[Undisclosed Location] minus three and counting.

* This summer's Battlestar Galactica TV movie looks like it might improve on the superfluity of Razor; judging from who's going to be in it I'd guess the storyline will involve the secret origins of this season's replacement Starbuck.

* Dark Roasted Blend has a brief item with three weird examples of mass hysteria: the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, and the Monkeyman of Dehli.

* All about the Tunguska Event.

* And David Owen explains the surcharged services on his airline in the New Yorker.

Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.

If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are travelling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.

The most disturbing part of this entire Paris Hilton prison debacle is not, as previously suspected, that it has forced me to sympathize with Paris Hilton, but rather that it has now forced me to link approvingly to Christopher Hitchens, who only just last night I was calling "a nasty, useful idiot for the neo-cons."

And now here I go, clearing my throat as above before deciding to do something I would have never believed I would do, and choosing to write about Paris Hilton. Choosing to write about her, furthermore, not just as if she were some metaphor or signifier, but as a subject in herself. At some point toward the middle of last Friday, it seemed to me, one was being made a spectator to a small but important injustice. Those gloating and jeering headlines, showing a tearful child being hauled back to jail, had the effect of making me feel sick. So, you finally got the kid to weep on camera? Are you happy now?