I thought that The Da Vinci Code was not terribly original, but I can't believe how pursued Mr. Brown is.

Only days after a British court rejected a lawsuit by two writers who claimed that author Dan Brown had plagiarized their writings in The Da Vinci Code, a Russian art historian is also threatening to take Brown to court. Mikhail Anikin, a Leonardo Da Vinci expert in the Hermitage museum's Western European art department, told the London Times that in 1998 he had shared his controversial ideas about Da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting with visitors from Texas, one of whom asked if he could pass them on to his friend, Brown. Anikin told the Times that he agreed, even giving his theory about the painting a name -- The Da Vinci Code. "When I read the book, I was shocked at its poor quality and because it used my ideas," Anakin told the newspaper. He is demanding an apology from Brown and half the revenue from the book. A film version of the book is due to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

I was trashing the book in front of a Dan Brown fan yesterday in a desperate attempt to prevent her from interesting someone else in reading it. I'm really not sure why I cared.

The email address for people who drink $1K mint juleps.

Cool-assed (no really) shot glasses.

Tic tac flashlight.

There's a whole site about shoelaces (okay, probably more than one). Look at the effort invested in detailing how to tie them.

I need a ruling. Wearing black shoes with a navy skirt: totally wrong, to be avoided, or perfectly fine?

I vote "perfectly fine". Black goes with EVERYthing.

Are you wearing hose/tights? I think black hose and black shoes is perfectly fine (I'm not in the black goes with everything camp, but you can segue a lot of times).

I'd probably do it, but that's because I refuse to pander to blue with a whole new pair of shoes.

I'll be wearing beige tights, and it's a long skirt, if that makes any difference. And the kind of navy that you can only tell it's blue if it's next to black.

(eta: I should say, that I can only tell it's blue, etc. Other people are better at the color identification than I am, I'm sure.)

I'm going to look pretty frumpy regardless, just because that's me right now, but if a quick trip to Payless will effect improvement, I'm willing to do it.

If you don't already have appropriate blue shoes, and can't be arsed to shop, wear black. People should have better things to do than to judge you on that.

Tell them to see me if they have a problem with it.

The description of this link read "Actress Michelle Trachtenberg show's off some crack"--I can't get through our web filter to see what they mean. So--what's the deal?

ita, to my knowledge, I don't have a filter and can't get anything but the infamous red x in a box for those MT pictures. I think I'm kinda glad, though. I know when she was modelling heroin chic a year or two ago, it made me sad.

Misplaced apostrophe, maybe?

So--what's the deal?

Accidental butt cleavage.

The page and the text load. It's like what you see when someone is hotlinking to a picture which is no longer at a certain URL -- the little red X in a box (a picture holder, I guess).