Compare the facial types of Grace Kelly and Renee Zellweger (so sadly homely) : the sharp small features of Northern Europe and the blunt Eastern European face with a hint of the Mongol. Then the lush Mediterranean look of Michael Douglas' wife who probably gives him hell at home because in the rush of "first fame" she thinks she's a diva not a coal miner's daughter.

When accused of being an intellectual Noam Chomsky said, "In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical." So much for the mandarin complex of most of the professorial world!

In the New Yorker a Buckley essay on Westbrook Pegler, the populist O'Reilly of his day, many words and no political sense, immediately brought to mind the notion of The Luxury of Opinions by those who really do nothing of any consequence.

This was Symposia's last irritated reflection on closing the new Mencken bio last year. "So What!"

Conversations amongst the lumpenproles are heatedly rococo today, what with the graphic butchering in the Christ film and the finale of the made for pre-teens Sex in the City. The air in New York is coiled in a vortex of excitement, in every subway, around every ATM machine, in the salad bars........

The moral parameters of publishing are low. Deluded sociopath Jayson Blair duped into writing a book with the foul title, "Burning Down My Master's House" recalling the devious slave who lies and cheats and cannot be trusted. Perpetuating a ghastly stereotype. Pick up Drew Gilpin's book about the subject to discover what the slave owners' wives thought of their chattel; even the most enlightened like Mary Chesnut or Fanny Butler thought them liars and cheats and not to be trusted. For an antidote try "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

Hard to fathom why Nader would run again; he must certainly detest the Democratic Party for some reason.

In England they would call Rather,Brokaw and Jennings news-readers which is what they are, hardly journalists but men told what to say and to look the part. One presumes Gary Trudeau was being sarcastic when he saw the troika at the Waldorf and exclaimed "It looks like Yalta.". Maybe not since Brokaw introduced him to his wife.

The portrait drawn of Ariel Durant in Michael Korda's "Another Life" must be revisited by all lovers of a good belly laugh. She is another Manichean narcissist, tiny, fierce, paranoid rather like Ayn Rand (shudder!). "Her voice was low and guttural and her expression that of Madame Defarge and her tricoteuses friends demanding the guillotine for an aristocrat." Such women are more frightening than any man ..... and one has seen many replicas of Ariel and Ayn as bosses over the years.

The gruesome, undemocratic word "boss" derives from the Dutch "baas" meaning master; Roget's synonyms for employee include lackey, slave, hireling.

Newspapers gearing up for Bloomsday in June and Bloomberg should decree that high school graduates must recite a passage from Ulysses. Of course Joyce was a lunatic and his works resemble the incoherent writings of schizophrenics, but he uses words after all and words are the guage of a civilization. Does anyone read Piaget anymore?

Guess the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has expired and he will soon take a trophy wife. As a devotee of all cooking programs, the only thing worth watching on television, we are acquainted with Padma Lakshmi whose bare midriff so close to the curry pot and slow, velvet delivery distracted us from the correct ingredients for garam masala.

Last night an interviewer interviewing an interviewer (Larry King and Barbara Walters) on TeeVee, both with identical IQ's.

" "Tis Madness to resist or blame/The force of angry Heavens flame."

We are reading a biography of Andrew Marvell and trying to imagine what he would have thought of the preposterous Gibson movie on Jesus Christ. A resident of 17th century Hull, Yorkshire had more knowledge of les affaires du monde than...well, you finish the sentence......just add the myth of progress to all those others necessary for man's psychic survival. The enlightened do not require these wish fulfillment fantasies.

Speaking of fashionable (see last entry) whatever happened to the woman who tried to make Everest Upper East Side chic? Which it refused to do. Sandy Pittman!

Happy President's Day to all you cozy armchair spectators of political life: go take a look again at Ground Zero and remember why we are in Iraq. The Arabs hate us viscerally and they will bomb us into the Stone Age or in the words of Neruda until the blood runs in the streets.

So you and those moronic movie "stars" -- this is not Vietnam; there is no comparison. Of the Kerry generation we spent the late 60s and early 70s (until to be exact April 15, 1975) in activist protest against that war. Remember that actress Jane Fonda renounced her beliefs and actions when it was no longer fashionable

We see Frances Partridge died, deemed The Last Survivor of the Bloomsbury Group. We had never heard of her and assume she was a deuxieme tier.

Privileged bohemes with small inherited incomes; today their counterparts would be taking drugs and making independent movies. We recently visited Davis & Langdale gallery in the East 60s for an exhibition of some objects created by this group and was amazed at how amateur and poor their quality. Even one's old professor Quentin Bell had a few curious looking ceramics.

When we showed some photographs of two Roger Fry paintings (given to us by his daughter Pamela Diamand) to the gormless gallery attendant she yawned and ordered lunch. Poor Bloomsbury, always in the shade, perhaps rightly so , though the feminists discovered Wolff and Ismael Merchant, Forster.

One imagines Camilla looking at the front page photos of Charles in Iraq in those awkward fatigues thinking to herself, "Poor Dear!".

Oprah Winfrey--she who is beyond reproach in all things--and that Liz Taylorish spectacle of her 50th! Who could take her seriously after that? All those white 50K a year women in her audience who feel so relieved to actually like a black person.

Enoch Powell Lives! In the corporeal form of Taki who again in his schoolboy fashion tries to epater le bourgeois in this month's Quest. An arriviste who assumes the Brit Aristo role of lover of the country and loather of the city...we knew scores of this type during our 12 year sojurn in the Lake District. They were usually Americans who took to wearing kilts and speaking with the local lilt of Gretna Green within weeks, so it seemed.

Just when you give up hope of any signs of intelligence in civilization there is a little glimmer, i.e. gay marriage. Now this is socially progressive legislation. Demographically it makes sense; perhaps these couples can adopt some of the unwanted children in the country, rather than continually pop out their own as hetero couples do.

Joe Conason rails against Bush again, using the standard literary stance fostered in this City of Scribes, trotting out the same old verbiage about the president's purported dumbness. So, Mr. Conason, you have Way with Words. Bravo.

Far more interesting (on the same page) is Ralph Gardner's first hand observation of Martha in the 80s:" What struck me back then was how surprisingly underdeveloped her social skills were. She was less mean than clueless." Nutley, NJ meets emigre son Baconovic and the rest........

AT precisely 5.05 p.m. on 7th Avenue we cross paths with a little gnome of a lady, wizened, looking like a Hobbit, somberly goose stepping into the Haler Building -- a selector of fashion photographs--Anna Wintour. Another lionized New Yorker. Odd.

Collecting something like Arthur Rubloff collected those paperweights is little different from peasants hording potatoes in the Thirty Year's War. Insecurity and....it does not ward off the Big Kahuna. Today when material possessions are for immigrants, it really does not earn you prestige amongst those you want to impress, or should want to impress.

You just know in your heart that you were not meant to spend a lifetime staring at a computer screen, which is physically, what you do as a writer,a lawyer, a professor, a banker, any white collar worker. We are all grovelling obedient servants for the tiny percentile that has real assets.

Tried to navigate last year's "Literary Occasions" by VS Naipaul and discovered the secret of his success. He makes you feel guilty for being utterly unable to concentrate on his literary efforts...so you feel stupid and somehow chastened.

I actually always revered him since he berated a newspaper, was it the Chicago Tribune, for sending over an interviewer who was not educated....sufficiently. So hard to be superior.

At the dog brunch yesterday at Doyle's all the women owners/trainers looked like they had definite gender issues. Not so the society columnist Cindy Adams, jumpy, eyes darting at the less than fashionable assembly,with two miniscule pooches about the size of underfed rats.

The Two Cultures is not C.P. Snow's anymore but more black and white. It's a shame the entertainment industry has for 100 years reinforced D.W.Griffith's stereotypes...it has not helped social progress.

That snake oil purveyor Deepak Chopra gives quantum mechanics a bad name. Many years ago I would give Quantum Healing to terminally ill friends hoping beyond hope; it served some real psychological function. Then.........well TeeVee land made him absurd.

I can relate a little to Martha's impatience at the kid's insouciance, but it always gets you in trouble. Joan Rivers throwing a pen in the eye of a Hertz car clerk, Lizzie Grubman backing into a pack of people, Martha calling underlings nasty names........such is the self-importance of Les Media Barbarians de New York...but the equally hard scrapple press manages to get them! Ha Ha!

Last night the crowds were wrapped around 59th Street for the opening of -- A Building, i.e. Time Warner. Well at least it wasn't a perfume store on Madison Avenue.The monotonony of identical "shops" from Atlantic to Pacific and a basement food court with tomatoes and mozzarella, more revered than the Smithsonian.

"He would go to the opening of an envelope."

One hopes Teresa Kerry does not slim down and pose for magazines. Women simply cannot have it both ways...intelligence and beauty. I remember meeting Hilary Clinton at a party in Chicago right after you know who became President and she looked like a cosmetologists' dream, a pink kewpie doll, all fussed up. Thought she looked ridiculous and much prefer the smarter look she has now

From your friendly science writer Dennis Overbye today's momento mori:

"The asteroid or the killer virus could show up tomorrow."

I had no idea it was fashionable to knock the Times' book review section but I picked up New York and there it was in plain daylight -- the same complaint about too many novels.

Wolff obviously another Stewart shadowman -- how we fear to truly criticize those in power. A few harmless jabs of the old epee. (My God says he: what if she is exonerated? What repercussions will it have on my career?my coop?) All the agonizing about how she will react and feel and be. Who cares? I lost a bundle in stock scams in the year 2000-1 precisely with these kind of depredations.

How often can Liz Smith or Richard Johnson be celebrated, feted, lauded? How many birthdays can they have? How much newspaper space can they absorb? You have to read the infernal Post but it is two bit purgatory every day. When you think it is owned by an outre Australian it is even harder to endure.

After being ambushed by the troglodytes at the half time show at Super Bowl I go running for DeTocqueville; in 1828 he said it all and reaffirms the importance of the written word.

As if the printing press were never invented and high culture a distant Jungian race memory.

Why does the New York Times Book Review waste so much space on inferior novels? They ask RIchard Eder to write incomprehensible reviews of pretentious and booooring novels like Shirley Hazzard's recent output. You know she should never have written Greene on Capri because it made her seem so eagle-eyed snoopy; besides you learn much more from Michael Korda about him.

Why are all Korda's books $1 at Barnes and other large chains? I suspect he doesn't have an audience because The World Has Changed and no one cares about subjects that once were of interest. There was No Enlightenment after all!