AP, via Washington Post: "[Hugh] Laurie, who masks his British accent to play the brilliant but difficult doctor in 'House,' said he had 172 people to thank. So he said he wrote their names on slips of paper and would choose three at random. He thanked the show's script supervisor, hair stylist and, finally, his agent."

We feel like we say this more than we ever should for a Times reporter, but: poor Lola Oguinnake. She's got an enviable beat, digging up the latest in arts, nightlife, and pop culture — and yet she gets stuck trolling around Marquee or watching Nicole Richie pretend to eat. And as if these subjects weren't punishment enough, today Oguinnake profiles insanely successful music producer Scott Storch, the grotesque man responsible for Paris Hilton's forthcoming album and, perhaps, 70% of Louis Vuitton's profits. From what we can tell, Storch's only redeeming quality is that he smoked enough weed in Oguinnake's presence to give her a lovely secondhand high.

A series of questions raised by last night's premiere of Fox's ridiculous and ridiculously addictive action series, 24:

Being young and (more or less) healthy, and with parents who are reasonably young and reasonably healthy, we confess we know rather little about the vagaries of geriatric medicine. But, still, we have to wonder: Even without the patient remaining in a coma a week and a half later, when an obese 77-year-old has massive stroke and several subsequent surgeries, is that something doctors are typically unconcerned about?

We're so ashamed we missed this on Wednesday, especially because it was such a momentous event. Only 11 days into 2006, Alessandra Stanley clocked her first Times correction of the year:

In yesterday's review of South Beach, a new UPN series that debuted last night, La Stanley describes one of the show's key characters:

For a man who left ABC News in part because, after 40-some years, he didn't want to work quite as hard as management would have insisted in a new contract, Ted Koppel is certainly turning out to be one busy retiree.

A representative sample from "Eavesdropping on the Public Theater of the Absurd," by Wendell Jamieson, Ink column, page B2, today's Times:

Oh, silly Times. What's the one thing we know people are willing to pay for online?

For whatever reason, we actually read today's DailyCandy email, in which the virtues of professional organizer Stacey Platt so wonderfully applauded that, upon reading, we were left stupidly wondering how we ever could have lived without paying someone to alphabetize our DVDs for us. So we went to Platt's website, the tastefully Zen Breathing Space, moseyed around, and came across the following testimonial:

Amid all the excitement about Warren St. John's positive identification in today's Times of the (female) actor who's been playing "JT Leroy," and the concomitant final proof that "Leroy" is almost certainly the creation of San Francisco couple Laura Albert and Geoffery Knoop, New York magazine doesn't want you to forget its writer said it, too. And months ago. (Except, you know, without identifying the person who appears as "Leroy" in public, or being willing to remove a lot of likelys and probablys from the expose.)

The lede to today's review of Emily's Reasons Why Not, a new ABC sitcom:

Earlier today, it was revealed that ambiguous literary wunderkind JT Leroy, who claims to be an AIDS-stricken truck-stop hooker turned literary star, was really a fabrication of Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop and played, in public, by Knoop's half-sister Savannah. In an email sent to Galleycat, JT Leroy's book agent, Ira Silverberg, comments on being completely duped into believing his client:

In case your short-term memory is as fried as ours, an October article in New York suggested (perhaps more loudly so than previous suggestions from other outlets) that successful young author JT Leroy — the former West Virginia truck-stop hooker with a history in the San Francisco drug scene and a solid case of AIDS — didn't exactly exist. Leroy, the piece maintained, was merely a fabrication of Laura Albert and Geoffery Knoop, the couple who are said to have rescued Leroy from his tragic life and helped him to become a "brilliant" dark writer.

In case you missed the Janet Maslin review last Tuesday, or the David Carr profile Thursday, or the op-ed that also ran Thursday, the Times considerately ran yet another review of erstwhile Wonkette Ana Marie Cox's new novel, Dog Days, in the Book Review yesterday. (And people thought "flooding the zone" went the way of Howell Raines.)

• Timesman James Risen, who broke the domestic-spying story, is humble, modest, and likes to eat at Subway. Also, he ain't looking to move to the L.A. Times. [MW]
• How will Jann Wenner celebrate his 60th birthday? By having 142 of his best pals for dinner at Le Bernardin, where they'll be entertained by Bruce Springsteen. They best part, though: The party is being hosted by his wife, Jane Wenner, and his boyfriend, Matt Nye. [WWD]
• Prof thinks pundits' accuracy should be tracked. Perhaps in a handy-dandy "Pundit Scorecard." Why hasn't anyone thought of that before? [WSJ]
• There's a new literary superagency on the block: Folio. We sort of hope superagents dress in capes and codpieces, because that would be fun. [GalleyCat]

Thank God for subheads. Otherwise we laypeople — and certainly that U.S. general in Iraq — would think more bleeding was a good sign.

Also: The pope is Catholic, according to the general.

• Bush could out-Nixon Nixon and prosecute the Times and its reporters and editors for publishing domestic-spying story. Which would both suck and not be at all surprising. [Boston Phoenix]
• One, very small upside of the miners-are-saved-oh-no-they're-not disaster and debacle: Editors actually got to yell, "Stop the presses!" [NYT]
• WP pulls newspapering into the early 20th century, announcing forthcoming launch of Washington Post radio. [WP]

Maureen Dowd, yesterday (bold ours):