NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE COMMITTEE TO PLAN PARTIES:As self-appointed chair of the ALOTT5MA Party Planning Committee, in an effort to actually hold the much vaunted ALOTT5MA Chrismukkah Party this year, wanted to feel out people's availability on the following dates and general locations:

• Evening of Saturday, December 6 (Times Square)
  
• Evening of Monday, December 8 (Lower East Side)
• Afternoon of Saturday, December 13 (Grand Central)
• Afternoon of Saturday, January 3 (Grand Central or Upper West Side)

Still at the embryonic stage, but want to gauge interest before moving forward.

RIGHT, LISA, LIKE THERE'S SOME MAGICAL ANIMAL... Is there anything more divine than bacon? Is there anything more revolting than mayonnaise? Given that Baconnaise is on its way, I can shortly resolve this culinary front of manicheanism.

UPDATE: I note that someone means to resolve this.

THEY EACH SPENT $150,000 ON CLOTHES IN A SINGLE SEASON. THEY WERE BOTH SCREWED OVER BY KATIE COURIC. AND BOTH WEAR WOMEN'S JEANS: The Friars roasted Matt Lauer today, and the Village Voice and EW were there for the NSFW carnage.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS: A few years back, Marketplace did a great but self-defeating little bit about how dumb it is to ascribe conscious thought to collective market behavior. One of the examples, I think, was "Dow falls a half-percent on growing concern about the war in Iraq." Think about that for one moment, and then ask how a financial reporter could possibly make that causal connection. Whose concerns drove the market down? How? Who did the reporter interview to get that information? A representative sample of traders and investors? Why exactly would concerns about the war in Iraq drive investors away from technology stocks (or, for that matter, media stocks)? The point of the piece was that the reporters' analysis is often little more than choosing the most plausible cause from a menu of the day's top stories. And yet different financial reporters usually isolate the same causes for the same behavior -- nobody picks "Britney shaved her head" over "war fears" -- meaning that either there's an element of chick-sexing (they actually know it when they see it) or common training (right or wrong, everybody learns the same cause-picking techniques).

I raise this now because for several weeks up to and including today, I've seen a version of the following headline: Stocks End Lower As Conviction About Global Recession Grows. Look, I'm no financial engineer -- I can barely aggregate large debt obligations and separate them into discrete risk-stratified interest and principal components -- but I don't see how this can possibly be right. The premise of that headline is that (a) there is a block of investors who were on the fence about whether or not the economy is (technical jargon alert) turdlike; (b) a portion of that block decided today to get off the fence; and (c) that portion was large enough to move the market 3%. The implication being that before today, that gigantic 3%-moving block was reading the Journal and going, "gosh, Bear, Lehman, AIG, Wachovia, WaMu, Fannie, Freddie, buck-breaking -- what a conceivably coincidental string of potential aberrations."

For there to be a "growing belief that [a] severe global recession is at hand," there first has to be some portion of people that aren't already certain that a severe global recession is at hand. Do these people exist? Isn't a more plausible explanation that everybody agrees that there is a disaster but that the market collectively is calibrating its depths differently on different days? In other words, aren't "market just about ready to agree it's bad out there" and "market despairs as it tries to figure out just how bad" entirely different stories?

A FEW OF MY LEAST-FAVORITE THINGS: I've never been shy about identifying and cataloguing the worst kinds of music I've heard. I've ripped on Eastern Bloc heavy metal, 80s synth-pop, evangelical college a capella groups. I am constantly amazed by the fact that people will listen to songs in foreign languages that would horrify and shame them if sung in English (ever listen to an Israeli folk singer?), and I have a working theory that this is somehow related to the inexplicable Europop phenomenon (numa numa hey…).

Until recently, I had pegged Richard Marx as the low point in domestic modern music. His work is to good music as industrial-park buildings are to good architecture: cheaply built, designed for maximum profit, determinedly inoffensive, and utterly indifferent to invention or artfulness. It's the soundtrack of double-ledger accounting and actuarial tabulation.

But over the course of the last year, I've had to come to grips with the fact that Marx is not, after all, as bad as it gets. There is a saxophonist who often plays in the evenings above the Embarcadero BART station (I think I've mentioned him before), and I cannot even imagine a worse musician. You may think it's unfair to give the title to an "amateur" (scare quotes apply here because the root meaning of amateur -- one who does something for the love of it -- could not possibly apply to one who commits such violent acts against music) over a pro like Marx, but even if you grade them on a curve against their peers, Sax Guy has to win. He knows two songs: "Over the Rainbow" and "My Favorite Things." The latter is a song that, if played on a saxophone for mass appeal, really can only be played in 5:46:8, a la Coltrane. Sax Guy plays it in something closest to 3:4, with no syncopation at all, except that the beats don't quite fit together, sometimes hesitating as if there's a particular note to which he can never quite remember the fingering. "Over the Rainbow" is equally fitful, but because of the wider tonal leaps, it takes on an extra honk-squeak dimension. Both are played at appalling volume, which as you draw nearer creates a surreal malice to WHISKERS ON KITTENS and ONCE IN A LULLABY. I have never played a woodwind, but I am quite confident that given a year of practice a couple of days a week -- exactly the amount of time I have been listening to Sax Guy -- I would do a better job.

I'm sure this guy has fallen on hard times, and maybe he has a mental illness, and I hope he gets whatever he needs, but people: you are driving me crazy. Do not give money to terrible street musicians. NO RAINBOW.

PORTFOLIO, YOU'RE NEXT: With the news that both the print version of Radar and its most excellent website will be dying, let's take a moment to mourn other defunct magazines of the past--Wiki's got a list--I particularly miss Spy, Brill's Content, George, and Legal Affairs, and I'm sure some of our readers have a soft spot for Sassy.

CHILDREN, CHILDREN! NO, NO, YOU'VE GOT IT ALL WRONG. DON'T YOU SEE, CHILDREN? YOU HAVE THE HEART, BUT YOU DON'T HAVE THE SOUL. NO, NO, WAIT. YOU HAVE THE SOUL, BUT YOU DON'T HAVE THE HEART. NO, NO, SCRATCH THAT. YOU HAVE THE HEART AND THE SOUL, BUT YOU DON'T HAVE THE TALENT: Conflicts arise often in the blogger world, so what do I do when this site's No Politics rule runs up against my fondness for derivative works based upon the 2004 film You Got Served?

The latter wins out. Some of the best CGI work I've seen in a long time.