SPEAKING OF CONSUMER GUILT AND COMPLICITY WITH EVIL: David Foster Wallace's somewhat notorious piece in Gourmet Magazine from last summer on the morality of cooking and eating lobster is now available online (PDF).

Me? I'm a member of the knife-in-head pre-dismemberment school/steam in sea water school, which tends to really gross people out during the process, what with the tail often reflexively thrashing around for a few seconds even after being severed from the rest of the lobster, but that way (a) they die in a way other than being steamed alive, and (b) no one has to deal with lobster carcass when eating it. Wallace's point about accepting one's moral agency for the act rings true to me -- I don't think you should eat lobster without accepting the fact that you're killing something that's alive, right there in your kitchen, for your pleasure.

If you can accept that -- and I do, with melted butter on the side -- then there are few better ways to enjoy summer's bounty. Does anyone out there (who isn't vegetarian generally) have a particular problem with lobster?

FOREVER? FOREVER EVER? FOREVER EVER? Why I [heart] Kanye West, part VII. From "Diamonds from Sierra Leone (remix)":

Good morning, this ain't Vietnam still
People lose hands, legs, arms, fo' real
Little was known on Sierra Leone
And how it connect to the diamonds we own
When I spit the diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin' 'bout the ones that be glowin'
I'm talkin' 'bout Roc-a-Fella, my home
My chain, this ain't conflict diamonds
Is they Jacob? Don't lie to me, man
See, a part of me sayin', "Keep shinin'"
How? When I know what a blood diamond is
Though it's thousands of miles away
Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today
Over here it's a drug trade, we die from drugs
Over there they die from what we buy from drugs
The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses
I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless
'Til I seen a picture of a shorty armless
And here's the conflict
It's in a black person soul to rock that gold
Spend your while life tryin' to get that ice
On a Polo rugby it look so nice
How can something so wrong make me feel so right?
Right? 'fore I beat myself up like Ike
You can still throw your Roc-a-Fella diamond tonight

Let's hope West doesn't go all Lauryn Hill/Arrested Development on us before the next album comes out.

SAVVY READERS WILL SPOT THE CONNECTION TO THINGS MONEGASQUE: Andy Denhart has the scoop on where The Amazing Race 8 was filmed on Thursday.

Hint: there's a "sneak up on a drunk Hessian" roadblock which proceeds it, plus a "Makes" or "Takes" detour . . . .

"READER'S DIGEST IS THE BEST!": A few weeks after picking its 50 Best Magazines, the Chicago Tribune let's its readers have their say on the 20 most overlooked magazines.

YOU'RE A SLAVE TO MONEY, THEN YOU DIE: As hoped for yesterday, MTV announced today that they need a 'do-over' on Live 8:

This Saturday, July 9, MTV and sib VH1 will each air five commercial-free hours of selected performances from 'Live 8: A Concert to Make Poverty History.'

VH1 will air footage from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., MTV from 3 to 8 p.m. The channels will both air some of the same performances, including U2, Coldplay, Paul McCartney and the reunion of Pink Floyd.

But the nets will divide other performances by audience interest: MTV will air, among others, the Killers, Kanye West, Green Day and Linkin Park with Jay-Z, while VH1 will include Sting, Dave Matthews, Maroon 5 and Rob Thomas.

You know who I want to see, of course: Yannick Noah. Anyone know if he's still rocking the Le Coq Sportifs?

WILLIAM WHO? J.K. Rowling, who apparently has written a series of popular children's books based on the childhood for M*A*S*H's Col. Potter, is the all-time best-selling author in the 10-year history of Amazon.com. Following Rowling on the list of 25 and signaling the decline of Western Civilization: Spencer Johnson of Who Moved My Cheese? fame, romance novelist Nora Roberts and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. As for the author of Hamlet, King Lear, and a series of other plays, he finished 26th on the list, just behind Tom Clancy. Perhaps someday 500 years or so in the future, high school students will bemoan the archaic language and intricate plots of Red Storm Rising and Patriot Games.

Sadly, I appear to have finished somewhere about 1.6 million spots behind Rowling. (For $1.21 people, you can own a little part of me.)

And, it turns out Amazon has lots of fun things planned for the big 1-0, including making Harrison Ford and Jason Alexander schlpe packages to your door. Tell you what, buy a used copy of my book and I will come to your house and sign it, provided you live within 20-25 miles of the North Shore Chicago suburbs or have a layover at O'Hare (not applicable during rush hour). Heck, I'll even stay for dinner or at least a drink.

Hurry there are only nine used copies left!

AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON COSMO: As a public service, ALOTT5MA would like to note that the (at least) three different "Larry Kramers" out there in the media are, in fact different people:

• Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media. Frequently quoted in inane press releases, like this one, involving CBS's plans for digital media experiments, including the inexplicable "Big Brother Fantasy League."
• Larry Kramer, Dean of Stanford Law School. Frequently quoted in the media as a liberal Constitutional scholar. Author of borderline incomprehensible articles like this one, questioning the need for and existence of judicial review in a democracy.
• Larry Kramer, cantakerous playwright. Frequently quoted about AIDS and gay rights issues. Author of plays such as The Normal Heart and books about the AIDS epidemic in America.

Keep your Kramers straight. It's important.