Another week has arrived and you'll be hoping it's not like poet Roger McGough's A Critic's Review (in The State of Poetry, one of those brilliant $5 Penguins) Of A Curate's Egg: “It's all bad. Especially in parts.”

For your excitement and delectation, Chris offers Barbie going bestial.

The dumb blonde has a new accessory: a dog called Tanner whose droppings are made of plastic. This version of Barbie comes with a pooper scooper, and the "dog biscuits" that are fed into one end of Tanner are exactly the same as what comes out the other end. Which, as this blog post in The Age points out, means that kids will be “feeding Tanner's own excrement back to him”.

And from Barbie's mutt to Mickey Mouse's: everyone from standup comedians to NZ Herald columnists has been ranting about the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf-planet, but here's a slightly better informed and more readable piece from Boston.com, via Arts & Letters.

CB also like Ben Schott's (author of Schott’s Original Miscellany and the forthcoming Schott’s Almanac 2007, a yearbook of American society) "Five Years of Consequence"; an attempt to survey graphically the last five years, "a world that is certainly new, though not always brave", says Schott, who also concedes his effort is selective and incomplete.

I offered Ben my latest idea for a reference book but, oddly, he hasn't got back yet.

Stephen is greatly impressed by the weight and average smartness of comments to David Farrar's post on Labour's cynical attacks on the Nats to deflect from their own electoral spending badness - 265 comments and counting.

He accepts that the signal to noise ratio might be low, but reckons quite a few are sensible, “and once you filter the rabids out, nice to see dialogue developing”. Almost a conversation, he says. Blogversation, maybe.

I offer you a few of my predictable profiles, including brainbox New Yorker editor David Remnick.

No focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. 'So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.

Well, some of us do, anyway.

There's another attempt to unravel Ali G's creator, Sacha Baron Cohen.

And kitsch icon David Hasselhoff.

If you didn't catch it, the fearsome Lynn Barber interviews (wrong byline photo) tireless self-promoter (and quite good writer) Toby Young. First question: “Is it true you google yourself every day?”

Young preempted the interview with his own (behind paywall) strike in the Spectator. It's worth checking out on the mags shelf. Flecks of his angry spit landing on her tape recorder, etc.

For the record, Barber is slightly charmed.

Speaking of serve and parry, here's a lyrical explanation of the sublimity of Roger Federer's game by author David Foster Wallace.

And since we haven't had any foreign politics, here's a piece on China getting its swagger on around the UN Security Council.

Ciaoarama.