¶ Matins: What an upside-down world we are in, when Congressional Democrats bashfully support the Israeli attacks at Gaza but the Times dismisses them as “a dismal coda to the Bush administration’s second-term push for Middle East peace.”

¶ Lauds: Ever since Ghost Town, I’ve been a huge fan of Kristen Wiig. Knocked Up was the movie that ought to have taught me, but her role in that film — as the infamously snarky production assistant — struck me as just another Hollywood bitch. As a colonoscopist, however — well! Regular readers will know why I sat up and paid attention.

¶ Prime: Muscato strikes gold — or perhaps, since he always strikes gold, we ought to call it vermeil — with a collection of TV ads for Konsum, the konsumer emporium of the DDR. Who can resist ein tausend kleine Dinge? Don’t tune out before that starts. It could have been called New York Confidential.

¶ Tierce: How do you spell “Idiocracy”? A-r-p-a-i-o. David Carr writes about the showboating Arizona sheriff who may, one hopes, find his true calling as a reality-show fixture — and put a stop to his travesty of public service.

¶ Sext: The nice thing about the juggling LaSalle Brothers, currently wowing audiences at the Big Apple Circus, is that they give credit where credit is due.

According to Jake, the act is more about genetics than balance. “Juggling is such a difficult discipline to perfect,” he said. “You have to be so precise. There are very few good team juggling acts out there now. I think everyone has an individual internal rhythm.

“There’s a difference in internal rhythms,” he added. “With my brother, we’re exactly on the same page. When I watch other professional teams perform, it seems much more forced. There’s a fluency from our luck in being twins.”

¶ Nones: The post-mortem will be interesting, and resurrection oughtn’t to be ruled out; but Waterford Wedgwood has gone into “administration” — receivership. Among the many causes, there is a sad truth:

Waterford Wedgwood has suffered from falling demand for its high-quality crystal, china and other tableware, and has recorded a loss for the last five years.

¶ Vespers: Just when my bibliotechnical energy was failing, I encountered an encouraging entry at Anecdotal Evidence, where Patrick Kurp shares a poem by David Slavett.

“What will I re-read, or even consult?
Let us admit that, for all their heft on the shelves,
books are flighty, become souvenirs of themselves,
appealing no longer to intellect and taste
but playing to sentiment. Why else keep on hand
Look Homeward, Angel, except in the in the hope that the schoolboy
who turned its pages may show up some afternoon?”

¶ Compline: A proper dinner at our house ends not with dessert but with a reading from Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking. One or the other of us wants to know why such-and-such a thing happens in the kitchen. Our curiosities — Kathleen’s and mine — have very different motivations. I usually want to know What Went Wrong. Kathleen, in contrast, wants to know How Things Work. These are two sides of the same coin, the flip being whether or not you actually spend any time in the kitchen making meals. Tonight, in a rare congruence, we both wanted to the skinny on how something works: the substance known, very unscientifically, as “cream of tartar.”

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