ALOTT5MA GRAMMAR RODEO: BONUS WEDNESDAY EDITION: A profile of popular British historian Lucy Worsley in the current New Yorker contains the following sentence:

To learn about fifteenth-century hygiene, she forwent showers for a week and brushed her teeth with powdered cuttlefish bone.

Forwent? For real?  Google had 137K hits for "forwent" (and 120K for "forewent"), 143K for "foregoed," and a whopping 967K for "chose to forego," which I'd employ rather than either of the prior formulations.  (Ngram prefers forwent.)

WHY FOOL AROUND WITH HAMBURGER WHEN YOU HAVE STEAK AT HOME?  The Awl's Anne Helen Petersen explains why the career of Paul Newman proves that "hotness and decency are not mutually exclusive."

I'M EDWARD KIMBERLY, THE RECLUSE BROTHER OF MY SISTER ANTHEA: NYMag supercuts memorable cross-dressing reveals in film history, and since it includes the one from The Crying Game, it may not be safe for your office.

SHUFFLE THE DECK CHAIRS: It's no shock that NBC is doing major schedule renovation come January, but some of the moves are surprising. Of particular note:

• Parenthood will wrap for the season in February and be replaced by a Project Runway ripoff. Inexplicably, despite its severe ratings erosion, they're sticking with two hours of Biggest Loser to open the night.
  
• Wednesday gets a thorough scrubbing--we still start with a comedy block (now, Whitney and Are You There Vodka, It's Me Chelsea?), with Rock Center replacing Harry's Law (which moves to Sundays).
• Thursday gets a reshuffle--30 Rock, Parks and Rec, The Office, Up All Night are the new "Comedy Night Done Right," with The Firm getting the 10 PM slot. Community is being "put on the bench" with no specific return date, though Sony is clearly going to make a push to get through season 4, which gives them 100 episodes for syndication.
• NBC's post-NFL Sundays? Dateline, Harry's Law, Celebrity Apprentice.
• Total of 8 hours of reality and 3 hours of newsmagazine in 19 hours of non-scheduled reruns in primetime.
• Also not on the schedule--Awake (the much touted Inception-y series starring Jason Isaacs, which I had assumed would get Thursday at 10), Fear Factor (which will apparently be used as Holiday season filler, because nothing says Christmas like "eat some slimy bugs!"), or Prime Suspect, which appears to be a goner.

ETA: Also announced--TAR will not be back on Sundays, at least for a while, once this race ends--they're giving that slot to Undercover Boss, making the night an utter whiplash of tone/audience, and new Rob Schneider sitcom ¡Rob! is getting the coveted slot out of Big Bang Theory on Thursdays.

LET THEM EAT CAKE: In the most wonderful news I've heard all day, the NBA owners made their bottom-line final (note: probably not bottom-line; probably not final) offer to the players' union, and the union rejected it. That means there may not be, and probably won't be, an NBA season this year. The dispute in a nutshell:

• The owners correctly understand that they have a present monopoly in government-subsidized professional basketball facilities and IP (trademarks and all of the team loyalty that come with them), with high barriers to entry for potential competitors for player labor. The owners also have legally-sanctioned cartel status (which prevents the development of a free market in player labor) and legacy contracts that impede player mobility. The owners want to leverage their monopoly and legal-cartel status to set a below-market rate for labor.
• The players correctly understand that they have a present monopoly in a specialized good (elite-level basketball ability), with legally-sanctioned cartel status and natural scarcity creating a high barrier to entry for potential competitors in that good. The players want to leverage their monopoly in that good to extract monopoly rents for it.

This is a textbook -- and by that I mean, literally, "of the type that appears in textbooks" -- economic conundrum: How do you allocate returns among two monopoly goods that cannot be sold except in conjunction with each other? If I remember correctly, the answer is that the two sides play chicken, and either one side bails out or they crash and burn together.

I'm rooting for the crash and burn, because, ugh, the NBA. No group of owners has so greedily squeezed fans and governments, and no group of players has been so frequently placated by huge salaries into indifference to substandard product. The NBA (and particularly NBA owners) are counting on their losses being small enough for the duration of any lockout that they will make it back quickly with the benefit of a new labor model and the corresponding increase in franchise values. What I hope is (a) that fans remember that NBA owners would rather murder fans than give up a penny of revenue; and (b) more importantly, that local governments realize that the lockout-loving NBA is the same NBA that, when the lockout is over, will promise endless economic bonanzas to induce arena subsidies and tax breaks for NBA teams. Hey, cities: what's Oklahoma City's return on its $210 million investment to steal the Sonics going to be this year?

DO THEY PARTY TOO? I was already quite interested in Don't Trust The B**** In Apartment 23 (Krysten Ritter as the title character? James Van Der Beek playing "James Van Der Beek?"), but having Kiernan Shipka play "Kiernan Shipka?" Sold! (And of course, linkage to the YouTube clip that provides the headline.)

IS THIS THE TRIPLEDOWN? So, what do you add to the McRib to make it even more delicious? Bacon and fried cheese, of course! (Disclaimer--I actually kind of like McRibs.)