A PRICE WAR between bus companies targeting Chinese immigrant customers has led to $15 round-trip bus fares from DC to NY, Chinatown to Chinatown. That's cheaper than the highway tolls alone.

INCIDENTALLY, APROPOS of the previous entry, the music in the "French Dictionary" Levi's commercial is "Playground Love" by Air.

Ads.com bit the dust and no one told me. It was a nifty site where one could look up advertisements, including names of songs in ads, or catch funny advertisements that people were talking about but you had somehow missed. It's funny that people have had so much trouble finding a way to commercialize content-providing sites, increasingly having to rely on annoying pop-up, pop-under, or, in the case of Slate, screen-obscuring advertising, and here's a site that couldn't make a go of it even though the content was the commercial.

DAVID FRUM IS appropriately upset at a typical New York Times headline:

“Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims.” Yes, those missionaries and those Muslims really hate each other: Bonnie Witherall showed her hatred by offering free prenatal care to indigent Lebanese; the local Muslim clerics were naturally goaded by this outrage and killed her.

The new Smarter Harper's Index is up.

MINUTES AFTER THE Anter family arrived at their hotel, their vacation was ruined by a suicide bomber. Dvir, 14, and Nor, 12, were killed; their mother is unconscious in an Israeli hospital. BBC coverage.

SO IS EVERYONE getting the "Spin the Dreydel" Orbitz pop-up ad, or do I have a hidden cookie that tells the world that a Jew is using the browser?

ON-LINE GROCERIES IN 2002? If you remember the multi-billion-dollar bubble valuations for Webvan and the like, you may scoff, but FreshDirect seems to have an interesting business model focusing on Manhattan, where grocery prices are abnormally high and there's a demand for quality foodstuffs. Deliveries are on weekends and nights only, increasing the efficiency of the drivers, who avoid rush-hour jams.

I DON'T KNOW HOW Matt Welch beat me to blogging about Garance Franke-Ruta's take-down of Bowling for Columbine, but he did. Small world, etc., etc.

Smarting from the dis by the Yale Law Blog convention, I've been sunning it up in LA for a few days: blog-encounters with Welch, Emmanuelle, Howard Owens, and the always-gorgeous Cathy Seipp at a German beer-garden; and Captain Spaulding was kind enough to treat me to a tasty meal of Guatemalan fried chicken. Moxie is apparently sufficiently smitten with her new beau that she stood me up twice.

I also had a retroactive encounter with Nick Denton; I apparently met him a few months ago at a sushi bar in New York, where he was introduced to me as "Nick," and I was introduced to him with my real name by a mutual film-director friend, and we went our separate ways. The film-director recently sent out a party invitation cc'ing both of us and, in discussing it with her ("Wow, not only are you a hot award-winning film director, but you also know Nick Denton, so now I'm really impressed"), I learned that we already met. Who knew?