The Times learns us good: We couldn't help but scratch our heads over the lede from yesterday's "As the iPod Stays Hot, It Risks Losing Its Cool," in the New York Times: "So President George W. Bush listens to an iPod, it was learned recently. How uncool is that?" Also learned: the passive voice for "learned" sounds really weird.

But seriously, try the veal: Frank Rich writes about Laura Bush's White House Correspondent's Dinner yukfest and does not implore anyone to take his anything, please. Even we're relieved.

MoDo roughs it: Maureen Dowd one-ups Jayson Blair on mythology by rocking an extended chimera reference in her Saturday column, "What Rough Beasts?" (which just sounds hot). Currently ranked at #24 on MEL (yikes, that transition really has been tough), MoDo declares her love for chimeras and then skips down the meandering path from mythology to monster-making science to Bush, Frist and DeLay. But who cares, she wins our hearts all over again by mentioning the word "humanzee" (which just sounds hot), though her concomitant failure to give any props to Mansquito totally decks her points.

Dwarves are very upsetting: I'm done. I need no more proof that New York media loves showtunes than the column inches given to the gargantuan feature in yesterday's Times about a high-school production of "Into The Woods." (Frankly, I don't need a 3,750-word piece to convey the challenges of putting that show on with a bunch of high schoolers; it's Sondheim, for God's sake.) I'll spare you the memories the article stirred of a certain Fishbowl editor's six summers as Head of Drama at Camp Winnebagoe in Huntsville, Ontario (Into The Woods '94 yeah!) but I won't spare you from the fact that Joanna Gleason who played the Baker's Wife in the original Broadway production is from this friendly country to the north. A song for a boy and his cow after the jump. Has that sentence ever been written, I wonder.

Jack (of beanstalk fame) to his cow Milky White upon being instructed by his mother to sell him at market:

I guess this is goodbye, old pal
You've been a perfect friend
I hate to see us part, old pal,
Someday I'll buy you back
I'll see you soon again
I hope that when I do
You won't be on a plate

Sniff. This and the rest of the lyrics are online here. Okay, Fishbowl Musical Theater Hour is officially over, apologies and thank you for singing along.