ONLY THE STRONG: Want to know who wins the fairly entertaining current edition of Survivor?

Numerous press sources are reporting that an offshore gambling website taking wagers on Survivor has determined that several CBS employees had placed early, lucrative winning bets on the winners of the past two series, and had wagered heavily again on this season's winner. The bets have been disallowed. You can, however, still wager [potential spoiler - highlight text to reveal] on the gender of the ultimate survivor, which strongly suggests that the two finalists are of opposite genders -- in other words, no Heidi/Jenna finale. [/spoiler]

If you'd like to read an article about the gambling scandal with no spoilers as to who the CBS insiders bet on, click here. If you want to know who the insiders believe the final two are, however, this WaPo article tells all.

WANG FACING HARD TIME: Following up on a previous story, Taiwan native Suo-Sou Wang, age 29, was convicted today after a two day trial in Michigan on charges of practicing medicine without a license and related offenses.

Wang faces up to four years in prison for his unlicensed creation of Rocky Mountain oysters, so to speak, and I'm sure he will be given a wide berth by his fellow inmates.

Via Obscure Store.

STILL MORE ON THE NYT WEDDINGS PAGE: Reader Anna Moody sent me a link to a great 1997 article by David Brooks on the history of the Times' wedding announcements.

Like America itself, Brooks explains, the page has evolved from chronicling a WASP elite based on lineage to a cognitive elite based on merit and accomplishment. Brooks notes:

Episcopalians and Jews serve as tracer elements that mark the transformation from an elite based on blood to an elite based on education and brains. It's hard to track cleanly the decline of New York's Episcopalian elite and the succession of the city's Jews, because until recently Jewish weddings held on Sunday were reported separately, in the Times's Monday edition (observant Jews don't wed on Saturday, and the Times, treating weddings as news events, long would not write about them until they had occurred). Still, by looking at the raw numbers, you can see the basic trend. In the spring of 1957, 55 percent of the couples featured on the Sunday wedding page were Episcopalians. Other Protestants constituted 31 percent of the weddings, and Catholics were 14 percent. In 1977, 48 percent of the weddings were Episcopalian. Catholic weddings made up 21 percent of those listed. Jews made their appearance at 12 percent. Other Protestants were 15 percent, and non-religious ceremonies registered on the scale at 4 percent. On the wedding pages of the winter and spring of 1997, by contrast, 40 percent of the ceremonies are Jewish, only 17 percent are Episcopalian, 15 percent are Catholic, 13 percent are other Protestant, and 15 percent are non-religious or non-denominational.

Can magna graduates marry summas? (I did.) Can predators marry nurturers? If you start a chain of erotic car washes, will the Times report on your wedding?

Brooks addresses all this and more in a well-researched, comprehensive piece, which you can read via this link.

NEXT TIME IT'S A NON-ELIMINATION LEG, HIRE PHIL KEOGHAN: The Chicago Sun-Times' Phil Rosenthal was not amused with this week's American Idol bait-and-switch:

What a brilliant plan: Cheat us out of two hours in our busy schedules, force us to listen to these wannabes mangle a selection of disco tunes, persuade us to call and text message our votes, entice us to sit through product placement ads for Coca-Cola and AT&T with the promise of a result and then tell us to come back next week when the votes might actually count.

Makes you want to switch to Pepsi and U.S. Cellular.

There was some lip service about how this week's "Idol" vote will be averaged with next week's vote. But that's a sham.

Keep reading here.

TAKING MARX SERIOUSLY: My alma mater has gone Marxist. Well, sorta.

Amherst College has just named Anthony (Tony) W. Marx, professor and director of undergraduate studies in political science at Columbia University, as its 18th president.

According to the college's press release:

Marx is a respected teacher and an internationally recognized scholar who has written three books on nation building, particularly in South Africa, but also in the U.S., Brazil and Europe. He also has established and managed programs designed to strengthen secondary school education in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to his faculty post at Columbia, he currently serves as director of the Gates Foundation-funded Early College/High School Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which establishes model public high schools as partnerships between school systems and universities; and he is founder of the Columbia Urban Educators Program, a public school teacher recruitment and training partnership. He also was founder of Khanya College, a South African secondary school that helped prepare more than 1,000 black students for university.

To the surprise of some observers, the new president is neither an alum of the College (three straight non-alums), nor a woman or member of a minority group (none in the College's history). And it's quite a big step up for Marx -- his two predecessors were the president of Trinity College and the dean of Columbia University. Marx has no similar level experience.

But he's got quite a resume demonstrating caring about race and education, and seems like a cool guy. We all wish him well.

Marx succeeds Tom Gerety, who has served for the past nine years.

If anyone knows more about Marx worth sharing, email me.

ROCK MY ADIDAS, NEVER ROCK FILA: A new website to enjoy: Lucian James' American Brandstand, helpfully tracking all the brand name product placement and references in this week's top 40 hits. Nice detective work.

THE NYT AND GAY MARRIAGES: Still no response from anyone at the Times, or, really, anyone who knows anything, on the mystery of what happened to all the gay wedding announcements in the Times' Sunday Styles section?

Current scoreboard stands at Heterosexual Couples: 165, Homosexual Couples: 0 since mid-January. We'll see what this Sunday brings.

Meanwhile, this TimesStyle trivia note: when an announcement notes that the bride or groom is "a daughter/son" of Mr. and Mrs. X, that indicates the bride or groom has at least one sibling of the same sex. When it's the daughter or son, s/he doesn't.