One of my best friends, Dana Vachon (below), has a novel coming out in April (from Riverhead/Penguin). It's called Mergers & Acquisitions, and it is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Very exciting! The D-Nasty, as he is otherwise known, is a screamingly funny writer and the book is hilarious.

This is relevant to almost no one who reads this site, but on the offchance...

Institutional Investor asked me to emcee their Alpha hedge fund dinner tonight at the Battery Park Ritz. Which makes sense, as I TOTALLY KILLED last week at the Chicago Board of Exchange.** Ah, the opportunities in the little-known financial comedy sector. Take my risk arbitrage, please. Or something.

** Not really.

1) This is so hilariously post-mo I can hardly stand it: the lovely and talented Jonathan Coulton will be performing in Second Life at 5PM SLT (which is, I think, around 2PM EST) today.

2) Check out Robert Lanham's (author of the fabled Hipster Handbook and former Bible Belt resident) Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. It's funny because it's true.

I'm happy to see that the book I shoved down everyone's throats last December, Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, made the Booker Prize shortlist. I read it last November and loved it so much I went out and bought several more copies and gave them to every friend I ran into. (Sometimes misguidedly, in fact. One friend, not exactly known for his love of literature, looked at me incredulously and said, "you're giving me a book?")

Le cheval mort gets a few kicks from Gawker this morning with a slightly hysteria-tinged post about bloggers with book deals. In summary: STUPID PUBLISHERS! WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?! (To reiterate: a group of people who have a book deal based on their blog are suggesting that giving people book deals based on their blogs is stupid.) They're not the worst offender, and probably not even the most frequent offender, but in all the talk about whether these deals will earn out, there's a failure to distinguish between book deals given to people who happen to have blogs (Jami Attenberg's book, Dana Vachon's book, etc.) and books that are based on blogs (Gawker's book, Stephanie Klein's book, etc.) I was at mediabistro when I sold my book, and needless to say, it isn't a novel about media job postings and the freelance journalists who respond to them.

That said, if we're going to keep repeating the false analogy, I'm first in line to refer to Malcolm Gladwell's next book as a "blogger book."

Just because.

Speaking of book-ifying other mediums, someone gifted me with a copy of this last week and it looks amazing. (As you would expect. Alex Isley designed it.) They reproduced my all-time favorite cover story, "What Passes for Friendship," in full and several of my favorite front-of-the-book bits--i.e., Henry Alford's "What if Jean Paul Sartre Had A Little Imaginary Friend Named Sneakers?" I was going to do a five-monocle Walter Monheit review of it, but Vanity Fair beat me to it.

[Ed.—Carter, my co-conspirator and lead investor, was an Assistant Art Director at SPY during the Kurt/Graydon years (under B.W. Honeycutt). He's an incorrigible mischief-maker and, I suspect, may disappear my copy when I'm not looking. Carter is also responsible for me insisting that everyone I know watch this.]