LORD KNOWS THE COPYRIGHT ISSUES ARE FASCINATING: With little more than a month to burn before the First Monday in October, Slate SCOTUS correspondent Dahlia Lithwick is attempting to write a chick-lit novel in part through crowd-sourcing. Lithwick is an insightful writer on SCOTUS issues who's taking her first real crack at fiction, and this will be an interesting experiment to watch.

WILL HUNTING'S FATHER IS FINALLY OFF THE HOOK: Is something wrong in your world? Blame can be assigned to the responsible No. 5 at DonovansFault.com.

THROUGH EARLY MORNING FOG I SEE VISIONS OF THE THINGS TO BE: Don't forget to enter the free ALOTT5MA football suicide pool, hosted by ESPN.

Q ON FILM: Quentin Tarantino picks his 20 favorite films of the last 17 years (basically the time period that he has been directing films). His overwhelming choice as his favorite is the Japanese film Battle Royale, which you may know by its American title, Battle Quarter Pounder. Among the various Korean and Japanese films, are more mainstream choices Boogie Nights, Dazed and Confused, Fight Club, Fridays, Lost in Translation, The Insider, The Matrix (despite its sequels), Speed (despite the last 20 minutes after the bus explodes), Team America, and Unbreakable.

PHONY BEATLEMANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST: The Fab Four -- mono v. stereo v. Rock Band -- do you care? Should we? Might Seth Schiesel be right that "With all due respect to Wii Sports, no video game has ever brought more parents together with their teenage and adult children than The Beatles: Rock Band likely will in the months and years to come"?

added: Klosterman: "It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as 'Beatlesque.' It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed."

LEAD FELL LIKE A SHOWER AT ELEVEN MILES PER HOUR: Vanity Fair has a terrific piece on the commissioning, writing, and publication of William Manchester's Death of a President, the Kennedy Family-sanctioned history of the events of November 22-25 1963. This may well have been the first grown-up history I ever read. And William Manchester remains one of my favorite historians.

The Kennedy family understood that a book about the assassination would be in the works immediately and chose Mr Manchester in order to both beat others to the punch, but also to be sure that they could give their comments for posterity and be done with it. The sort of access was incredible -- ten hours of interviews with Mrs. Kennedy in the spring of 1964 and no one, save President Johnson (who answered in writing) and Marina Oswald refused to be interviewed -- but also a testament to the Kennedy's family's sense of history and public grace that they did.

GUESS WE KNOW WHO LAUREN CONRAD IS VOTING FOR IN 2012: Now, I don't want to get into any of the political issues associated with President Obama's speech to schools tomorrow, but in looking at the text, one remark seemed worthy of noting here:

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star.

This sentence may well mark the first time that the President of the United States has discussed "rapping" and is almost certainly the first time that the "occupation" of "reality TV star" has been referenced by a President. And really, someone in the White House speechwriting office apparently watches (or is at least aware of) reality TV? Gabba gabba one of us!