Judith Regan (Is she here yet? Is she here yet?) will be hosting a weekly two-hour talk show on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. So if you think Donny Deutsch is too intellectual, be sure to tune in.

A neighborhood in NYC or LA can be said to have “made it” when it starts being specifically named in contributors’ bios of certain magazines. Case in point: In the new issue of Spin, photographer Autumn de Wilde is identified as living in ‘Echo Park, CA.’

I predict that Eagle Rock will appear in the Spin contributors’ bio section in, oh, March 2007.

Los Angeles CityBeat‘s special food issue includes that alternative-weekly staple, an article about the absinthe subculture. As is de rigeur in the alternative-weekly-absinthe-article genre, the author meets up with a shadowy-but-ultimately-surprisingly-normal absinthe subculture member, tries the drink, and ends up feeling slightly underwhelmed.

Also in the special Food issue, Arty Nelson on Fosselman’s Ice Cream in Alhambra:

To understand what makes Fosselman’s Ice Cream so magnificent, one must put aside all of one’s ego-/fear-based opinions and just head east until one is standing in exactly the same place. More than any kind of iced treat, like almost everything worth writing or talking about, encountering it makes one feel shoved tumbling down a rabbit hole into a kind of parallel snack time, where all that’s been learned about the making of good things means very little when face-to-face with all that simply tastes good.

I consulted my trusty Arty Nelson Decoder Ring, and I think what he means is that Fosselman’s serves good ice cream.

The LAT looks at the underground celebrity home-trading subculture, wherein highly desirable properties are shuffled from owner to owner without ever seeing the light of the MLS. Some deals are struck at parties; others, through shadowy middle-men and -women like the ubiquitous old-school LA real estate maven Elaine Young:

“I signed confidentiality agreements when I sold Elizabeth Taylor’s home as well as Billy Bob [Thornton] and Angelina Jolie’s homes,” says Elaine Young, who has been selling high-profile properties in Los Angeles for 48 years.

Um, did the confidentiality agreement include a clause about not talking to the press?

Luke Ford, the most misunderstood van owner since the A-Team’s Hannibal, reports that Andrew Breitbart has left his Huffington Post post and returned to the Drudge Report. I tried without success to reach Breitbart for confirmation. Then again, I guess it was kind of early in the morning for an IM session.

In the LA Weekly, Brendan Bernhard further documents Michel Houellebecq’s recent visit to LA. The best moment takes place at Mel’s Diner:

A small, birdlike man with a waxen complexion and wispy brown hair, Houellebecq had finished picking his way through a mound of what was billed on the menu as Santa Fe Chicken Salad. (Asked what he thought of it, he described it tactfully as “something quite specific.”)

Ah, LA, where the weather is gorgeous, the people are friendly, and, uh, the salads are specific. Bernhard also mentions that Oliver Stone’s recent DUI/substance possession arrest occurred on his way home from dinner with Houellebecq at the White Lotus.

Come back soon, Michel!

Say what you want about the LAT wikitorial, but wow, it certainly got people talking. Such as you, if you’re actually saying what you want about the wikitorial, like I just told you to. My boss Elizabeth Spiers writes at mediabistro.com:

The wikitorial failed in execution but the concept is still on the table and LAT editors insist that they’re open to the possibility of trying it again. And I hope they do. Large newspapers aren’t exactly inclined to embrace experimental innovations, especially high-concept structural changes, and the wikitorial is a little bit subversive, a little bit anti-establishment and maybe even a little bit mischievous.

Spiers then goes on to speculate on other potential future media trends which adhere to what she identifies as the wikitorial formula:

pressure to innovate + media trends that are already happening + a little Kinsley-esque journalistic mischief-making.

Read it and speculate along with her!

“You either liked her or you hated her. There wasn’t much room in the middle. But almost everyone respected her reporting.”

That’s Nikki Finke on Nikki Finke. Oops, I mean, that’s Nikki Finke on Anita Busch, to whom she apologizes on behalf of the entire Hollywood press corps for belittling her claims that she was being threatened by private investigator Anthony Pellicano. Pellicano has finally been charged with doing precisely that by the DA.

Finke ascribes the refusal to take Busch’s situation seriously to the media community’s misplaced priorities. “[W]e made the mistake of putting personality before principle,” writes Finke, and that’s why Finke, I mean Busch, never got the attention she deserved. I’d say that Finke has found a new best friend, except that, as she writes, the understandably press-shy Busch didn’t return her phone calls.

In the wake of the restrictive agreement journalists were forced to sign before interviewing Angelina Jolie about ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’, attendees at a recent ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ press junket were greeted with a contract which read, in part:

I understand and agree that my participation in the aforementioned press day is for the purpose of writing features about the production of Dukes of Hazzard, and not a profile of any specific participant. My questions & story will relate to the film and its production.

Write about the film? Great, except there was no film to see. The only footage that Warner Bros. showed the press corps was the trailer, now playing to civilians in theaters everywhere. (By the way, I’m pretty sure the General Lee in the movie is not quite the same shade of orange as the one in the TV show.)

Anyway, it’s hard to see how WB expects journalists to write about a movie they won’t show them. I hope the gift bags were good.

A new FishbowlLA events-listing format, wherein information will be given about media-ish goings-on around town and the underlying forces of sociological conflict that will be apparent at them. If you want your event listed, email me. Please specify the forces of sociological conflict that attendees can expect. Otherwise I’m just gonna speculate.

Tonight: LA Press Club party at the Formosa for Rodney Rothman’s book Early Bird. RSVP required.
Social tension on display: underpaid journalists vs. overpaid TV writers.

Friday: Cloverfield Press reading at Skylight Books featuring Laurence Dumortier, Miranda July, Mary Rechner, and Carol Treadwell.
Social tension on display: People who haven’t yet seen ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’ vs. people who have vs. people who will pretend they saw it at some festival a year ago before there was any buzz.

Note: the Saturday Cinespia screening has been canceled. So everyone needs to find another graveyard in which to eat their hummus.