I've barely noticed, what with dreams of next September already dancing through my head, but the Superbowl is almost upon us. Will it be the patrician fans of the personality-free Patriots that'll be cheering come February seventh, or the criminals and blowhards that make up the Philly fanbase? More to the point, who cares? The Redskins' NFC East rivalry with the Eagles should help me enjoy the proficient steamrolling that I expect to see from the Pats, but I can't get too excited about it.

The Superbowl as a ritual, though -- now that I can enjoy. Get some friends over, turn on the TV and start making quiet promises to your vascular system about how things are gonna be different soon, baby, it's just cause you love it so much that it makes you crazy sometimes. Then, with the help of a variety of simple carbohydrates, consume half a liter of peanut oil.

Although I usually leave the football staples -- pizza and Helluva Good dip (aka sour cream and onion powder) -- to third parties, I do like to try making something for the game. Usually that something is buffalo wings. The recipe is simple: fry the hell out of some wings, then coat with a 1:1 mixture of pleasantly-cheap Texas Pete hot sauce and butter. Gotta keep things healthy and avoid those trans-fats!

The trick, of course, is the actual frying process -- I've tried it with both a Fry Daddy Jr. and just a Big Pot of Oil, and the only difference is that the Fry Daddy Jr. only works in irritatingly small batches. With either solution and despite knowing better I always put in too many ice-encrusted frozen chicken wings at once, creating a roiling eruption of oil and steam that coats every surface in the kitchen.

That end result, though: mighty tasty! And you can hardly put a price on the quality-of-life improvement you'll enjoy as you glide effortlessly across your kitchen's freshly oiled floor. So who's coming over for Superbowl Sunday, and do any of you know how to treat burns?

Thanks to a commenter over at Yglesias', I've been enjoying Oink's Pink Palace the last couple of days which, surprisingly, is not nearly as unpleasant as it sounds -- it's actually an audio torrent site. Prior to this I had written off BitTorrent as a source of music. To be honest, it's still a bit cumbersome -- it's less like a celestial jukebox than a celestial remainders bin. The upside, though, is that unlike Kazaa or Soulseek, Oink's has got a lot of audiobooks available, including a bunch of stuff from The Teaching Company. My dad's a big fan of TTC -- lately he's been working his way through their Great Philosophers series. Overall, the audiobook section is still a little spare, but I've managed to stumble across a torrents of stuff by Bukowski and John Searle next to pirated Lemony Snicket. So, like the rest of the internet, they get points for breadth, if not depth. And hey, how about a belated segue? There's also a torrent of a lecture debunking the Da Vinci Code.

I have to admit that I feel comparatively uneasy about downloading boutique content such as this. While I realize it's hardly a coherent moral philosophy, I intuitively feel better about downloading a copy of Alien Versus Predator than I do a copy of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In the case of AvP, a lot better. I suppose the reason is that downloading a copyrighted work I respect tacitly discourages the production of content that I think is worthwhile, even if the download generally doesn't represent a lost sale. On the other hand, it's not like there's a looming shortage of recordings of college lectures. Hopefully outfits like AudioBooksForFree will be able to cajole note-taking-averse students and their professors into making their courses available on the web, following the trend set by folks like Christof Koch and, well, all of MIT.

Anyway, back to the morally troublesome present: if you click on the link to Oink's you'll notice that you've got to register with the site. That's a bit of a drag, especially considering that they don't seem to enforce up/down ratios, making the account system rather pointless. Still, the process is fairly painless.

Finally, this won't be of interest to most folks, but as the new owner of a 4G ipod, it seems cool to me: you can turn any audio file into an ipod-ready audiobook by following the instructions here (short version: make it an AAC, change the extension from 'm4a' to 'm4b'). The advantages to doing so are that 1) the file will start showing up in the audiobook section of your menus instead of the music area 2) the device will remember where you stopped listening and 3) you can use the nifty setting that lets you speed up or slow down the audiobook by 25% without affecting the pitch. Neat.

i don't know why i keep reporting updates on the filming of "the da vinci code." i guess i believe it's one of those rare movies that have the potential to be better than the book. but with this announcement, i'm not so positive:

Variety is reporting that Audrey Tatou will play the lead female role of Sophie Neveu in "The DaVinci Code" opposite Tom Hanks and Jean Reno.

now, i'm as big a fan of "amelie" as any other europhile chick, and i think it's great that the director actually cast a french woman in the role of (gasp!) a french woman, but...audrey tautou? making out with tom hanks....? acting in the role of a supposedly-brilliant cryptologist....? and being convincing...? i'm just not sure.

sometimes i love the celebrity puff profile pieces in the post's style section. oh, who am i kidding? i always love them! and today they've got what i think is a particularly fascinating piece on PR guru jonathan cheban, whose job it is to raise the profiles of whatever products have hired him to work on their advertising campaigns. basically, it means he's got to get stuff like evian water bottles or certain products into music videos or the pages of US weekly - because if you can get a shot of lindsay lohan wearing your company's shoes or chatting away on your company's cellphone, it both creates a lot of buzz and saves you millions of dollars in paid advertising.

cheban is apparently a genius at this kind of stuff. but this time around, a PR marketing firm has given him what seems like the most impossible of jobs: making lean cuisine cool!

"It costs $50,000 to get your product in a rap video now," explains Ryan Berger, the head of "buzz marketing" at a company called Euro RSCG Worldwide, the same firm that handles Evian. "That's why Jonathan is so crucial. He makes it okay for Paris to hold that Evian bottle."

This week, Berger is betting heavily on Cheban. He's hired him to fly to the Sundance Film Festival and bestow the penumbra of chic on something that sounds utterly chic-proof: Lean Cuisine. Yes, Cheban's mission impossible is to somehow finagle frozen dinners into the arms of some bold-faced names, and then immortalize that moment in the pages of Us Weekly, or one of its rivals.

The tough part is that Sundance is essentially the Mall of America during the festival. Cadillac, Nautica, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, Heineken and dozens of other companies -- they're all going, too, trying to sideswipe a celebrity long enough to generate an image that can be "serviced," as it's known in the biz, to the press.

"The dream would be to have a Hilary Swank or a Will Smith get hungry at midnight, when all the restaurants are closed, and order 10 boxes of Lean Cuisine to their condo," Berger says. "Then have Jonathan deliver the Lean Cuisine with a deliveryman and a photographer and get a shot of that. It would totally transform the way people think about Lean Cuisine."

did anybody else just BUST OUT LAUGHING upon reading that last paragraph? it's one of the most ridiculous claims i've ever heard - that lean cuisine believes someday that it can be contained in the same lexicon as evian water or (ugh) ugg boots. lean cuisine is what the other half of america eats - the non cameron diaz, non paris hilton, non famous, non-thin-as-a-stick-insect-who-shop-at-safeway-half of america. BWAH. lean cuisine is DREAMING.

but then i started reading the rest of the article.

Talk turns to Cheban's upcoming Lean Cuisine job. How exactly is he going to pull off this miracle?

"I can tell you exactly what he's going to do," Grubman interrupts. "He's going to walk around in the afternoon and stick Lean Cuisine in everyone's hand." She's laughing now. "I'm so glad I'm not going to be there because he'll be like, 'Here!' "

"No," groans Cheban. "It's going to be at a spa, so people will be eating it after they get their facials."

"What if they don't want to eat it?" teases Grubman.

"It doesn't matter!" says Cheban. "I'll give it to somebody else who wants to eat it."

Like Star magazine. The latest issue, the one published last week, ran an In & Out column that announced that fried foods are officially out, and -- you got it -- Lean Cuisine is officially in. Us Weekly, meanwhile, worked a Lean Cuisine reference into its "Best Bashes at Sundance" page, leaking the news that "clean-living stars can nosh on Lean Cuisine's new Spa Cuisine line" at the Shutterfly Lounge.

Ka-ching!

maybe the impossible isn't so unlikely as i thought. and then i read this sentence: "Suddenly, [Cheban]'s surfing the Internet on a gadget called a Sidekick."

and i realize: if this is a man who has made tommy's trademark phone cool, then he can probably do anything.

viva la lean cuisine!

some heartening news this morning: 82% of people polled in a 1,000-person poll conducted by a nonpartisan group support voting rights for the district. and it extends across party lines, too: 77% of republicans supported it, as did 87% of democrats.

"The current war environment and discussion about spreading democracy around the world has an influence on people's thoughts when you ask them whether or not people in the U.S. capital should have voting rights," Richards said.

About 82 percent of survey respondents said the nearly 600,000 D.C. residents should have equal voting rights, after being told that District residents serve in the military and pay local and federal taxes but have no voting representative in the House or Senate. Support was strong among self-identified Republicans (77 percent) and Democrats (87 percent).

Thirteen percent said D.C. should not have full voting rights, and 5 percent said they did not know. Of those who opposed equal voting rights, 28 percent favored granting the District at least a vote in the House.

Richards acknowledged that the poll did not pose any counter-argument against representation, which is not provided for in the U.S. Constitution, and that the question's wording may have influenced the responses. But he said the percentage of Americans supporting equal representation has increased from 72 percent in 2000, when he conducted a survey for Bisconti Research Inc.