LISTEN MISSY GIVES her rules for dating, which nicely coincides with what I told a friend on the phone tonight. ("No, you shouldn't mention your restraining order on the first date.") This has created a kerfuffle on her comments page, but I think things can be resolved by reference to the American Dating Association rules.

READER MAIL. My long-time real-life pen-pal M.E., who figured out my identity on one visit to the page, writes:

The DC Water & Sewer Authority is installing new end-user meters
citywide. While this show of civil efficiency is amazing in itself, what's
really astonishing is item 16 in the agency's FAQ on the new meters:

16. Is this system monitoring my phone calls?
No, this equipment does not monitor phone calls.

The only reason I can come up with for this being in the FAQ is that,
well, it's a question WASA has been asked frequently. Yikes.

Number 17 is similar. Also, Number 3 indicates that WASA doesn't know that there's such a word as "maintenance."

IMDB TELLS ME that I saw "Gothic" fifteen years ago, so it's a good thing I didn't guess "Lair of the White Worm," which I suppose I didn't see.

THE NOT-QUITE-YET-LATE Warren Zevon will appear on the Late Show with David Letterman on Wednesday, October 30th at 11:30pm EST. The entire show will be dedicated to Warren and he will perform 2 songs including "Genius."

I'm not a huge Zevon fan: none of his stuff would end up in my top-twenty-CDs-on-a-desert-island lists, and my favorite Zevon album is probably the out-of-print "Hindu Love Gods" set of blues covers that he recorded with three fourths of REM. But I do have a soft spot for him, because shortly after I discovered college radio in high school, "Sentimental Hygiene" was the first tape I bought because I'd heard its music outside of the normal media channels.

That's not much more than fifteen years ago, and it's amazing what one remembers and forgets; Lileks has been writing about this, so the ephemeral nature of memory is on my mind. A hundred years from now, will someone be fascinated by the 1980s, with its clunky 64K computers and fear of nuclear holocaust? I quiz myself. Was it the Tulane or UNO radio station? Don't remember. What was the name of the DJ you took out on a date? Was it Ursula? Don't remember. How in the heck did a 1510-SAT-scoring geek on the wrong side of the Mississippi River and just out of high school ever finagle a date with her? Again, don't remember, though one suspects it must have been through mutual friends or friends of friends. What movie did you see? That Ken Russell flick about Shelley and Byron. Can you tell me anything about the movie, including its name or any of its actors? No. Wait, I remember that it was rated R. Also, that I was vaguely confused between Ken Russell and Kurt Russell. Where did you have lunch? Easy: the Camellia Grill, often misspelled "Camelia" with one L, as I did before Google corrected me. What did you have for lunch? Don't remember. What did she have for lunch? The "Cannibal Special" -- a quarter pound raw hamburger mixed with a raw egg and chopped raw onion.

The health department doesn't let them serve that any more. Google finds only three web pages on the Web discussing the Camellia Grill Cannibal Special, and one of them is a fetish story about women with bald scalps. Consider this site number four, and only slightly less tasteful.

"THANK YOU FOR SMOKING"'s Nick Naylor pops up as a minor character in Christopher Buckley's new novel, "No Way to Treat a First Lady," which I read in two sittings today waiting for the Metro (it's bad enough they shut down all the roads for a marathon so I can't drive in, but then they run the trains less frequently as if to remind me that normal people don't spend so many hours in the office on a Sunday) and watching the seventh game of the World Series. Thumbs up. Buckley's gotten just as formulaic as, say, John Grisham, but it's an entertaining formula. Part of the fun is the roman à clef guessing of who's who (e.g., doesn't Sandy Clintrick's name sound a lot like Jamie Gorelick, an actual deputy attorney general?) Not perfect, of course: as every other novel with a trial sequence does, this one gets the hearsay rule wrong, and a deputy attorney general would never try a case like this. But a pleasant diversion.

I THINK GLENN REYNOLDS is making a little much of the Islamic tendencies of the Beltway Sniper, John Muhammad. I agree that it's silly that CNN is calling Muhammad "John Williams"; the man got his name legally changed, and this sort of PC pretending that he didn't is becoming all too common. But if one reads the note that Muhammad left behind, with its fourth grade level of literacy and its fantastic schemes of a magic ATM card with a ten-million dollar balance, it's fairly clear that this isn't an Al Qaeda activity. Muhammad is simply a violent idiot, and to the extent he subscribes to violent Islamic ideologies that call for the death of infidels, it is because he is the sort of violent idiot for whom such ideologies appeal, rather than because the Islamofascists persuaded him to do it. If Muhammad were white, he would've been drawn to the Timothy McVeigh circles of black-helicopter paranoia and The Turner Diaries; because he was black, it was the idiocy of the African-American flavor--Nation of Islam--that appealed to him.

Another question is how the heck the Army admits such illiterates into their ranks in the first place, but I'm sure someone will have an explanatory comment. I blame Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster.

AS JULIA Z. POINTED OUT to me, we've been refusing to broadcast Osama tapes and the statements of prominent Muslim terrorists for fear that they might be using coded messages to sleeper cells. So why in hell was Police Chief Moose announcing "You want us to say 'We have the sniper caught like a duck in a noose.'"?

Hooray for Captain Spaulding takes on Doonesbury better than anyone else to date:

Trudeau does bloggers today (and presumably this week) with the original punchline that bloggers have nothing to say (Check out next week's strip about two guys standing next to each other talking on their cell phones).

I don't have much to say, I will grant. Other than, at least I wasn't dopey enough to fall for the Presidential IQ hoax.

THE ROBOT WARBLOG takes on Max Power and Julia Zlotnick. I have to say the attack on Captain Spaulding was uncalled for, though.

THEY'RE ADVERTISING THE new movie "The Truth About Charlie" with Klint's "Diamond" theme from "Snatch" [track 2]. Last time I saw that, the preview for "Being John Malkovich" used "Brazil's" office worker march music [track 1], which didn't appear in the movie itself, though one can see the preview on the DVD. It's apparently not uncommon for previews to swipe music from earlier movies when the released film has not yet finished being scored ("The Royal Tenenbaums" had the music reworked between the New York Film Festival and its commercial release, for example), but it's rarely so noticeable -- perhaps other musical selections aren't so distinctive.