. And what happened? The Dow plummeted. Unemployment skyrocketed. Paul Blart, Mall Cop became a massive hit.

Finally I realized that what I’d been doing was too selfish and too destructive to continue. I will no longer withhold my genius from the USA, and instead do my part to make us all better off. And I hope you notice that as soon as I began even thinking about coming back, the stock market jumped up. We Galt people are pretty powerful.

Oh, who am I kidding? Actually, I flipped to the end of Atlas Shrugged at Borders the other day and discovered that to really be John Galt I’d have to deliver a sixty page speech explaining the intricacies of my philosophy. (And that’s sixty pages of the smallest type visible without an electron microscope — if my Psych books were printed like this, they could fit on the back of a Cap’n Crunch box.) Since I have trouble stretching out my philosophy to fill a bumper sticker, I figured it was time to give up Galting…