Zagat, the restaurant guide place, has posted "outtakes" from reviews that I guess they weren't comfortable printing. Some fun stuff, some crude stuff, some ugly stuff. Worth a peek, anyway:

• Outtakes/Unfit to Print [zagatsurvey.com]
  #5. Filled with flowers and all the things that make flowers grow.
  #21. I can defrost better.
  #37. I get sick from the food every time. At least it has consistency.
  #54. Grandma cooked like this, Grandpa died young.

Are you a fan of The Sting? I've watched it a few times now and enjoy it greatly.

Seen on metascene, this page seems to be about the guy the story was based on. At least, he ran a scam or two much like it. It's a long piece, but there are a lot of fun tidbits in it:

• Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil by Michael Marinacci [netcom]
  Inevitably, the mark screwed up the bet, took the blame and forked over compensation to Weil and Wall. Guilt-tripping and shaming the mark was important, for it kept him emotionally off-balance and made him more ready to believe the staged blunders were all his fault.
  
  Like the suckers who had followed Weil into his phony betting parlors in Chicago, the gullible investor saw exactly what the Yellow Kid wanted him to see: a prosperous, thriving bank clogged with customers. ... The mark witnessed this incredible display for an hour, met with the president, and handed over $50,000 on the spot, confident that he would soon see handsome profits. Of course, he never saw the money again; upon his departure, the Yellow Kid Weil branch of the Merchants National Bank vanished, like Brigadoon, into thin air.
  
  Said he of the well-fed, corrupt Solid Citizens whose seemingly bottomless greed and gullibility fed his free-and-easy lifestyle: "They were seldom concerned with human nature. They knew little -- and cared less -- about their fellow men. If they had been keener students of human nature, if they had given more time to companionship with their fellows and less to the chase of the almighty dollar, they wouldn't have been such easy marks."

P.S. The most recent time I watched the movie, I noticed a striking similarity between the character Luther Coleman and James Earl Jones, so much so that I thought it was just a young, made-up-to-look-older Jones in the role. I was close -- Luther was played by James Earl Jones' father, Robert Earl Jones. Cool.

That's me, always the last to find out... There's going to be a Dragonriders of Pern TV series?? Love the books, not sure how they'll work on the screen myself.

• About the TV show [Pern.net, seen on TVBarn]
  It has required over a year and a half of digital preproduction in Toronto, London and Frankfurt, to create the dragons.

I guess this means someone will try to write the music for the various Harper songs. Hmph.

Better left to imagination, Zathras say, but no one listen to Zathras...

Dan Hartung has started a nifty weblog of his own:

• Lake Effect Weblog

Aside from the (surmountable) difficulty of reading teensy Tahoma in Mac IE, I like it. It leans more towards commentary & opinion than toward isolated/cryptic linking. I favor that kinda thing, obviously.

The estimable Brad Graham pointed me to this 1998 update on Bill Watterson, which gives more info than I've seen elsewhere (but unfortunately that's not saying much):

• 'CALVIN' CREATOR'S SECRET HIDEOUT [Okidoki.nl]
  The 40-year-old Watterson declined a formal interview. But in a conversation at his door, where he would not allow any notes to be taken, Watterson stressed that he does not want to live, nor should he have to live, in a fish bowl or have to deal with intrusions into his life by the curious.
  
  Watterson has spent the last three years painting and "enjoying life," said Lee Salem, editorial director at Universal Press Syndicate.
  
  Will Watterson ever resume drawing and writing "Calvin and Hobbes"? "I don't know how to answer that, which may surprise you that I didn't say a flat-out no," Salem said. "... We've talked to him about it. He's open to it. ... But I think it's low on his list of priorities."

I have no desire to infringe on the man's privacy, and I understand that he wants to remain out of the limelight. I only want to know when (if) he publishes anything new so I can buy it and enjoy his words and pictures again.

Watched Showtime's Linc's for the first time tonight. Pretty good stuff, worth checking out again for sure.

Seen on MacInTouch, photos of the bigger-than-life ads Apple has been posting in France (on the Louvre museum, even):

• "Think Different" in Paris

I was looking for a permanent URL I could point to about Steve Jobs joining the board of the Gap, but Gap Inc.'s press releases page still doesn't reflect the news a day later. What's up with that, anh?

It's my duty as a weblogger to now make an appropriately sarcastic remark, so here it is:

New in 2000: translucent khakis.

That's it, gotta go. Back Monday.