MAD MAGAZINE NAILS it on the head with what's wrong with the Onion, and it's funny to boot. (via Spaulding)

BUT DOES HE LOOK BETTER IN GO-GO BOOTS? In frightening news today, I was shopping for ties at Hecht's when a saleslady sidles over to me. "You're the Secretary of Energy, aren't you!" I'm dumbfounded for a minute -- first time I'd been confused for a quasi-celebrity, and I'm searching my head for who the Secretary of Energy is, and the saleslady completes her thought hesitantly, "Spencer Abraham?" I accurately deny it, and I accurately deny ever hearing that comparison before in response to further questioning.

So, not only is the saleslady telling me that I look like a jowly ex-Senator 17 years older than me, but she's effectively rubbing it in my face that she's better at Cabinet Jeopardy! than I am. (In a 200-person American Politics class lecture hall twelve years ago, the professor, telling an anecdote about how Reagan identified his HUD Secretary as "Mr. Mayor," asked if anyone remembered who that cabinet member was. After a moment of silence, I blurted out "Pierce," and then slunk down in my tenth-row seat so I wouldn't be singled out as the flamer who remembered that trivia.)

I still buy some ties from her (ties much more stylish than those Abraham wears), but now I'm worried Moxie won't want to be seen in public with me when we go out for sushi in two weeks.

ANYONE EVER NOTICE THAT Heather Havrilesky has two separate entries for the same blog on InstaPundit?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON HAS traded in her Lincoln Navigator for a Toyota Prius, and will be producing public-service announcements from the "Got Milk?" people in favor of the concept.

THE REVIEWS FOR THE new Harry Potter movie are crummy, and indicate adaptation troubles that make the movie disjointed, even at 162 minutes, which bodes poorly for the third and fourth books, which were even longer than the second.

I'M LINKING TO THIS piece from the Claremont Institute on the Minnesota election not because it's a special special piece on punditry, but because I'm strangely flattered that they thought sending me a press release would accomplish anything. They'd get more hits if they sent $100 to Moxie, and she looks better in go-go boots than I do.

In other news, the American Lawyer did a big story with a picture spread of Denise Howell because her blog gets 250 hits a day. I, of course, with 350-400 hits a day, am chopped liver, which is why Yale Law School will invite me to attend as a student, but not as a blogger, not that I don't have two pre-existing and mutually interfering, commitments. And I suspect Denise Howell also looks better in go-go boots than I do.

MAKE YOUR OWN BUSH SPEECH. (via gb)

YOU KNOW, IT WOULD have been nice for the Washington Post to mention before an election on a $5 billion tax increase to pay for transportation that part of Northern Virginia's traffic problem stems from the failure of local government to retime traffic lights that were last programmed over a decade ago.

A REAL GOOGLE MIRROR: elgooG.

WATCHING TOO MUCH late night television lately. Things I noticed:

* Michael Moore on Oprah repeating the Halloween candy story I had been telling people all last week. (When I grew up in Houston, trick-or-treating essentially ended because of a mass scare over poisoned candy, even though the only incident was a father poisoning his son for insurance money.) I hope people don't think I was just parroting Michael Moore. What was really happening was that we were both parroting Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear." Glassner was on the show, too; I won't comment on the irony of Oprah having guests complaining about fear-mongering. (And I wonder how many "TV Nation" and "Awful Truth" segments focused on wildly remote environmental risks?)

* Carson Daly is terrible interviewer. He had Ted Danson on. He gave Danson a shirt as a reference to a joke on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The gag, not that funny to begin with (it was a different shirt for one thing), was sufficiently obscure that even Danson seemed confused, and the audience didn't seem to get it either. The interview itself was painful to watch: Daly gushing like a little fanboy.

* Ted Danson gave a pitch on the show for the Toyota Prius, though. Good for him.

* The opening credits montage of a 1990 rerun of Saturday Night Live had an awkward number of close-to-identical shots of an Empire State Building bedecked in red, white, and blue, which makes one suspect that they were editing out shots of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center. It was far more noticeable than if they hadn't done the Soviet-style re-editing, and it just seemed wrong.

* Speaking of which, why is it that The Powers That Be pulled the "Simpsons" episode where Homer visits the World Trade Center, but not the "Simpsons" episode where a missile collapses a fictional New York City Mad Magazine skyscraper into rubble?