You may enter

If you're not busy at the end of July, this would kind of be a cool sweepstakes to win.

No more to write - I'm jumping over there to put my name in right now.

Other than this: With this rather lame installment, I've made it to 100 posts, exceeding my expectations by about, oh, 98. And somehow or another, you outrageously kind people have teamed up to generate - as of earlier this week - more than 2,500 hits on my blog. I know that's a minuscule number for a blog, but I think it's cool anyway.

Thanks. Now go enter to win that trip. Part of the prize is flying to LAX, which is approximately seven minutes from where I'm sitting right now.

Maybe there IS such a thing as bad press

Latest guilty pleasure - or maybe not even a guilty one - is reading hypercritical reviews of movies and restaurants. Sometimes, if the writer is on his or her game, there will be a sentence that's so damning yet so well-composed that I just can't help but smile.

That was true of a New York Times movie review I read a few weeks ago (I'll have to poke around and see if I can find it - will post link later if I do) that panned the movie so mercilessly I almost wanted to see it just to take in the monumental awfulness.

So this morning when I went to the L.A. Times web site, a link on the home page caught my eye. Tagged "Restaurants," it read: "What's lower than no stars? Oh well, at least there's a nice view."

Intrigued, I jumped to this review - more like a slaughter than a review, actually - of Gladstone's, an oceanside seafood restaurant in Pacific Palisades. Credit to the reviewer for this one pretty clever thought: "It's terrible to gaze out to the ocean and imagine the volume of precious seafood being pulled out and ruined every day by this restaurant."

Now, that's tasty.

Seen any well-written hatchet jobs lately that you'd like to share?

Hey, over here!

There's a New York Times article today reporting that the leaders of the G8 countries "endorsed... the idea" of cutting carbon emissions in half - by 2050. By which time approximately all of these guys will be dead. Cool how they managed not to actually commit to anything - they just like the idea. Way to be aggressive, kids.

Anyway, the article is illustrated with a class portrait, in which all of your assorted presidents and prime ministers (can a brother get a chancellor?) are looking forward, one guesses, toward where most of the press photographers are. Well, all of them were looking forward except for one. Which world leader was facing a totally different direction? I'll give you one guess - and no, it wasn't Sarkozy.

Well, here, see for yourself:

Throw me a line

It's been more than 20 years since I read Leon Uris' Exodus, but I remember it as being an all-time great novel.

Unfortunately, it has been just 20 hours since I finished watching the Otto Preminger movie version, and I remember it as being very very long. And extremely terrible.

Apparently, movie makers in the 1960s hadn't quite mastered the concepts of editing (three and a half hours!?!?) or sound engineering (I don't know where the microphones were positioned during all of the indoor scenes, but my best guess was near a vacuum cleaner).

Or special effects. In one scene, a bomb explodes outside a prison wall, and the resulting hole is a perfect rectangle.

Or dialogue, for that matter. I might be off by a word or two here, but I swear to Oprah H. Winfrey that Paul Newman, as Ari, actually said this to Eva Marie Saint, as Kitty: "A year is a long time in the life of a beautiful woman." Well, yeah, no wonder he swept her off her feet.

I really think I'm giving them a fair shot, but other than Chinatown and The Graduate, and maybe the Wizard of Oz, which was waaay ahead of its time, I have yet to see a movie from before 1976 that didn't absolutely stink on ice.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Pain in the apse

Imagine, if you will, that the managers of dozens of McDonald's restaurants in cities across the U.S. were constantly getting in trouble -- and having to pay millions of dollars in settlements -- for sexually abusing children.

I'd hazard a guess that, after a while, people might stop going to those particular McDonald's locations. I'd even go out on a limb and predict that consumers -- even consumers in other cities -- might be outraged enough to, I don't know, stay home and cook their own crappy burgers.

Anyway, today's coverage on the Denver archdiocese having to shell out $5.5 mil doesn't even seem like news anymore -- just another episode in a tired old story. And it's really none of my business, but it did make me wonder again why people keep patronizing these places.

Advice I hope you won't have to use

If you're going to fake your own death, don't use the title of a classic TV theme song as the text of your suicide note.

Had I not read this article, I'm pretty sure that would never have occurred to me.

One other thought about this: If you've swindled money from a hedge fund, why are you driving a GMC Envoy? The Envoy is actually a pretty nice ride, but not "hedge fund swindler" nice.

Science you can taste

Finally, researchers are doing something useful in the field of genetics. Just goes to show you the good that can come from industry, government and farmers all working toward a common goal ... sustaining the chocolate supply!

Now, if they can sequence the genes for New York pizza and replicate it out in L.A., I'll be the happiest guy around.