For a while there, it seemed like there was celebrity gossip every moment of every day. Mel Gibson went nuts, Tom Cruise went nuts, Britney Spears went triple nuts. Then, after this winter, there was a lull. Eliot Spitzer got pinched for patronizing prostitutes, and David Paterson was funny, for a little while, but then what? Luckily, the last week has saved us from the prospect of a country without highly public idiocy. Thank Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook, but most of all thank A-Rod and Madonna. Here is my tribute to them, "Fragments from A-Rod! The Musical," at newyorker.com. A sample is below, but check out the whole thing:

MADONNA:
Remember when I dressed up
As Marilyn Monroe?
If you play your cards right
You can be DiMaggio
You know that heady feeling
When you hit a shot into the gap?
You can tell me all about it
When I shift and settle on your lap

A-ROD:
I get it
You're Madonna
You enjoy
Double entendre

As if Lindsay Lohan's family life wasn't chaotic enough, now a Montana woman is claiming that her daughter is the starlet's half sister, the result of a tryst with Lindsay's father Michael thirteen years ago. Michael has acknowledged the relationship with the woman and admits that there is a resemblance between the girl and his daughters. Could this happen to anyone, or is it more proof of Michael Lohan's consistently bad judgment?

Christie Brinkley said she was so mad at her estranged husband Peter Cook that her divorce was going to get ugly. She wasn't lying. The trial has now become a portrait of Cook as a sex addict, and not the respectable kind. According to TMZ, he used every medium available: "Cook...admitted he masturbated in front of a web cam and frequented escort, porn and swinger sites, all while married to Brinkley. He also admitted that he had sex with then-teenager Diana Bianchi in his office while she worked for him. He testified he gave Bianchi nearly $300k hoping to keep their tryst on the down low. He said he would leave money for her under a rock outside his office and more cash behind a painting. He also says he bought her a $2000 watch and lingerie."

Is there any chance that demonizing Cook to this degree will actually help his case by making him seem more sympathetic, or at the very least pathetic?

Three or four people sent me this news item within a twenty-minute stretch: in the Tampa area, two men named Telly Savalas were arrested within hours of each other. Worse, they were both named for the former television star-they carry his first and middle names, though they have different last names. Almost certainly, there are no statistics kept on this kind of thing: if anyone knows of any other cases of criminals bearing the names of formerly popular crimefighting characters, please advise.

When we think of advanced military technology, we tend to think of weapons. But how many of us think of humans as a form of technology? According to a recent report in Time magazine, maybe we should start doing that. In the future, we may fight wars against (or even with) a race of supersoldiers with genetically and pharmaceutically modified neural pathways that allow them to sleep less, remember tactics and strategies better, and need relatively little food. Genetic engineering of humans is always held up as part of medical Utopianism: diseases can be eradicated from the earth. But can people be turned into single-minded war machines? And how do you feel about it?

According to the BBC, a number - a high number - of Chinese children have been given the name Aoyun over the last fifteen years. Aoyun, of course, means "Olympic Games" (check your Chinese Book of Baby Names). Evidently, it's not that uncommon in China to name children after important events or occasions. Many nations - Germany, for example, and Brazil - have laws against giving children odd names. This has always struck me as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it seems to curb freedom. On the other hand, it seems to curb child abuse. Should China have these laws? Should the United States?

Big Brown was a sure thing for the Belmont, except that he never broke out of the pack, was pulled up by his jockey, and finished last. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories started to circulate: that Big Brown's injury was far worse than suspected, that criminal presences forced the horse to throw the race. Bob Mieszerski of the Los Angeles Times points out the obvious: that maybe Big Brown wasn't good enough when it counted. Perhaps health issues contributed. Perhaps the weather was too hot and humid. It's disappointing to come up short in what could have been a Triple Crown year, and it will hurt the already-ailing sport of horse racing. But does anyone really think that there is some mysterious, nefarious explanation for the way the race turned out?

Back from vacation, which involved spending lots of time with the kids, both of whom were under eight pounds at birth. That's not usually how I think of them, but usually I haven't started the day reading an article about the alarming rise in the weights of newborns. In general, weights are up a bit over the last thirty years, but there's a marked increase in the incidence of macrosomia, or excessive birth weight. That category is reserved for newborns ten pounds or more, and it's up twenty percent over the last decade. It's even more noteworthy when you consider that weights tend to increase with each successive birth, and families are smaller these days, so there's less time to get to the later, larger babies. There are many possible reasons, ranging from better prenatal nutrition to gestational diabetes, and many effects, including an increase in C-sections.

Do you know (or have) any babies who were over ten pounds at birth? If they were over fifteen, please write your comments in all caps.

Celebrities have been less stupid these last few months, or maybe it's just that there's relative quiet from Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Mel Gibson. That's why it's nice that Sharon Stone has decided to step into the breach and shoot off her mouth. Following the recent earthquake in China that killed more than sixty thousand people, Stone spoke to a reporter at Cannes about the karmic dimension of natural disaster, speculating that China may have been hit because of its policies in Tibet. Stone apologized ("In the course of the interview I made inappropriate remarks and for any harm created towards the Chinese people I am extremely sad and apologize") but Chinese officials said that they will not show her films any longer and retailers, including Christian Dior China, have started to pull advertisements featuring the actress. Is this fair? Granted that Stone was stupid, but she's been stupid before, as have plenty of other actors: what are the companies punishing, exactly?

More than a decade ago, the British Highways Agency erected signs along the A1 highway to warn drivers about the consequences of unsafe driving: the signs detailed how many motorists had been killed on that stretch of road. Now, though, the signs themselves have been designated road hazards, as authorities have determined that drivers are suffering from "information overload' and are at risk of crashing as they try to process the signs. There is now some debate over whether to replace the signs with signs that say "Slow Down," signs that display the speeds of passing motorists, or tiny signs that show how many drivers were injured or killed by the large signs.

Let's assume that the story about a Japanese parrot who helped police return him to his owners by reciting "his" (his owners') name and address isn't a hoax. It's a perfect storm of news appeal: animal in distress, authority that behaves comically rather than menacingly. But there's a hidden seam here: parrots can speak Japanese? I guess I knew that, in the sense that I knew that people from different countries owned parrots, and that parrots owned by Peruvians would speak Spanish, parrots owned by Brazilians would speak Portugese, parrots owned by Finns would speak Finnish. But can parrots exactly mimic human speech no matter what the language, or are there certain languages that are harder (or even impossible) for them to speak.

Down in Houston, crazy ants are taking over! Technically, the red-brown creatures are called "crazy rasberry ants," not because rasberries are red-brown, because rasberries don't exist, but because one of the exterminators who warred against the ants was named Tom Rasberry. There are millions and millions of the tiny (one-eighth of an inch long), speedy ants attacking five Texas counties: they seem attracted to electrical boxes and computers, and swarms of them can cause shorts and malfunctions.

How would you solve Houston's ant infestation?

Following the death of the filly Eight Belles in last weekend's Kentucky Derby, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has called for the suspension of jockey Gabriel Saez. Evidently, they don't believe in the ethical treatment of people: Saez wasn't doing anything different from any of the other jockeys on the course, and no one has suggested that his treatment of Eight Belles (including whipping) contributed materially to her death. There are, of course, some valid concerns here. The overbreeding of thoroughbreds seems to be producing animals with incredible musculature and delicate skeletons, which maximizes speed but minimizes durability. How this is Saez's fault, though, I'm not sure. Isn't he just a 20-year-old kid who was trying to do his job as best as possible -- and, in fact, did?

It's only April and the silliest story of the year is already in and done: David Blaine has broken the world-record for breath-holding! He did it! On Oprah! He shattered the record previously held by Switzerland's Peter Colat, previously the world's best breath-holder! Has Blaine finally jumped the shark in his media stunts?

Well, of course it is. Disney is a gigantic corporation that couldn't possibly care if one of its most marketable stars gets more publicity. What about that Vanessa Hudgens flap a few years ago? But now TMZ has blown the lid off of the situation by locating images of Disney lingerie ads elsewhere in the world that are significantly more revealing than the Cyrus's Vanity Fair photos?