FOOT-BALL: "With Thomas and Ivory both on IR," I emailed Isaac on Thursday, "the Saints may well lose this game." He denied it. Insisted on the suckitude of his home team, that I was underestimating how "terrible" (his word, not mine) the Seahawks were. I told him that true though that might be, they only needed to win this game once.

Julius Jones wasn't that bad today, but if all I told you about today's game was that the Saints ran 22 times but passed it 60 you'd know something was seriously amiss. And then Marshawn Lynch, wow.

Football days like this one render me inarticulate, and that's even without getting into one of the more impressive defensive performances I've ever seen from the Jets tonight.  Revis Island is real, and you don't want to be stranded there.  Onto tomorrow.

IT'S LESSIG-TASTIC!  After you read about Girl Talk's brilliant (though I kinda prefer Feed the Animals) mashup album All Day in today's NYT Magazine, go to MashupBreakdown.com to listen and see how the 373 samples fit together.

THERE ARE TOO MANY TYPES OF CHAIRS IN THIS ROOM: Funny People was a fascinating failure for Judd Apatow, so I was already interested to see what he was going to do next. That he's apparently doing a Knocked Up spinoff focusing on Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) sounds like an interesting and potentially fruitful choice. I do hope that he avoids the big sin he committed in Funny People of making Leslie Mann's character overidealized, which he certainly avoided in Knocked Up, and keeps the characters true to the ones we saw and liked originally. (Semi-relatedly--early reports are indicating Seth Rogen's Green Hornet might actually be really good, much to my surprise, even though Pineapple Express did prove that Rogen can do a relatively straight role in an action comedy.)

BUT IT'S GOT "HONEY" IN ITS NAME:  Via Cracked.com, Six Animals That Don't Give A F---.

(I've got nothing today.  Suggest some links folks should read.)

THAT'S ONE BAD TEDDY BEAR:   Matt Zoller Seitz explains why The Furnace scene works so well in Toy Story 3, as part of his Best Scenes of 2010 video essay series:

IT'S NOT WILLIAM GOLDMAN'S FAULT. (I KNOW.)  IT'S NOT WILLIAM GOLDMAN'S FAULT. (I KNOW): How Rob Reiner and Terrence Malick shaped the Good Will Hunting script.

WHAT TREASURES HIDE, JING CHA SIU BAO, PILLOWED IN YOUR DOUGH?  Okay.  Loved loved last night's Top Chef All-Stars, and it's funny because normally I'm more of a fan of "let's see them do awesome things amid realistic constraints" than "let's make them uncomfortable and amp up the pressure."  But in this case, we had a clusterfuck of epic proportions by placing the thirteen cheftestants in an insufficient kitchen and not reminding them that no one gives a damn about the plating at a dim sum restaurant.  So: angry old people! kitchen chaos! an ill-advised dessert!  turtle on a leash!  jalapeño in your eye!  And the glorious return of TC: Masters fave and kitchen badass Susur Lee, whom nobody doesn't like.  Plus we got the Jamie "Top Scallop" montage.

Bourdain writes:  "Of the carnage and recriminations, the filth and the fury that followed, I will speak little. Antonia, once again, became the repository for all the world's sins, left, it appeared, to cook nearly everything single handed. What a Trojan! She's like John Shaft -- always willing to help her brotherman, demonstrating a generosity of spirit that nearly doomed her. Had her own shrimp toast not been delicious, it might well have been her head on the block. For much of the show -- whether because of the edit or not, it looked like she was the only person moving in a kitchen full of stunned carp. As at the aftermath of a violent bar fight, the others present creeped slowly and stealthily away from the horror, unwilling to get blood or hair on their shoes. But she hung in. And at Judges' Table, when confronted about her central role in this greatest of face-plants, she stood up under brutal interrogation like a hard case career con refusing to put the much guiltier Casey in the soup. She made Sammy the Bull Gravano and Whitey Bulger look like punks. In the same situation, I suspect, the guys would have been jostling each other to drop a dime on each other."