Wes Phillips

This is just so wrong, it's right.

I feel a bit remiss about not commenting on Bobby Fischer's passing. As a bookish chess-obssessed kid, I lived for his Boy's Life chess column and, during the "Match of the Century," I was hitchhiking to and from Iowa and the Spassky/Fischer battle of wits was always a safe topic of conversation. (1972 was ground zero for the mainstream born again movement and it seemed like half the people that picked me up wanted a conversion in exchange for the ride. Thank goodness for chess!)

Lawrence Lanaham goes to Baltimore, Maryland, as well as Bodymore, Murdaland to discover if David Simon's dyspeptic portrait of newspapers in crisis in this season's The Wire is realistic.

On my travel day to Vegas, I awoke at 3am and flew six hours to the desert city. When I checked into my hotel, I stripped off my outerwear and napped.

For many years one of my most beloved guilty pleasures has been reading George MacDonald Frasier's books. Not just the Flashman Papers, which I have found delightful and from which I have learned a lot of 19^th century history, but also his McAusland novels, his Mr. American,his spirited adventure novel Candlemass Road (which, at a taut 181 pages, is one of the finest examples of economical action writing ever), and his masterful history of the Scottish boarder wars, The Steel Bonnets.

It must be the week after the Consumer Electronics Show: I'm all written out on consumer electronics, my feet hurt, and I have a cold. All three happen every year.